To All Appearances, He Just Seems to Fit the Pull-Over Profile

Tim Thompson is a 39-year-old quality assurance manager for a Santa Ana company that manufactures devices that measure the chemical content in water. Right away you’re thinking, I’ll bet he lives a very dull life.

But put a full gray beard on him and a mane of gray hair that hangs to his shoulders. Now, dress him in a tie-dyed T-shirt and let him drive around in a 12-year-old pickup truck with a bashed-in side, faded paint job and an 80-pound dog in the flatbed.

Suddenly Thompson is a stereotype, and his life becomes a lot more interesting.

At least, that’s what Thompson thinks is happening to him. In his office Friday morning, he handed me a two-page printout that he titled “Police Stops Chronology.”

It lists 18 times he’s been stopped by local police in the last four years.

The stops occurred in Dana Point, Beverly Hills, Irvine, Costa Mesa, Lake Forest, Mission Viejo, Modjeska Canyon, Trabuco Canyon, Lake Isabella, Norwalk, Newport Beach and Orange. Local jurisdictions and the Orange County Sheriff’s Department have made the stops.

Until Nov. 5 (more on that later), only one of the previous 17 stops resulted in arrest--when he was charged with a DUI in Costa Mesa. Even on that stop, Thompson said, he was pulled over for not having his dog leashed in the back of the truck (it turned out the dog was leashed). The two officers who stopped him were about to let him go, Thompson said, when a sergeant showed up “with an attitude” and gave him a breath test, on which Thompson registered .11.

Thompson said he’s convinced he was cited only because his dog scared the sergeant, who then said he would shoot it if attacked. Upset because he had lost another dog the week before, Thompson said, he made a profane wisecrack to the sergeant, and he got arrested.

Thompson, who once lived in a treehouse and, then, a tepee and now in Dana Point, is convinced he’s a target only because of his appearance. “I think it’s just the trigger for them. I think it’s drug-culture oriented. They look at me and think, ‘This guy has something to do with drugs, either carrying them or using them, whatever.’ ”

Oddly enough, he said as we talked in his office, he’s not anti-police. “Police are vital,” he said. “I’ve had plenty of encounters with police--funny ones, ones with attitudes, ones just doing their job. For the most part, I know, they’re working men and women and they bring home a paycheck just like me.”

On the various police stops, he said, he’s been told he resembled burglars, robbers, molesters and peeping Toms. He’s been stopped, he said, for not having his seat belt fastened, having a crack in his windshield and assorted minor traffic violations.

Skeptical readers may well be asking how I can vouch for a stranger. The answer is, I cannot.

I’m putting most stock in Bob Hunt, the owner of the company where Thompson works and who has known Thompson for seven years. It was Hunt who originally contacted me about Thompson’s habit of getting pulled over, most often in South County.

“Tim is one of those free spirits who looks the part,” Hunt wrote. “Educated in philosophy, ascribes to the Taoist principles, laid-back, a little irresponsible in some matters that the bulk of society takes seriously, but no skeletons in his closet. What you see is what you get--which is an ex-hippie-looking guy. . . . His nemesis has been his hair, casual dress and a penchant for beat-up old cars. . . . “

For the most part, Thompson said, he’s resigned himself to the stops, even the one in Irvine where he was detained on a sidewalk for two hours late at night after being told he fit the description of a molester and burglary suspect.

He told me of going to his 20th high school reunion in 1994 and chatting with three former classmates, now police officers. “Tim,” they told me, “you fit the profile. And these guys know me,” Thompson said, laughing.

But it really isn’t funny, he said. “I cannot do anything or have anything, appearance-wise, wrong when I’m driving, especially late at night and especially in South County. If I looked like you and was leaving at 11 o’clock and going down [a street] in Mission Viejo, they would look at me as a dad or responsible citizen going home. But I go in my pickup at 11 o’clock and it’s like, ‘What’s this guy doing in our neighborhood?’ ”

That brings us to an incident Nov. 5 that--in trying to be fair--I’m going to be spare with details. Thompson claims he was pulled over in Orange County within a minute or two of having left a bar, where he had drunk only two glasses of wine.

He said he wasn’t told why he was stopped, but in an admittedly bad judgment call, he refused a sobriety test because he was afraid it might affect the only blemish on his record--the existing DUI from Costa Mesa.

He was taken into custody, Thompson said, during which several officers used pepper spray on him before pushing, hitting and forcing him to walk while blinded and handcuffed until he fell face-first over a parking lot barrier. The officers laughed at that and then subjected him to more rough-housing before jailing him overnight.

I won’t name the jurisdiction because it is Thompson’s word against theirs, and he hasn’t filed a formal complaint.

I can’t know the truth. But it is the one incident, among all the others, that gets Thompson riled. “It’s hard for me to convey to you the ritual that it [the excessive force] was,” he said. “It was like a protocol. They thought I was a nobody. I just got the impression, they do this all the time.”

Readers might ask, without more to go on, why I’m bothering with Thompson’s story of police misconduct. It’s because I don’t want police to make enemies of law-abiding citizens like Bob Hunt, a businessman and police supporter.

But that’s the danger of police misconduct. Hunt believes his friend’s story.

I’ll let Hunt finish the story.

” . . . They [police] have got a damn tough job to do, and it’s one that is vital to an orderly, safe society. If somebody is arrested [rightly or wrongly] and verbally abused by a cop, big deal. The guy’s a jerk, get over it. If someone tries to resist arrest or attack a cop, in my opinion they generally deserve whatever they get. . . .

“Thank God we have people willing to do this often thankless job. But the police officer is there for one purpose--to detect and if necessary intercept and halt breaking of the law. . . . He is the law’s watchdog. He is not the instrument of punishment. When police take that task upon themselves, then they are lawless. And if the police are outlaws, you have no law at all.”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.