Well, let's see...
There was the time I was pulled over doing 100 in a 50...
There was the time five minutes later when I got a ticket for supposedly failing to yield...
There was the time that a county clerk screwed up entering my payment on two traffic tickets, resulting in my license being suspended - and I wasn't notified until TWO MONTHS after it happened...
There was the time some friends and I called the cops to aid a woman who'd been assaulted by a guy she'd met at a party - and we all got picked up as we were going home and hauled to the county police office as suspects, being grilled by a clueless detective the whole time... When the victim was thanking us in the precinct house afterwards for coming to her aid, it made the detective seems pretty stupid.
But to New Yorkers, none of that matters. Because the most important encounter most of us have had with cops were in the weeks following September 11th, 2001. There were so many fire and police funerals going on all at the same time, the mayor had put out a call for the public to attend in as large a number as possible, due to a lack of enough high-ranking city officials to be present to give them the honors they deserved. Encountering so many cops in their own funeral processions in such a short time has a way of realigning your reality.