it was summer, so the sun was still very high in the sky when the neighborhood's 6 PM noise ordinance went into effect, and we were still plowing ahead on the project. We were using some power tools, circular saws and the like, which made a few seconds of loud noise every few minutes. At about 6:15 a cop came by and told us they had received a noise complaint.
The cop a) didn't have his hand anywhere near his gun, b) didn't ask anyone for identification, and c) didn't even bother to ask who we were or what we were doing or whether we had a right to be there.
He delivered that message, we said "oh, sorry, lost track of time, we'll stop right now" and he turned around and walked away before he had made it half-way down the drive way. And this from a suburban police department so bored they set up traffic-stop traps for people who roll through stop signs in this neighborhood.
And that wasn't the first time my relative had run afoul of that noise rule during his remodel, but that didn't make the cop any more aggressive than a kitten.
Is it relevant that every person the cop saw on my relative's property that day was a white male? 
This hand-wringing about the OP post's anecdote declaiming that we don't know all the details of this particular situation ignores the relevant point the anecdote alludes to -- cops (and non-cops) do not react to the presence of black bodies the same way they react to the presence of white bodies. This phenomenon is well documented. This story doesn't prove the phenomenon, that is done elsewhere in a broad swath of social science literature, but it does provide a personalized illustration of it.
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