Skylarsmum1999
New Member
Hi,
I'm hoping someone can tell me whether or not what happenned to me and my boyfriend the other night was legal or if it could be considered police harrassment. Around 8:30pm we were walking down a street that has several houses on one side, a mobile home park on the other side, then a short stretch of unpopulated area followed by a casino-which is where we were headed. As we were walking in front of one of the houses we were stopped by two Mormon gentlemen who wanted to tell us about their Good News and so on and so forth. They said they were at this particular house waiting to visit with the occupants and they saw us walking and thought they would talk to us also. We listened for a few minutes and they gave us some info on their church and then we continued on our way. As we were talking to these gentlemen we observed two police cars on the road, one on the same side as us, one on the other side, and each had pulled over a car at different spots on the road. After we started walking again, the officer on the opposite side of the road apparently completed his traffic stop and turned around to drive down the side of the road where we were walking. To our surprise, he pulled up behind us, shined his spotlight at us and "pulled us over". At this point we were maybe 200 feet from the casino. The officer steps out and asks us if we are ok and where we are headed (it seems fairly obvious from where we were that we were headed to the casino). We told him we are fine and going to the casino and I ask him if something is wrong or what. He says that nothing is wrong, that he stopped us to see if we were ok and if maybe we needed a ride (does this ever happen????). Then he requests to see our identification claiming that they are required to do an identification check on anyone they stop and talk to. We both provide our identification and then have to sit there for about 10 minutes while they run our names through the system. My check comes back ok, but they come up with a warrant under my boyfriend's name. To make a long story short..it turns out that the warrant could not possibly be for my boyfriend as it is from a city in Arizona that he has never been to, the description of the person is totally different (this person being 5'5 and my boyfriend being 6'2)and it is non-extraditable anyway. However, the whole scene ended up taking about 45 minutes which made us late meeting our friends. All we were doing was minding our own business walking down the street and even the officer admitted their was nothing suspicious about us that prompted him to stop us. Is this normal procedure, or could we file some kind of complaint about this? I feel like we were inconvienenced and detained unneccesarily. If anyone could give me some advice I would very much appreciate it!! Thank you SO much.
I'm hoping someone can tell me whether or not what happenned to me and my boyfriend the other night was legal or if it could be considered police harrassment. Around 8:30pm we were walking down a street that has several houses on one side, a mobile home park on the other side, then a short stretch of unpopulated area followed by a casino-which is where we were headed. As we were walking in front of one of the houses we were stopped by two Mormon gentlemen who wanted to tell us about their Good News and so on and so forth. They said they were at this particular house waiting to visit with the occupants and they saw us walking and thought they would talk to us also. We listened for a few minutes and they gave us some info on their church and then we continued on our way. As we were talking to these gentlemen we observed two police cars on the road, one on the same side as us, one on the other side, and each had pulled over a car at different spots on the road. After we started walking again, the officer on the opposite side of the road apparently completed his traffic stop and turned around to drive down the side of the road where we were walking. To our surprise, he pulled up behind us, shined his spotlight at us and "pulled us over". At this point we were maybe 200 feet from the casino. The officer steps out and asks us if we are ok and where we are headed (it seems fairly obvious from where we were that we were headed to the casino). We told him we are fine and going to the casino and I ask him if something is wrong or what. He says that nothing is wrong, that he stopped us to see if we were ok and if maybe we needed a ride (does this ever happen????). Then he requests to see our identification claiming that they are required to do an identification check on anyone they stop and talk to. We both provide our identification and then have to sit there for about 10 minutes while they run our names through the system. My check comes back ok, but they come up with a warrant under my boyfriend's name. To make a long story short..it turns out that the warrant could not possibly be for my boyfriend as it is from a city in Arizona that he has never been to, the description of the person is totally different (this person being 5'5 and my boyfriend being 6'2)and it is non-extraditable anyway. However, the whole scene ended up taking about 45 minutes which made us late meeting our friends. All we were doing was minding our own business walking down the street and even the officer admitted their was nothing suspicious about us that prompted him to stop us. Is this normal procedure, or could we file some kind of complaint about this? I feel like we were inconvienenced and detained unneccesarily. If anyone could give me some advice I would very much appreciate it!! Thank you SO much.
