"The crazy thing is, I had come to a complete stop," I remember him saying.

I completely believed him. For a few months, I had filled in as the interim city administrator for this city while they were searching for a permanent replacement. In that capacity, I had a chance to meet with the police chief. He was a nice enough guy, and certainly well-liked in the community, but his approach made me uncomfortable.

He told me he instructed his officers to be very aggressive in pulling people over. He told me they would look for any reason they could to make a stop and then use that interaction as a stepping-stone of sorts to fish for bigger things. Did the driver sound a little strange? Get her out of the car for a intoxication test. Run her license and check for warrants. Pry around and see if you smell pot (or something like it).

The police chief bragged that they had nailed a lot of really bad people this way—individuals who had warrants or other red flags on their records. Often they would be able to seize the vehicle or other property and sell that at auction, the proceeds of which they got to keep in the department in a process I still don't fully understand. In the short time I was there, whenever he wanted a new piece of equipment and there wasn't money in the budget, he would seek authorization to use the asset forfeiture fund, which was off budget and had an unknown balance (at least to me — and I tried to get access) but which, we were assured, had enough in it to cover the purchase.

So when my colleague said he was pulled over for no reason, I had no problem believing him. I had been pulled over myself in the same city on a few occasions. One instance that I remember was for a taillight being out. I had a mouse chew through the wire and spent hundreds of dollars trying to get it fixed but there was something loose we couldn't isolate. I'm not joking here: if I pounded on the light, it would flicker back on. I told this to the officer and he said he’d let me show him if I would open the trunk so he could see inside. My light back on and my trunk searched, I was allowed to go on my way without a ticket.

I've had a lot — a lot— of interactions with traffic police. Back in my consulting days, there were years when I put 50,000 miles on my car (I worked all over the state). Lots of these miles were late at night in rural areas where the police were just waiting for the lone car to drive through the 55 mph to 30 mph transition on the edge of town—the guarantee ticket zone. I once got a ticket for going 40 mph in a 30 mph. When I drove past the patrol car he rapidly turned around and I responded by immediately pulling over. I received the ticket while sitting at the 55 mph sign.

"Right there the sign says 55, officer," I protested.

"You can't go 55 until you get to the sign," he informed me.

I kept a clip-on tie in my car because I had a long streak where I would not get a ticket if I was wearing a tie. If I didn't have a tie, it seemed like an automatic ticket. So I kept a tie handy. First view of the shiny lights and I'd reach for my tie.

Once, my best friend Mike and I were leaving Moondance Jam, a music festival where our band was the regional host band. I don't drink and he hadn't been drinking either, but traveling 60 mph in a 55 zone (a speed generally slower than traffic) gave the officer the excuse to pull us over. He wanted to know if we had been drinking. "We weren't drinking; we're musicians," Mike helpfully offered from the passenger seat, a line that has become a recurring punchline in our friendship. I got a ticket that time. No tie.

Philando Castile, who was shot dead by a St. Anthony police officer during a routine traffic stop here in Minnesota back on July 6, had been pulled over by police 49 times. As if that wasn't an amazingly high number, keep in mind that he was only 32 years old. This paragraph from the Star Tribune story sounded eerily familiar, both from my experience as a driver and as an interim city administrator:

Castile had been stopped before, when officers spotted him not wearing a seat belt, or when an officer ran his plate number and found his license had been revoked for not paying an earlier fine. Numerous stops came after he didn’t use a turn signal. A few came after he was speeding. He was stopped for rolling through a right turn on a red light, having window tints that were too dark, and at least twice for not having a rear license plate light. He was rarely ticketed for the reason he was stopped.