The cops have had an awful lot of bad press lately, for example the interactions with OWS protestors such as this one, and this sobering article from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, or this report of a former marine killed in his home by a SWAT team who erroneously thought he was a drug dealer. And erroneously thought their team member who tripped had just been shot.
My personal encounters with law enforcement have been qualitatively different. I have interacted with the police 26 times, and although that number seems large, none of them ended in an arrest, and in only two seemed like good material for an episode of Cops. In rough order of occurrence (I'm approximating my age on a few of these), they are: