A little late jumping in this thread, but thought I'd add a story.
It was maybe 10-15 years ago. I was a teenager. With my dad and two other guys. I may have told this story here before, but I'll type it again. Anyway, we usually tried to avoid having all men in a car group. Stereotypes, the world we live in, whatever, can make that seem scary to some people, but anyway, we couldn't avoid it that day. We lived in a rural area, and we were working a territory far out on the edge of our rural territory. A small town that was just a widening of the road. All four of us black guys. My dad and I finish working our houses and come back to the car. The other two guys are still at the door talking. We are riding in one of the other bros. cars so my dad and I are are sitting in the back seat with the doors open on this warm summer day. A police car pulls up behind us and the policeman gets out and walks up on my side and looks in at us and says "hi" and how are ya'll. something to that affect. We return the greeting and my dad tells him what we're doing and he acknowledges it. I am sure he knew what we were doing all along. So by this time the other two guys come back from the house they were at. The policeman watches them approach and notices one with his hand in his pocket. And he says "you always have your hand in your pocket like that?". And the bro. says "yeah, I guess so". The policeman goes "I guess you must be the one with the gun." And we all laugh. So he tells us he got a call. Apparently, the caller had chosen to heighten the urgency by suggesting that he might have a gun. I can't remember what else he says but it was probably some friendly advice or something about the people in the town and he sends us off. We were finished with that area any way.
I never noticed that police were called in the few short years I worked up around the No. VA area just outside of DC. Its an all urban area and we have a lot of recent immigrants, hispanics, ethiopians, etc. staying in apartments, and I noticed another poster said something about people thinking we were the FBI. Same thing would happen sometimes with the recent immigrants in some of the apartments in the area. I never had anyone say that, but had one guy openly say, I thought you were the FBI coming up here in those suits.
