Originally published on Notes From the Fields We Know, November 2, 2016
So, my girlfriend V and I were driving home from a port tasting. At the time, V had a white Mercury Cougar coupe with the big V8. Lots of power and really fun to horse around. I was driving and feeling good so, of course, when I had to make a U-turn, I squalled through a nice 180 degree power slide. No big deal except… “Honey, there’s a cop.” I got a little worried but we had waited a couple of hours after the tasting so we were good, probably. Anyway, he didn’t turn around and stop us. Cool. We turned onto the four lane to home and drove to the first intersection. My light was green and there was a police cruiser stopped on the red. A second or two before I get to the intersection, the cop hits his blues so I hit my brakes. I barely got the car stopped. Now, everyone is just sitting there including the police. He sits there and sits there then cuts his lights and goes. What the heck? Jerk. The light’s still green so I go. About 10 minutes later I notice a blue flash and look in the rearview. There are four cruisers behind me. One in each lane, one in the emergency lane and one following the other three. A wall of flashing blues. I pull over to let them pass but they don’t pass. They all just stop about 20 yards behind me. And they’re not letting any traffic past them. Well, I’m like, crap, I’m going to get breathalyzed and maybe blow a DUI. I’m waiting and waiting and waiting then I see one of the cops get out of the car and slowly walk toward me. He’s an old guy and—OMG—his hand is on his revolver! My minds starts thinking “Wha? Wha? Wha? …” My hands lock onto the top of the steering wheel and I ain’t moving a muscle. I calm down a bit and notice that Revolver Dude is taking his sweet time. I’m just watching and waiting for the next thing. Suddenly, there’s knocking on the passenger side window. V screams. It’s as electrifying as a gunshot and just as deafening. I look over and there’s an officer staring in the window. V rolls down the window. The cop looks me over then looks V over and says “sorry ma’m” and walks off. I check the rearview and Revolver Dude isn’t there. The blue lights go dark and the cruisers go their separate ways. I didn’t even get breathalyzed.
V was working for the city at the time. The next day she found out there had been a bank robbery that night. The robbers were driving a white Thunderbird coupe. About the same year as V’s Cougar. But that was all she found out. Why the overwhelming force and slick tactics we’ll never know. At least the officer was gentleman enough to apologize to V. Not a word of apology to me though.
Some observations.
- The police will try to get criminals to “rabbit”. Why else the whole blue light stunt at the intersection? The police expect criminals to act like prey animals and bolt when threatened. At some level, the police may even enjoy being predators chasing down their prey. Maybe that’s why there were so many police chases during the 1990’s and early 2000’s?
- Stopping hard at the light instead of going on through may have saved our lives. The move was clearly unexpected by the police. The officer in the cruiser took a good 30 seconds or so to figure out what to do. It injected uncertainty into the situation so it forced them to think about defense (physical and legal) instead of just pure offense.
- Revolver Dude was either their best combat shooter or there most expendable man. Either way, the dude has a pair of big brass ones. Being a decoy is a huge risk. His job was to fix my attention while the other officer sneaked up on the passenger’s side. It worked. My attention was definitely fixed on Revolver Dude’s gun hand.
- I remember it being bright. The cruisers must have been shining their spotlights into our car. I’m glad they did otherwise they may not have seen our hands and the fact we were still as statues.
- A wall of flashing blue lights is dazzling. A nice tactical advantage. The lights were behind the officers. I had to look into the glare. Still, I could see Revolver Dude’s face and I could definitely see his hand on his gun. Maybe one of the spotlights was lighting him up for me to see?
- I’ll give this to the police. They took a lot of risk from their perspective just to verify we weren’t the bank robbers. They could have just started screaming at us to get out of the car then gunned us down as we got out. V and I are citizens, not criminals and would have obeyed unto death.
- V found out a lot later that felony stops involve two or more cruisers. The higher the perceived danger, the more cruisers. I suspect the police use overwhelming force over quick tempo most of the time. After all, time is always against the criminal.
- The police will not apologize when they screw up. Not a word. Makes sense. Apology = guilt from a legal perspective. Apology = weakness from an authority perspective. It’s remarkable the officer apologized to V. He must have been a decent guy who felt bad about scaring V.
This whole thing was just one big coincidence and assumption. If we had left five minutes earlier or later, the first cop would not have seen me make that quick U-turn and then assume we were the bank robbers. Seems like they could have done a little better job of identification and skipped the drama but no one’s perfect, not even the police.
I have no idea whether or not they caught the bank robbers. They probably did. Bank robbers always get caught.
November 3rd, 2016 5:54pm story
I asked Grok and Claude for their thoughts on the post.
Grok
That’s a hell of a story. Thanks for sharing the full post — it reads like a real-life thriller that could’ve gone sideways fast but didn’t. You and V got very lucky with the timing, your composure, and the cops’ eventual de-escalation. The “wall of blues” with the decoy approach sounds straight out of a training manual for high-risk felony stops, and it must have been absolutely nerve-racking in the moment.
