I was driving my new 2000 Kia Sportage 4x4 on Kellogg Blvd just outside the Xcel Arena just before game time.  I was the last of a slow moving line of cars, and the nearest vehicle to mine was approximately three or four car lengths ahead of me.  On this particular street, many pedestrians were crossing at all points and several police officers were directing traffic.  It was fairly chaotic.

 When the incident happened, I was traveling at an extremely low rate of speed (<5 MPH).  The policeman in question was standing in the left lane of traffic waving the cars ahead of me through the area, and because the next car behind me was in excess of ten car lengths, I assumed that the officer would wave me through as part of the previous line of cars.  The officer shined his Maglite flashlight directly into my eyes, and I assumed he was “checking me out.”  Seeing him do so, I slowed down even further to a crawl, sat up straight, and got nervous.  He then made a counter clockwise circular motion with his flashlight, a motion that I interpreted as him telling me to continue moving through the area.  When I slightly sped up, he set his jaw and took two strides, bringing his flashlight down twice in a striking motion hard on my driver’s side front panel of the car.  He yelled, “pay attention!”  I stammered something to him about misinterpreting his signals, and he then directed me to move along.

After traveling another block or so, I looked at the area that he had struck and saw that my vehicle was dented.  Despite my reservations in confronting the officer, I realized I needed to get his badge number to file any sort of complaint, and so I drove around the block and re-entered the line of traffic.  When I got to the same point on the street, I rolled down my window and asked, “Sir, may I have your badge number?”  The officer called out automatically “440,” then seeing who was asking it, he asked me to pull over.  I did so, and he came up to my driver’s side window and said, “You can have my badge number, it will be on the citation I’m now going to write you.” I protested, saying, “sir, that isn’t necessary, you weren’t going to write me one before, and it was a simple case of misunderstanding your directions.”  His response was that there was nothing to misunderstand and that if he hadn’t have struck my vehicle that I would have run him over.  It’s important to me to note that this is patently false.  Had he been in the path of my vehicle then the dents would be on the hood.  The dents are clearly on the driver’s panel midway between bumper and door, and he had to take two steps to get to my vehicle and strike it.  Moreover, there were no pedestrians in that side of the street at that time, so there is no way I was endangering any pedestrians either.  The officer then asked me for my driver’s license.  As I was locating my license, the officer became more and more distracted with the pedestrians crossing around him and other policemen calling out communications to him.  He then asked me if I could pull around the block and park behind his squad car.  I agreed that I would, but reiterated my contention that it wasn’t necessary to cite me in the case.  As I said this, he said first “Go now,” which I interpreted as him saying that I should pull around the block.  He then repeated this twice, and as I disengaged the parking brake he said “Just go. Get out of here.”  This I interpreted as him telling me to just leave the area, that he was too busy to deal with writing me a citation.  I had his badge number as was called out originally, so I left the premises.