you must be from a small town...
i've spent a lot of my time working with police officers in a few different capacities. the job i have today requires that i work very closely with local and federal law enforcement from all over the country. i've found that local cops tend to be assholes. power-tripping assholes at that. they simply have nothing at all better to do than harass people (gotta justify that job somehow). they say idle hands are the devil's playground... and small town cops have some pretty idle hands. i mean let's face it.. if you grow up in podunk, ohio where there has been one murder in it's 170 year history and an average of <100 police calls per year, and you decide you want to be a cop, that means you want to harass people and write tickets. that's all town cops do, harass kids and write tickets. you gotta be a pretty big asshole to want to work in a field where your only function is to piss off your neighbors.
that said, in the city it's a whole different ball game. larger departments are run much differently, and the police officers (at least most of them) are there because they want to make their neighborhood safer, and that is admirable. they actually have something to protect people from... murder, home invasion, sexual assault, real crimes. 99% of the time they do a great job, it's the 1%% that get's reported on. most big dept. officers have a real disdain for doing the things we hate: ticketing drivers, harassing children, etc. they overwhelmingly despise "fund raising" as they call it (traffic duty) and quite often are opponents of the drug war.
to summarize: small town cops love writing tickets and harassing kids for drugs because if they couldn't they would serve no purpose and have no job. this is a pain in the ass. big city cops tend to hate both because they get in the way of, you know, catching real criminals. those guys will save your ass, and you'll thank them for it.