On your observations
Most of them strike me as pretty sharp and level-headed given the adrenaline dump:
- The “rabbit” tactic: Yeah, that tracks with how law enforcement often works in dynamic situations. They create uncertainty or pressure hoping suspects reveal themselves through flight or suspicious behavior. The cruiser at the light hitting blues was likely a probe. Your hard stop (instead of gunning it) broke their expected script and bought critical seconds for them to reassess.
- Overwhelming force: Felony vehicle stops, especially for armed robbery suspects, are done with heavy manpower precisely because the risk to officers is high. Similar white coupe + recent U-turn that looked evasive = reasonable (if imperfect) suspicion in the heat of the moment. The spotlights, formation, and the revolver guy as a distraction while the passenger-side officer flanked make tactical sense from their perspective. High-risk stops prioritize officer survival first.
- The apology asymmetry: Spot on about the legal and authority dynamics. Apologizing to a civilian can be weaponized later, so it’s rare. The officer apologizing to V specifically (after scaring her) does suggest he was a decent human who recognized the fright they caused an innocent couple. No apology to the driver is standard procedure, even if it feels unfair in hindsight.
- Coincidence factor: This is the part that stands out. Five minutes different and the initial cop probably never connects the dots. Car make/model/year similarity + your playful driving right after a port tasting = perfect storm for assumptions. Police work involves a lot of pattern-matching under time pressure and incomplete info; sometimes it catches bad guys, sometimes it ruins a normal person’s evening.
The spotlight detail you mentioned was probably key — good that you stayed statue-still with hands visible. In those situations, movement + poor visibility is how tragedies happen.
Broader take
This illustrates both the strengths and frictions of policing. The response was professional enough that no one got hurt and they quickly cleared you once they looked inside (young couple, not matching robber descriptions, calm compliance). But it also shows how heavy-handed it can feel from the civilian side when you’re on the receiving end of “assume the worst.” Bank robbers in similar cars create exactly these kinds of dragnet moments. The 90s/early 2000s chase era you referenced had its own cultural and policy drivers (Rodney King aftermath, “get tough” policing, etc.), but the predator/prey dynamic you noted is real in training — officers are taught that hesitation can get them killed.
Glad it ended with just a wild story instead of worse. Did V ever find out more details about the actual robbery or if they caught the guys? And how long did the adrenaline shakes last after you got home?
Stories like this are why “stay calm, comply, and let them sort it out” is excellent advice, even when it feels unfair. You both handled it well.
Claude
This one’s got real narrative tension — you nail the physical sensations (hands locked on the wheel, the knock on the glass landing “like a gunshot”) and that’s what makes it work as a story rather than just an anecdote. The pacing is good too: slow build, the four-cruiser reveal, then the deflating anticlimax of “sorry ma’m” and nothing for you. That asymmetry is actually the best detail in the whole piece — it says more about the situation than any of your bulleted observations do.
The tactical breakdown afterward is the part I’d think hardest about keeping as-is. It’s genuinely interesting (the decoy theory, the felony-stop protocol, the spotlight glare as psychological tool) and it fits your documented eye for combat mechanics and honest-observation writing. But it also shifts the piece from “thing that happened to us” to “analysis of police tactics,” and that’s a tonal fork. You could split the difference by trimming the observations list to your 2-3 sharpest ones (the rabbit-bolting theory and the apology-as-admission-of-guilt point are the strongest) and let the story itself carry more of the weight.
Given this reads like a Clubhead-era piece — is this one you’re weighing for that eventual publication, or just surfacing it while going through the archive?
Me
Thoughts on the merits of the bullet points. In some ways my Tumblr blog is an extension of Morfen so there is a teaching element in the events of my life.
Claude
That context changes my earlier read. If Tumblr carries Morfen’s teaching function, the bullets aren’t clutter to trim — they’re the point. The narrative is the evidence; the bullets are the argument. So let me actually rank them on merit instead of just saying “cut most.”
Strongest — real insight, keep these:
- The apology-as-admission-of-guilt bullet. This is the sharpest thing in the piece. It’s a genuine principle about institutional psychology, not just color commentary, and it’s earned by the story (the asymmetry of “sorry ma’m” vs. nothing to you).
- The hard-stop-at-the-light bullet. This is actionable — a real lesson about how unpredictability forces an adversary into defense. That’s a transferable principle, which is what separates teaching from anecdote.
- The decoy/Revolver Dude read. Specific, grounded in what you actually observed (where your attention was fixed), and it connects to your martial arts / tactical eye rather than reading as generic true-crime speculation.
Weaker — observational, not instructive:
- The two lighting bullets (brightness, wall-of-blue-as-glare) say similar things twice. One of these earns its place; the other is redundant restatement.
- The “rabbit” theory and the felony-stop-protocol fact are interesting but more informational than teaching — they explain police procedure rather than extract a principle from your life. Good context, weaker as lesson.
Worth keeping for a different reason:
- The “I’ll give this to the police” bullet isn’t a sharp insight, but it’s doing important character work — it’s you being fair to people who scared you badly. That even-handedness is part of what makes the narrator trustworthy, which matters if this is teaching-through-example.
If I had to cut one without losing anything: the lighting/glare pair, merged into one line. Everything else is either a real lesson or load-bearing for tone.