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I'd just show them my ID.
Well, go buy a shitty minivan and drive it through some small towns and then after you get harassed you might get fed up a little. Maybe I was too ambiguous with the post title....I should have posted "what should I do" rather than "what do you do"
i also live in a shitty minivan... getting it over with as quickly and politely as possible is actually your best bet.
one lovely cop expression is "you only need one nail to hang your hat on", meaning: they can pretty much arrest you at any time because there's always some crime or suspicion of a crime they can get you for...
or another way to frame it is: at the end of the day, cops with guns will do what they want... so don't make them want to do anything...
or, more directly, in my decades of vagabond experience... do not try to argue, debate or shame the cops, unless you really want a couple of tickets and several court dates to argue your position...
"i smell burnt marijuana", for example, is a cop's goto for searching your van... ive seen them say it when there was definitely no weed around... but that's not going to help you, until after a bunch of court and bullshit...
...
basically there's no way to make all cops respect your rights without some tedious court shit... you may be legally correct, but that doesn't help until much later...
...
pragmatically, you can try to blend in more... paint rusy spots, etc and make your van look more normy... keep your van clean and free of any character... any self expression...
clear dashboard, clean interior... make it look like you might not be camping in there.
...
another touch i like is leave some folders from the local city college on your dashboard.
there's a huge difference in sympathy between a broke student living in their van, trying to pull up bootstraps or whatever, and what they imagine is some junky/psycho bum living in their van getting free rent.
it's a dumb world but just seeming friendly and sympathetic helps... they don't have the framework to imagine what you're going through...
housey-psychology is all guesswork, but it seems like college, musician/artist, and having a dog helps...
definitely seeming as clean and organized as possible helps... any evidence of beer and you're automatically a scumbag...
reddit sucks, obviously, but the vagabond and vanliving subs have good resources...
All of that is good advice. I do get haircuts and stay clean shaven most of the time. So, I don't look homeless but my van does.
It seems like every day there's a new article about people getting priced out of apartments and unable to afford homes. So, it's just a matter of time before there's some huge "Grapes of Wrath" style caravans of people living in cars. I wonder if it will get to the point where the cops look the other way simply because there's too many people living in cars.
Dude in my area apartments are 3/4 of my take home pay.
I can only live because I live in coop housing that is 1/4th my pay, and I was only invited here because my buddy moved away and the neighbors already like me.