[coldtea]

>Why do American police stop people so often? Every American here seems to have experience of being stopped and acts like it’s a super normal thing.

And they also seem to think a cop pointing a gun at people they've stopped, or even shooting them for reaching into their pockets is also normal ("what did they expect?").

>I live in the UK and I’m don’t think I’ve ever even spoken to an on-duty police officer in my life. They don’t just cruise around stopping cars here.

Yeah, but you're not in the land of the "free".

[chrisseaton]

What I really want to know is what's wrong with American break-lights? Often the cause for a stop seems to be 'your break-light was out' (sometimes it's implied it's a lie, other times not.) Again I've never seen a break-light out in the UK, never been stopped for a break-light, never had to replace my break-lights. What's different?

[tazard]

(from movies) I think it's usually the 'tail light' and it's so they can smash it when the walk by. I've never heard of a break light being out either.

[sokoloff]

> I've never heard of a break light being out either.

LED lights are slowly reducing this, but I don't think I can do my 20 minute morning commute for a week without seeing at least one car with a burned out brake light. How is it possible that you've never seen or heard of it?

[striking]

Are you certain that movies reflect reality in this regard? I'm less willing than you are to believe a cop would smash a tail light, perhaps you could link me to a recent incident or something.

[_jal]

Yeah, that's movie-plot silliness.

In many jurisdictions the real method involves human cops making deputized dogs perform ritualized tricks near the car.

In US culture, performing this ritual grants the human cops permission to arrest people.

[chrisseaton]

I don't even understand how you could easily smash a tail light. They're inside the car bodies, encased in heavy plastic, and usually made of LEDs so there's no single bulb to hit even if you could get through the plastic.

[dsfyu404ed]

> They're inside the car bodies, encased in heavy plastic, and usually made of LEDs so there's no single bulb to hit even if you could get through the plastic.

Cops intentionally breaking tail lights is 99.999% something from Hollywood. I try and keep up to date on the various stupid abuses of power that happen at police departments throughout the country and I've never even heard of it happening. I thinks the notion of cops breaking tail lights probably predates the war on drugs (which gave them other ways to manufacture probably cause)

Nevertheless, tail lights weren't commonly LEDs until fairly recently and the styling that results in deeper housings also wasn't default until the mid 2000s. You can definitively break a tail light with the back end of a flashlight relatively easily though.

I'm sure you can imagine some jerk cop breaking a tail light on some 90s car because the person gave him lip and he can't find anything else to write a ticket for but jerk cops do all sorts of things and it's not really appropriate to use edge cases to reason about normal cases.