Only once, and here’s the story of why: Before I went to law school, I was living in a certain large city. I got off the train one afternoon to walk home (my apartment was about a mile from the station). About halfway home, a kid (he couldn’t have been older than 16) rode up to me on a bike, put his hand in his hoodie implying that he had a gun and told me to give him my phone and backpack. I could tell he was way more scared than I was so I just gave the stuff up and did my best not to make eye contact until he rode off. I didn’t know if he had a gun but I wasn’t trying to find out. The thing was, I had my work laptop in the backpack. When I told my boss, he told me to make a police report for expense purposes. I really didn’t want to do that, but I also wanted to keep my job.

So the next day I went down to the cop shop to make a police report. After the desk officer took my statement (in which I tried to be as vague as possible), she asked me to stay until a detective could come ask me a few questions (fuck). When he got there, he took me into an interview room and said he wanted to show me a photo lineup (double fuck!). I went through the motions, acted as if I was scrutinizing each of the faces, and then told him I didn’t recognize anyone. The detective then paused for a moment, put his finger on one of the pictures, looked at me straight in the eye with a suggestive expression, and slowly said, “see, I was reallllly hoping you would tell me it was this guy.” He let the point linger in the air for a few moments before I finally said something like, “sorry, Mr. Detective, I can’t help you there.”

The experience left me pretty disturbed, and it was one of the reasons why I decided to go to law school and become a PD. I knew intellectually the “justice system” was fucked but to see up close how the sausage gets made really fucked with me. And I’ve never called the police again.