Unfortunately, I drive a ghetto minivan which causes the police to profile me and has caused people in small towns to call the police on me if I am in a public park or in their neighborhood. I even had someone call the police on me at campground that I had pre-paid for and the police were not sympathetic at all to my right to just exist.
I am aware of stop and identify laws and know that a cop needs reasonable suspicion to demand to see your ID. However, can’t the cop just make up some lies about reasonable suspicion?
If a cop approaches me can I immediately start with: “Officer, do you have reasonable suspicion that a crime has occurred, is in the process of occurring, or is about to occur?” It seems like that will immediately escalate things even if technically the law is on my side.
I just want a damn right to exist law and to not be a target for an overactive imagination by the police which treats me like a criminal until they can check me for warrants.
Honestly, I want to tell them to fuck off right away but I also don’t have money for a lawyer.
Well, go buy a shitty minivan and drive it through some small towns and then after you get harassed you might get fed up a little. Maybe I was too ambiguous with the post title…I should have posted “what should I do” rather than “what do you do”
i also live in a shitty minivan… getting it over with as quickly and politely as possible is actually your best bet.
one lovely cop expression is “you only need one nail to hang your hat on”, meaning: they can pretty much arrest you at any time because there’s always some crime or suspicion of a crime they can get you for…
or another way to frame it is: at the end of the day, cops with guns will do what they want… so don’t make them want to do anything…
or, more directly, in my decades of vagabond experience… do not try to argue, debate or shame the cops, unless you really want a couple of tickets and several court dates to argue your position…
“i smell burnt marijuana”, for example, is a cop’s goto for searching your van… ive seen them say it when there was definitely no weed around… but that’s not going to help you, until after a bunch of court and bullshit…
…
basically there’s no way to make all cops respect your rights without some tedious court shit… you may be legally correct, but that doesn’t help until much later…
…
pragmatically, you can try to blend in more… paint rusy spots, etc and make your van look more normy… keep your van clean and free of any character… any self expression…
clear dashboard, clean interior… make it look like you might not be camping in there.
…
another touch i like is leave some folders from the local city college on your dashboard.
there’s a huge difference in sympathy between a broke student living in their van, trying to pull up bootstraps or whatever, and what they imagine is some junky/psycho bum living in their van getting free rent.
it’s a dumb world but just seeming friendly and sympathetic helps… they don’t have the framework to imagine what you’re going through…
housey-psychology is all guesswork, but it seems like college, musician/artist, and having a dog helps…
definitely seeming as clean and organized as possible helps… any evidence of beer and you’re automatically a scumbag…
reddit sucks, obviously, but the vagabond and vanliving subs have good resources…
I don’t see how asking for an ID is harassment. Like, are they asking you every day even though they know you by now?
different towns…also the incident at the campground happened and there were other people camping. The cop didn’t go check in on any of them. His specific “reasonable suspicion” was that in the past at that campground they have had trouble with “riff-raff”. Great! So be it, then why not go ID check all the other campers then? I was being profiled and targeted because of the vehicle I was driving. If you don’t understand then that’s because this hasn’t happened to you 10 times or more. It gets tiring.
Were the other campers actually camping and you were just a minivan parked at a campsite?
Because not many campers just sit inside a minivan the whole time.
But meth heads do, because they can’t smoke meth out in the open.
Stop being angry people notice you, and start trying to blend in. If you’re paying for the site, you might as well use it.
I have a ghetto van. It does not blend in. The campground was one incident. There are many more which have happened in parking lots where other people are also sitting in their cars. Since the invention of smart phones a lot of people sit in their cars for various reasons and look at their phones or use laptops. It’s not illegal nor suspicious to sit in your car. - Anytime you vent online people look for an angle to blame you. I just want to exist without being harassed like everyone else.
So…
You did go to a campsite where families were in tents and you just sat inside your sketchy minivan and don’t understand why the cops were called?
It might be just one example, but it was your pick. You saw nothing wrong with you behavior or understood why it was suspicious…
So there’s a good chance lots of the time you don’t see a reason, there’s a very good reason it’s happening.
Go lurk on r/vandwelling on Reddit, there’s a shit ton of old posts going over common sense stuff that you would greatly benefit from. And I sincerely mean that as good advice, by your own admission you want help.
But there’s not a lot of people on Lemmy, and this is pretty important.
So go reathe posts of people who live this life and have been doing it for years.