does anyone feel like the naples area is a police state? why or why not (Miami: foreclosures)

[mac702]

sometimes it seems like there are more police than citizens. can anyone explain this phenomenon

[feibax]

Well i do agree with you-
Pros- having police presence helps prevent this place from becoming another Miami or Cape coral and does provide a sense of security
Cons- does feel like a police state many times , once have been wrongly given a ticket by the cop,called police deptt to check the traffic camera , but they refused, I don't want to imply that there is racial profiling by the cops , but there are too many examples where some people get let off with just a warning and the others harshly get tickets

[Compression]

The whole area has become this. This area is hurting bad because of the tax base drying up due to the high number of foreclosures. Writing tickets is one of the easiest ways the local municipalities have to replace some of the revenues they are losing.

Expect this trend to continue, and probably get worse, with more roadblock/checkpoints, etc. I've been pulled over a couple times, as far as I can tell, for nothing more than driving my work truck after dark. Check the driver license, and ask where I'm coming from, where am I going. Soon, it will be..."papers, please".

Racial profiling, no, profiling based on something, obviously. Perhaps just the type of vehicle your driving, and the time of day. Still dont make it right.......

[yoko]

How often do you think Madoff was pulled over before he was caught stealing billions?
Do you think trophy wive's suitcases are ever checked at night to see if dollar bills are real or not?
When a company proudly announces have bought another company, do you think, the police can ever check what happened on corporate/private jets?

The real danger to Naples, and the like, has always come from " within", where the police has no presence at all. We only know about their "horrible loss" because they complain to each other about how this person or that partner betrayed him with money. Or we hear it on news. To catch "bad guys", many still resist giving information just to avoid to ever expose themselves.

[Adream]

Some of the locals told me that a part of that is due to the seniors' driving drunk on their way home from the restaurants. Too many accidents caused by that apparently. It is also, as explained previously, to keep the 'element' from Ft. Meyers and Miami out. There is only so much of that in their power to control though.

[JudiPatooti]

My husband would agree with "Naples is a police state" in a nano-second. They are everywhere and are always hiding. It drives him nuts! They just started ticketing inside our gated community and stopped our neighbor for rolling through a stop sign behind someone who was stopped at it. And, I've seen plenty of people ticketed in the past 8 years here, but NEVER was it an old person!!! We watch them drinking like crazy in restaurants all the time. They are very likely also on several medications, and are not the best drivers to begin with. But, they get in their cars and drive home. It scares me!!!

I'm a boring, plump 60 year old white woman, but drive an older ('99) Eclipse with a high spoiler. (What can I say? Inside I'm a 16 year old kid, I guess, ha ha.) Anyway, last Christmas I was innocently driving my car from my home in South Naples to the mall to shop for my grandchildren. I was doing the speed limit, but right near my home a police car got behind me. She tailed me from the corner of 951 (if you know it) down Rattlesnake Hammock, down County Barn, and finally stopped me right after I turned onto Davis Blvd. That's about 10 miles, I'd say. I drove very carefully, as you can imagine. She came up to the window and said to me in a very snotty tone of voice, not "Hello." and not "I'm patrol officer, such and such", but she just snarled at me, "Where are you going?" I told her to the mall. She asked me for the license and registration and continued to be very nasty. I finally asked what I did wrong and she said that when I stopped at the traffic light on the corner of Rattlesnake Hammock and County Barn to make my right turn (about 5 miles back from where she finally stopped me) I pulled over the thick white line with my tires!!!!! After much nonsense I told her I hadn't gotten a ticket since 1972, she was free to check that out, and I really am a careful driver. She did go check me out of course. Bu, she didn't ticket me. She also never stopped being abrupt and nasty to me.

The only thing I could attribute her tailing me and then stopping me for what was a crazy reason along with her nasty attitude from the very beginning was that she was racially profiling me. I think she initially thought I was much younger and a minority. I say this because my car looks like something a young kid would be driving and I have dark hair. There are many Latinos in my part of town and I see the cops stopping the younger ones all the time. There just seemed to be no other reason for her behavior. It was a weird encounter, to say the least, and really ruined my Christmas spirit that day!!! I would have liked to report her, because there was something "not right" about the entire thing as far as I was concerned. But, who needs to make an enemy of their town's police!

But, I do have to say, that in general I think the cops in Naples are very polite and nice. And, I guess, although they're mighty sneaky about it, they are actually doing their job and working for their salary, which is something you don't see the police doing in a lot of other areas.

[Huckleberry3911948]

dont know the area but am no stranger to rough neighborhoods.
current mind set is police action any and absolutely any police action is inappropriate.
when the inhabitants feel there is a problem it will get better. until then there will be many many posts saying we got a cop problem not a crime problem.

[Kuota]

It's a social phenomenon, people do not want to be exposed to any kind of police incident, they wish they were invisible, but, when they do need them they want them immediately and unconditionally