If you are white, did your parents give you "the talk" about how to behave around police?

[csziggy]

56. I voted yes because they did for a very specific reason

Just before I went off to college with a car in the early 1970s, a deputy sheriff in Polk County, Florida where my parents lived was arrested and charged with multiple rapes. He'd pull over women driving alone and threaten to charge them with prostitution if they refused to have sex with him. Many of his victims gave in without resisting, afraid of the consequences. He finally tried this with the wrong woman - an upper middle class woman whose husband had a lot of political influence. She refused and when he violently raped her, she had no hesitation about reporting it and pressuring the police to press charges.

My father told me that if I were ever pulled over by a single officer anywhere but in a populated area to not get out of the car, to keep my doors locked and to only open a window enough to pass him my driver's license and registration. At that point, in that area a policeman was a very real danger to women driving alone in isolated areas.

Under any other circumstances, where I grew up it was expected that a white woman was in no danger from police. As a college students in a Southern town during those times we knew that we were automatically assumed by law enforcement to be drug users and/or political agitators - and quite a few of us were one or the other or both. So we avoided the police as much as possible and tried to avoid trouble. But that was not something my parents knew about or warned me about.