Author, UPenn alum, and former Major League Baseball player Doug Glanville writes in the Atlantic today about being approached by a police officer who suspected him of illegally soliciting work as an itinerant laborer—while he was shoveling his own driveway in a well-to-do part of Hartford, Conn.
A police officer from West Hartford had pulled up across the street, exited his vehicle, and begun walking in my direction. I noted the strangeness of his being in Hartford—an entirely separate town with its own police force—so I thought he needed help. He approached me with purpose, and then, without any introduction or explanation he asked, “So, you trying to make a few extra bucks, shoveling people’s driveways around here?”
Glanville reacted calmly and tried to use the incident as a learning opportunity, eventually meeting with the mayor and police chief of West Hartford, the affluent suburb near his home whose police were allegedly following up on a tip about illegal door-to-door solicitation when they approached him. Read the whole piece at the Atlantic’s site; it’s worth it just for the half-uplifting, half-heartbreaking final line.
