Were you given "the talk" about police as a child?

[Cokeland Saxton]

No (white)

[Torrain]

Not until quite late. I spent my childhood in two very rural villages. In neither place did we even have a working police station - they'd have to drive in from miles away, so it never really came up.

However, when I was packing to go to university in Glasgow, my dad gave me a brief warning about city police. He was a student in the city in the 80s, and had a few run ins with authority. He didn't do anything (other than attend one anti-Thatcher protest), but turns out having both a thick Belfast accent during the height of the Troubles is a one-way ticket to suspicion.

It was still a surpise though that I was stopped and questioned infrequently by the police in Glasgow. It took me a couple of years to realise that it was because I was a young, scrawny white guy with a bad haircut, a cheap jacket, and a passive, glassy-eyed look (I needed glasses, badly) - a description that fit the figure that many Glasgow police officers were looking for on the average evening.

I know it's all kinds of dumb that I didn't understand profiling until it happened to me (in what was a fairly minor way), but that's just how things went down.

_{I know this post has a primarily racial component, but I wanted to offer a perspective from here. Scotland is, at last reckoning, whiter than Vermont, so the dynamics here are a little different. Racial prejudice is definitely an issue (a topic for another post), but on a sheer numerical level though, I think classism is probably still the issue that affects most lives north of the border, and the desire to appear middle class has informed countless ruinous financial decisions in my community.}

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

Yes/sort of, but it was never one singular talk, but rather progressively taught to us in bits and pieces by parents, school, driver's ed, my first boss, friends, and even the police themselves in schools.

I was never taught to explicitly mistrust or fear the police, but it was clear that you should avoid them and dealing with them means trouble.

But I did understand by the time I turned 17 that driving the "correct" kind of car (2002 Honda CRV = stereotypical suburban mom car, whereas my older brother drove a more suspect car) and having an address on my driver's license in the "correct" part of town was an advantage, and being in the bad parts of town/the county might give people the wrong impression.

The only negative experience I've ever had with the police was when someone called them on me while I was walking around my own neighborhood in July 2018. Other than that, most experiences have been neutral, fortunately.

[Tokugawa Sexgod Ieyasu]

Yes (had libertarian father socialist mother).

[afleitch]

In that the 'polis' were 'proddy' and in the Lodge, sure.