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| - Two friends and I had been on a camping trip, driving home through the Phoenix area when we decided to pull over and switch drivers (HUGE mistake in Nazi-land, we would soon discover). Right after we got back onto the road, we were pulled over by a Phoenix cop. It was one of the scariest events of our lives.
The cop was furious, screaming at us, holding us at gunpoint and forcing us to exit the vehicle. He roughly searched us (with no probable cause) and demanded our ID's. We explained to him that we'd been on a camping trip, and that all we were doing was switching drivers for the last leg home. He didn't believe a word of it (why? we had no idea), despite the fact that all of our camping gear was clearly visible within the car... hiking boots, backpacks, water bottles, etc. We literally hadn't done a single thing wrong, yet he was treating us like total criminals. He searched the car (again, without probable cause), and when we noted that what he was doing was illegal, he got even more mad.
He then threatened to "haul us to the station" and "answer for ourselves", and at that point the girl we were with started crying. We realized that this guy was completely out of his mind, and that all the horror stories we'd heard about Arizona cops being evil were not exaggerations at all. This cop was just itching to rough us up, pushing us as hard as he could so that one of us might resist, giving him a reason to beat us up. Fortunately, we all remained calm (except for the psycho cop, of course), and we just waited it out in the scorching heat. Eventually, he had to let us go, as we were just three innocent people that liked to go camping who hadn't violated any actual laws.
That doesn't matter in Arizona anymore, however. Everyone is guilty until proven innocent. I'll never set foot back in that Fourth Reich of a state as long as I live. It's become a truly sick place.
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