cop ride along twitter thread

Man’s Thread About How Doing A Cop Ride-Along “Radicalized” Him Goes Viral (21 Tweets)

Writer Sean Trainor decided to share an experience he had as a younger person hanging out with a friend who had become a cop. He spent the night riding along in his buddy’s car, seeing how he operated while on the job.

Trainor noticed that his classmate didn’t actually have very much to do. In fact, he went out of his way to stir up trouble, checking every license plate in his database even if there was nothing about a vehicle worth checking on.

He was especially attentive to cars that looked beat up and to drivers who were not white in neighborhoods that mostly were:

These efforts were mostly fruitless, but when another cop would have a traffic stop, they’d rush over to join, looking for some “action.” That action was harassing drivers for minor infractions, which were mostly over anyway by the time they arrived:

And at one point they arrived on the scene in time to participate in the harassment, and Trainor says he was horrified:

The big action of the night was sending a father back to prison over an expired license after cornering him. Trainor said that this is what the system was clearly designed to do, and though he was appalled by his friend’s behavior, it wasn’t actually anywhere near outside the line of legal police action:


A lot of people responded to Trainor’s account to share that they had witnessed many scenes exactly like this one:

Funny when everything clicks into place after you hear a story from inside the car.

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