I wrote just a couple of days ago about being stopped by the state police back in January and how it played to certain anxieties I simply couldn't banish from my mind no matter how logically or reasonably I thought about the interaction. About a month ago, I had a less direct interaction with the police that suggested my reaction had much more to do with the mere fact of interacting with the police than it did with any particular aspect of the conversation I had on that January night.
This second interaction was a 911 call (my first one ever) I made after pulling my bike over to the side of First Street in Cambridge. I reported smoke coming out of a trash barrel back on Cambridge Street, located about a block behind me as I made the call. It wasn't a ton of smoke, perhaps not quite enough to catch the attention of someone driving past, but it would definitely deter a pedestrian from walking over and placing any new trash into the barrel.
The notable feature of my call was that it took me about five minutes between noticing the smoke and placing the call. It wasn't like I had anything better to do, didn't trust my eyes, or thought placing the call was an inappropriate reaction to what seemed likely to be a rare case of smoke with no fire. It was, I realized about thirty seconds before making the call, that I just didn't want to interact with the police in any way. Once I admitted this to myself, I took out my phone and dialed 911. I have no clear idea why I'm so reluctant to interact with the police but I'm going to think about it some more and come back with a post or two if I form any reasonable theories on how I turned into just another police-fearing American.
One last note on this 911 call - the first thing the operator said when she picked up was 'this call is being recorded'. I wasn't ready for that, at least based on what I knew from TV and movies, but I recovered my composure quickly to reluctantly complete the call and play my small part as a nomadic Cambridge resident.
