I'm not going to add to the political, ethical, or police & public dynamic comments. I always figure that greasing my personal encounters as much as possible is the priority.

One of my vehicles is probably a "65" on the 1 - 100 profiling scale. An old ass beat up '08 Scion econobox I got used when work was a 60 mile round trip. And I'm too miserly to replace a vehicle that functions just fine otherwise. I just ain't going into debt over a goddam depreciating asset, no matter how nice it is. That kind of BS is for "lottery or fuck-you money" period.

I mean, your house is an appreciating asset, hopefully... so honestly, "your cars should be X times shittier than your house" ought to be rule of thumb financial advice. Just like "if you've got 10 million, live like you've got 1 million" etc.

Keeping up with the Joneses? Fuck the Joneses.

The traffic stops I've gotten in it, I can literally see the "Officer demeanor slump" as they approach, and the middle-aged taxpayer/dad doesn't match the expectations the little shitbox car gives off.

At night, interior lights on. All the time, day or night, engine off, keys on the dash. Although wireless fob & push-to-start kind of lessens that. It's gotten me some initial hairy-eyeball and: "Do you get pulled over a lot?" "

And I reply "Nah, cousin's a retired cop, told me about that." Half truth...

And a clean interior probably goes a long way. No clothes, junk, or fast-food trash. Unless maybe it's a minivan with child seats, and the clutter is all dry cereal & toys etc. I figure that's a profiling/perp-radar thing, or just bait if Sgt. Sphincter is feeling determined to toss your car in "The process as punishment"-mode even if they doubt they'll find anything.

Just emit relaxed non-judgmental boredom. And convey, "You're just doing your job." Even if you think it's high-handed fishing bullshit.

I figure that besides the possible range of personalities involved, pathological incentives & politics/unintended consequences etc... LE probably gets absolutely hammered in training these days with dashcam video of a cop/deputy/trooper being "friendly" and the angry nut job pulls out a rifle and kills them. Implying that not being 100% Gestapo-mode will get you dead. And "not being dead" is obviously more important than a soccer-mom being butthurt in an otherwise "no harm no foul" interaction because you "maintained control."

Regardless of if that's actually wise, as that angry nut job is probably a 1:100,000 thing and soccer-mom is almost assuredly 1:1 odds.

Shit like this is just pendulum swings, and human life, overreactions and babies tossed out with bathwater. Yeah, push back, complain. Fight Asset Forefeiture in court so that bullshit is buried where it belongs. But life's better when you realize that in most anything contentious, someone isn't always trying to be an asshole 100% on purpose.

Pennsylvania v. Mimms

Well, like anything in life, there's kind of a bell-curve distribution for almost everything. Including the skill level at administering pseudo-bullshit mental trcks on the methbillies & hoodrats, or whatever they're fishing for. Regardless of one's ethical or legal take on it overall.

Someone is always on the left end low-functioning skinny tail. Because even when you preselected the base population, there's still a performance bell-curve of whoever is left.

Like IQ... If you make a super satellite mind ray that amps up the intelligence of everyone on Earth so the average IQ is Einstein's at 143... then you IQ tested all 8 billion humans, Einstein and 143 are now the center and the new 100...

The officer, same for them. Pre-screening & training, there's still a bell-curve, and someone in that agency is the absolute worst at this.

They get desperate as nobody with a rusty junker, tinted out Nissan Altima, Chrysler 300, or whatever it is this year... & out of state plates has come by lately.

Maybe embarrassment or frustration at pulling over "regular people" just has them double down on all the psych pressure BS to get a paranoid person to crack.

Maybe they're just really prone to ride 100% on training, and ignore their intuition & gut. Or they have no "intuition & gut." And they're not all that great at executing the training either.

Maybe methbillies, hoodrats, cartel mules, or 420-fans going to/from Burning Man have started figuring out how to look more like 2023 "Ward & June Cleaver" and the Captain made a big stink about it.

Maybe they aren't actually that incompetent, the incentives, performance reviews, promotions, whatever in that agency are pathologies such to put that officer into ZFG-mode, and they engage in stop & high-pressure "bad cop" at random, on everybody, whatever, because it doesn't matter what they do. Or incentives promote ZFG if they piss off regular people constantly.

Maybe some combination of all that...