Street interactions with cops are all about race, age, class, and gender

Here's the story of the one time a cop talked to me when I was walking down the street.

My friend and I were walking through Berkeley. We were both 25-year-old females. She's Chinese-American and I'm white. We both looked totally middle class.

We crossed in a crosswalk that had a red "hand" signal, and when we got to the other side there was a white cop who was about 30.

He asked us if we had seen the red light and if we were deliberately antagonizing him. We said that we hadn't noticed the light and we hadn't seen him. He didn't check our IDs or cite us. He just told us to obey the traffic signals and we were on our way.

You can't tell me that wasn't about being white/Asian, young, middle class, and female.

Two poor-looking black men in that situation no matter how polite would have at least had their IDs checked.