It would be easy, then, to assume that you're safe from getting screwed over as long as you obey the law, or at least keep your crimes minor and private. You'd be wrong. In America, the courts have again and again given the police all sorts of leeway to royally screw up your life for almost no reason at all. It's just that most of you haven't been unlucky enough to find out that the police can legally ...

Although Hollywood likes to tell us otherwise, being a cop is far from Lethal Weapon -style no-holds-barred crime solving. Real police officers operate under a thick book full of rules and regulations intended to protect the rights of people like you.

5 Throw You in Jail and Repeatedly Strip Search You (Even if You're Innocent)

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Strip searching is not in vogue these days. Ten states have made strip searching prisoners downright illegal, and even the federal government -- the people who are generally cool with stuff like Guantanamo -- looks down on it. This is because strip searches are a slippery slope at best: They are both humiliating and a potentially massive violation of human rights, to the point where they can cause diplomatic scandals. And they can be done to you at any time, for the tiniest misdemeanors that may or may not have happened at all. And there isn't a damned thing you can do about it.

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Even chastity belts merely postpone the inevitable.

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Take the case of Albert Florence, the last guy you'd imagine getting shit from the cops: As a happily married family man with a spotless record, he was the definition of an average, non-threatening middle-class dude. This did little to save him from the long, overly grabby hand of justice when a cop pulled him and his wife (who was driving) over for speeding ... and promptly arrested Florence. Their computer said he had an unpaid fine from seven years ago, and thus he had an arrest warrant on his ass. So, off to jail he went, where they kept him locked away for a full week.

Florence's only entertainment in the strange pit of despair his life had suddenly become were the two full-on strip searches he had to go through, complete with the whole "lift your balls in front of observers and cough" experience. Keep in mind that this was just a dude with an unpaid ticket. He wasn't a violent offender or a likely connoisseur in the fine art of rectal smuggling. There was literally no reason to put him through a strip search or, for that matter, throw him in jail, because in reality Albert Florence had no unpaid fines whatsoever. He had totally paid that shit years ago, and he had a receipt to prove it. It was just an administrative error.