So Monday night I got the chance to get acquainted with the jackass K-9 unit of the Laurel, Mississippi Police deptarment, and in particular, Officer Jeff Monk #206

So the good new first: I was in New Orleans for VoodooFest this weekend, and found out the Faint were playing a show Monday night long after we should have been on our way home. Of course we stayed for it and we were right at the front (as in holding onto the stage to try to keep from getting pushed around too much, and having the singer hold my hand for a second after the show!!) and it was totally awesome.
But we had to be back in Atlanta Tuesday morning. My fiance was supposed to be back by 8:00 AM, but we figured we'd be pushing that pretty close since it was 1AM ET before we even left the show.

A couple hours later, I was driving us through Laurel, Mississippi and my fiance was asleep in the passenger seat. Suddenly, the speed limit dropped from 70 to 40. I think there had been a sign claiming it was a work zone but there was no indication of any work being done. There were no other cars around. The road was in good shape and was wide open. The 40 mph speed limit was COMPLETELY unreasonable. Anything below 65 would have been unreasonable. Laurel, after all, isn't much of a metropolis. So I kept going at about 50 mph (the speed limit dropped to 60-50-40 over about 1 mile...45 mph is the MINIMUM speed in most places), until I saw a police car on the side of the road. I slowed a bit, passed him a ways, and then saw him pull onto the road. UGH. He followed me VERY closely for several miles. He obviously was going to pull me over, so I couldn't imagine what he was doing. I suppose he could've been trying to see if I was drunk, but in retrospect that was unlikely since he didn't even ask if I'd had a drink, much less test me for anything like that.

So of course, Officer Monk did eventually pull me over. He came up and told me that I'd been going 50 when the speed limit dropped down to 40. I was having trouble finding my driver's license, so he asked for my fiance's license and went to run that. Asked if he'd ever gotten a ticket, had any arrests, etc... When he got back, I gave him my license (it had been under my fiance in the passenger seat) and he asked me the same thing. All pretty standard so far, although I guess it's a little odd that he asked for the fiance's license, but I guess it didn't seem weird at the time because I couldn't find mine.

So as he was running my license, I noticed another police car drive up behind us. A little weird, I thought, for a person going 50 mph on the wide open fucking road. Especially since the cars behind me seemed to be speeding quite a bit more than that. I guess that at this time it's worth noting that my fiance still has a Ron Paul bumper sticker on the back of his car.
Officer Monk came back to the car and told me to grab a jacket and step out of the car, saying "I'll tell you what I'm gonna do." I figured he was either going to write a warning, or else write a ticket for our burnt out tail light instead of the speeding since that would be a lesser fine. I figured it would be at most 2 minutes, so I didn't bother with my jacket which was in the trunk. So he started off telling me that he was just gonna write me a warning. Playing good cop I guess. Then he paused and stated that my fiance seemed nervous. "Is he always like that around the po-lice?" I stated that I thought if anything it was because he'd been asleep. We'd been standing around outside for a while as he was writing out a warning; my fiance glanced back at us, which is apparently very suspicious. So they took that as their chance. One of the cops went back to the car to ask my fiance to get out of the car and put his hands of the roof for a frisking. He had to empty his pockets: wallet, keys, bouncy ball- you know. At this time, we also had a 3rd car arriving along with a barking dog. The timing for all this is kind of confusing. He had told me they were just going to let me go with a warning, but he and the other guy were both standing there talking to me the entire time, so they had clearly called the dude with the dog BEFORE he told me he was letting us go. Fucked. Really.

So the second cop took my fiance over to his car and talked with him. Monk asked me to walk around to the back of his car and sit on his rear bumper. The third cop brought out the dog to sniff around our car. Afterward, Monk brought me back around to the front of the car (so I was again right behind my car) and asked if there was anything in the car that his dog wouldn't like. I said no. (In fact, we don't use illegal drugs, just a little drinking- and on this particular day my fiance had 1 beer 7 hours earlier and I'd had a cappuccino about 14 hours earlier. The only drugs in our car were 3 Prilosec OTC and to be fair to their drug dog perhaps some residual smoke since we had spent the weekend at a music festival, but again to be fair to us, they'd had no reason to bring out the dog at all except for our political ideology) He said that his dog was acting like they might find something, and that if it was just a misdemeanor amount of weed they'd throw it on the side of the road and let us on our way. My fiance later told me that at the same time they 2nd cop was asking him "Come on- you have just a little something?" "No, we really don't have anything" "You don't REALLY have anything, so you've got just a little something." So apparently they were separating us in hopes that one of us would confess to something. Of course, there was one flaw in that plan. We didn't have anything.

I told Monk and cop 3 that I was 100% certain they wouldn't find anything. We allowed them to search the car because my fiance was in a hurry to get to his meeting and since we REALLY DIDN'T HAVE ANYTHING we figured that would be the fastest way. Under some circumstances I might have wanted to be more annoying but I would have wanted to get my fiance's permission first...ha...especially if there was some reason that we didn't want to go to jail at the time.
Monk and cop 3 searched the car. At that point I (and my fiance says he as well) started to get pretty nervous that they might "find" something after all. From the things they were saying to us, they weren't even allowing for the possibility that they might not find ANYTHING, so it was a little bit scary. Maybe there was a reason for that certainty, you know?

But luckily, we were just a couple of white kids. They didn't find anything in our car. Unless you count the two cases of tortilla chips I'd bought earlier in the day. (The Whole Foods here doesn't carry El Milagro, even though they have a factory in north Atlanta, so I had to stock up while I was in NOLA.) They wrote out the warning and let us on our way.

Now, in retrospect, I'm sure the "warning" was just a bargaining chip. If he was giving us a warning, he could threaten us with a real ticket if we didn't let them search the car. But after looking him up online, I don't think he's even a traffic cop! I don't even know if he has the authority to write speeding tickets in the first place! He's part of the "Interstate Interdiction Team" which as far as I can tell means that his job is to catch people transporting drugs or illegal immigrants. He clearly intended to search the car before he ever even pulled us over. If I hadn't been speeding he would've pulled us for the tail light and searched anyway. In fact, while searching his name, I found this little gem.
http://www.leadercall.com/local/local_story_043094409.html
The guy was nervous so he called for back up? Bullshit. They're randomly pulling cars and searching them because the drivers/passengers "seem nervous." Fucking convenient how subjective that is. Sure he seems like a hero when he gets 100 lbs of weed off the street that was heading out of the state, but how many people's rights do you have to violate before you can find someone whose actually got something?
If I had had some weed I would've still been pissed because I wasn't being suspicious and laws against drugs are wrong in the first place. But since I didn't have anything, I have the benefit of also getting to be indignant. How dare they assume that just because I want to legalize drugs that I use them myself!

I really love being a drug-free libertarian and now feel especially validated in that position.

Finally, we were out in the freezing cold for about a half hour and now I'm pretty sick with a cold (I didn't have a jacket- after all)