July 11, 2007
Arrested?

I had a few people ask me about me an entry I made not to long ago, where I mentioned being “arrested” by the police. The grounds for us actually being stopped in the first place are questionable and looking back it seems like more of a joke. But to end any worry and or questions I will tell about our small brush with the “law.”

To start out with you need an understanding of how things work here. Liberian law is very flexible and if you really wanted to, most laws can be bypassed if you paid the right people. Although its getting better the police is are not exempt from this search for bribes. Ask most missionaries here and they will tell of some very funny police stories.

Anyway …..

We were driving down one of the main streets here in Monrovia and were planning on dropping someone off at a nearby side street before turning around and heading home. We made it to the street safely then turned onto the designated entry ramp (there was a medium sized island in the center) dropped off the person, and then pulled right back onto the exit ramp. Unfortunately a nearby police officer saw this and stopped us for what he called an unsafe turn. There were no other cars in the immediate area and there were no signs that said we couldn’t turn but we could see that the officer was not going to back down (warnings don’t exist here), so we asked what we needed to do. At first the officer was extremely confusing, but after about 3 min, he concluded that we are “arrested” and needed to get in the back of the police truck so he could take us to the court house. When my dad finally got a word in he simply said “I’m not leaving my car”. It took another 15 min of talking (with 3 officers and 2 UN police) to conclude that the car needed to be “impounded” for 1 and ½ hours time so we would “learn our lesson”. We agreed to this because it didn’t involve money and we had just finished everything we had to do for that day. So we parked our car on the side of the road and began to wait. Not long after that the same police officer who pulled us over came to us and said that the fine for reckless driving is $50 USD. We both knew what he was after (because he didn’t say this when all the other officers were around), so my dad politely said “what, you said I made an unsafe turn, there was nothing said about reckless driving” this ended all requests for money.
We sat in our car for an hour before the UN police came back around and was able to get us out early. Unfortunately, (to keep us from driving away early) the first police officer had taken my dads license and for some reason had given it to another officer who then ran off to do other “police duties”. This was annoying but it didn’t take that long to track down and recover his license.
Well, that’s pretty much the story. We made it though without paying anything and we did everything that was asked of us. I just hope next time it will go as smoothly as it did this time (if there is a next time).