My (almost) trip to jail

The closest I ever came (that I know of) to going to jail was one Sunday evening in Franklin, TN. For those of you who don't "know" Franklin, well they have a certain reputation for snootiness there. If you're a N AL person, it's sort of like the perception of folks in Hampton Cove. What once was a quaint, perhaps even rural, suburb was taken over by the money people and the money people don't like the non-money people. I'm not saying that's 100% accurate, but I think it is indicative of the perception many have about both communities. Anyway, back to jail ...

Back in my college days I was home for, I think, the summer break. I was hanging out with my old pal, Nate, and a classmate (from the architecture program at UT) he'd brought home with him for a visit. The classmate lived out the outskirts of Franklin and I rode along when Nathan took him home. Since they both were architecture students, the classmate wanted to show Nathan a couple of houses with interesting designs. I don't remember much about the houses, but I do recall that they weren't on one of the "main drags". Importantly, though, they weren't isolated streets in clearly residential, gated communities or anything like that. No, they were just a couple of houses on side streets. So, anyway, we took a little side trip to see these houses. I remember that Nathan, who was driving, slowed down a bit at each of the two houses, but we didn't pull over to look; heck, we didn't even slow that much -- just eased up on the speed a little bit so Nathan could see both houses

About the time we'd driven by the second house, we noticed a car behind us. No one thought too much about it as these weren't desolate streets or anything, but we did "perk up" when the car continued to follow us as we cut through some sort of office park type area to get back to the main drag that would take us to the classmate's house. Shortly after we got back to said main drag, the blue lights came on. If that wasn't bad enough, a second cop car came screeching to the scene, Roscoe P. Coltrane style, to "assist" the first car. So here we were, three early-twenties young men, sitting on the side of the road with two cop cars staring us down, wondering just what we'd done to warrant such attention. Soon we found out.

Cop #1 got out and approached Nathan, as I would expect a cop to do. Cop #2, meanwhile, snuck up on the passenger side and remained just behind the rear door while peeking all around trying to see just what malfeasance we might be up to. Cop #1 took IDs from all 3 of us and went back to his car -- never telling us just why we'd been stopped. Finally, cop #2 gave up his peeking and went back to join cop #1. After what seemed like half an hour (yes, I'm sure it wasn't that long, but it probably was 10 minutes or more), cop #1 came back all by himself and started quizzing us as to just what we were doing. Please keep in mind that, as far as I knew, we hadn't done anything approaching lawbreaking. We'd taken a short trip through some side streets in Franklin and then we'd cut through an office park area to get back to the main road. Anyway, the interview went something like:

Cop #1: Just what are y'all boys doing up here in Franklin?

Nathan: We were taking my friend, X, (turn and point to X) home. He lives up here and, since we're both architecture students, he wanted to show me a couple of interesting houses.

Cop #1: Hmm, ... [Pregnant pause.] Well see, we've had a bad rash of burglaries around here and I noticed y'all taking an unusual route. [Note: I didn't believe the crime wave story as I felt sure a string of home invasions in Franklin would have made it onto the Nashville news and if you lived in the Caffeine household you watched the Nashville news multiple times every day. Further, I still didn't see what we'd done that warranted our detention by the police.]

Nathan: Gosh, we didn't know anything about that.

Cop #1: Yeah, that's why I was suspicious of y'all.

Okay, up to this point I was offended, but I guess I could understand (if the burglary spree story was true) why the cop might have thought we deserved at least a look. I still thought it'd been overdone, but I COULD understand his actions -- maybe. What followed, though, really pissed me off!

Cop #1: (In my memory this was delivered a la sheriff Burford T. Justice from Smokey and the Bandit.) Well I'm gonna let y'all go, but we took down your information and if there is ANY trouble up here tonight we'll be getting in touch and you'll have to come back up here and explain more about just what you were doing here. We're real proud of our town and we appreciate that y'all wanted to visit, just make sure you come visit in the daytime the next time you want to look around.

Though I am a law-and-order type and I generally follow the Axl Rose rule of not confronting police officers, I was irate! How dare this guy threaten to haul us back in if "any trouble came up"? We had no burglary tools, we all had clean records, we had a perfectly legitimate story about why we were in Franklin, and we hadn't even really engaged in any suspicious behavior in the first place! The last straw, though, was his "y'all can come look around, but only in daylight hours"!!!!! Of course what we really did was say, "Yessir, thank you sir. We'll be leaving now, sir. Anything else we can do to improve your opinion of us, sir?", and got the heck out of Franklin. To this day, however, I curse Franklin cops every time I'm through there.

Point of this ramble? This story and, more specifically, that I wasn't a bit surprised by it. Though I dislike most zoning laws in principle (it's the libertarian in me), I sort of view it as an "it's your own fault" thing if you have a conflict with a neighborhood's covenants. Hello, (most of the time) they were in place when you moved in. Did you think the prohibition against porch couches would apply to everyone but you? This, though, strikes me as a little over the top -- banning parking in YOUR OWN front OR SIDE yard as a citywide policy! You can bet I'll be reading tomorrow's edition of the Williamson A.M. for more details.