Your perceived economic status, say if you are stopped while driving a car worth more than 50 or 60 thousand, and how well you are dressed, can equal a hands-off approach by bad cops. Money equals legal power in court, as we all know. However, if all those factors are the same, except you are brown or black, things get dicey again.
Regardless, if you are driving through a red zone neighborhood, as was the case when my brother took a popular short cut to get home out of the rush hour traffic, many bad cops will just go ahead and stop you on suspicion (drug buying, prostitution). My brother was in a late model Mercedes, but wearing cutoffs and a sweaty t-shirt, on his way back home to finish pruning and fertilizing his roses. The cops had set up an impromptu road block, my bro was a little less than sweet natured at the delay during interrogation, so they yanked him out of his car and broke his nose and dislocated his jaw by slamming him into the hood. They also miraculously "found" a baggie of crack in his car. Nevertheless, as outraged as he was, he was completely blown away by the immense percentage of blacks and other non-white Latinos in county lockup. The white Cuban Americans with him were equally dismayed. And they were all in the "good" part of the jail.
