One question I get asked a lot is if I'm hassled much by cops and the answer is "No." In over 5,000 sign postings I've been stopped and questioned by police maybe seven or eight times, and almost every time it's gone like this:
"Did you put that sign up there?"
"Yes sir, I did."
"Do you mind taking it down?"
"No sir, not at all."
Then I go take down the sign and that's pretty much the end of it.
Seconds after putting up this sign I turned and saw two SFPD walking onto the overpass and was, as they say, "totally busted". I stood there, smiled, and politely waited for them to reach me.
"You see any kids up here?" one of them asked.
"Uh, no."
"We got a call that said there were kids throwing rocks off here."
"Nope. Haven't seen any."
There was a pregnant pause and then he asked: "What does the sign say?"
"2,974 Arms... 3,244 Legs... 1,672 Lives."
He thought about this for a second and then said "Probably be a whole lot more too." And that was it. No asking for ID, no warnings, lectures... nothing.
I was sure they were just being polite and letting me go before they took down the sign, but some ten minutes later, when I took the picture, it was still there. In fact, it was still up two days later.
That was probably my most amiable run-in with the cops. The worst was a month or two later, also in San Francisco, when a guy in a black unmarked car caught me hanging "The War is a Lie." over the 280. He came on strong right away, asking for ID and responding to my "any problem?" with a litany of "What you're doing is illegal...", "We've had numerous complaints," "This is serious," etc. etc. I apologized politely and explained that I thought it was okay - just like all the flags that went up on overpasses after 9/11. I was as nice as I could possibly be.
Although he was doing his best to play bad cop it really wasn't working. First off, I was just about certain the law was on my side, and if it wasn't I was more than happy to argue it in court. More than that though, the guy looked exactly like Paul Simon from Simon and Garfunkel, and I've loved Simon and Garfunkel since I was nine years old. I know it sounds silly, but until he started hitting me with his baton or something, I just couldn't help liking him.
He ran my ID through his computer and while it came up clean, he said it resembled one that didn't and if I didn't mind he wanted to take me down to the station and have me printed to make sure I wasn't the other guy. Although I knew it was bogus, I was more than willing to play along: I was a citizen using public property for the purpose of political speech, and if they wanted my fingerprints I was more than happy to give them. After all, my fingerprints were all over the thousand or so signs I'd already put up anyway.
A police van arrived and they handcuffed me before putting me in the back. I was a little surprised by the handcuffs, but they said it was standard operating procedure which pretty much put an end to the discussion. Once we got to the station I was handcuffed to a bench for a couple minutes, then fingerprinted, photographed and released once I signed something that said I understood that I'd been detained and questioned but not formally arrested. The Paul Simon lookalike drove me back to my truck and we talked amiably about the war, free speech and Rosa Parks, whose body was lying in state at the Capital at the time. He turned out to be a pretty nice guy, and his last words to me were "You be careful out there hanging those signs."
That was my very worst experience with the police in a dozen years of hanging signs, and I'm sure there's plenty of you who've suffered far worse just from attending a single protest. Until the courts say otherwise, putting a sign on an overpass (safely: on the inside of the fencing, not the outside,) is no different than putting up a flag, and that's one of the things that still make this country great.
One final note: When they handcuffed me and put me in the back of the van, the first thing I saw were streaks of blood - not large, but fresh and bright red at head level over one of the benches. Believe it or not the first thing I thought to myself was "Thank God I'm in America." Because I knew there were plenty of places in this world where getting handcuffed and thrown in the back of a bloodstained van meant you were probably going to die, but this wasn't one of them.
I think about them every time I feel like giving up - all the people who've lost their lives for doing something we just take for granted - and that's one of the reasons why I keep putting up signs.