OldCowHand, the police around here are definitely cool. Can't speak for Newark or Princeton. If I need to see a city, I go back to my old home town, New York, New York. But they have enough to do with people making real trouble without bothering people just passing through.
I'll tell you what I thought was funny at the time, and I think speaks to attitudes around here. I was walking down the trail to a local lake, and carrying that Vaquero Grande to cut back the thorns that grow everywhere here. I came to a patch that half-blocked the trail and was just finishing shearing it off, when a little girl came home from school and saw me standing there with this huge knife. She also saw what I had just done with it, cutting the thornbush out of her way, and gave me a big smile.
We get the occasional hyped newpaper story that carefully leaves out the degraded background of the people involved and the perfect familiarity of the police with what's going on. The reporter, though, makes sure the world knows there was a KNIFE involved.
I don't think it's easterner or westerner, or even liberal or conservative. I think it's the urban atmosphere and the people there who never leave their own neighborhoods and never lose their own narrow outlook and fears. But New Jersey has a lot of variety in a small area and the economy is reliably better than many parts of the country. That relieves a lot of the social pressure that leads to rampant political correctness and zero tolerance and all those excuses for personal responsibility.
