…the California Highway Patrol, on those occasions when I (a skinny undergraduate with hair down past the middle of my back) had anything to do with them, were unfailingly courteous and professional. Indeed, trapped one night on a desolate onramp near Milpitas, I flagged one down, explained my urgent need to make it back to Santa Cruz for my morning dishwashing shift, and prevailed upon him to give me a lift to a far better-traveled ramp a few miles down the road.

Now, my exchanges with local police, a demographic that appears to attract aged-out school bullies, tended to be of an entirely different character. Few things say “we don’t like your type in our town” as eloquently as a beating administered by three armed and uniformed men. That one was an outlier, but the usual tenor was, as Bob Dylan once put it, “the cops don’t need you, and man, they expect the same.”

cordially,