I've been pulled over (1997) while being a passenger in a older (1970sh) truck in Palo Alto at night. The officer was really friendly, asked what we were doing in the neighborhood (We were driving around slowly, looking for a house we were trying to visit), and wished us a good evening after confirming we were on the up-up. The driver (my friend) was hispanic, I'm a white guy. License and Tags were up to date - it was just a kind of crummy truck. I thought it was really weird, but he said that sort of thing had happened to him several times - he attributed it a lot more to the truck being in a nice neighborhood than him personally.
On the flip side, a couple years earlier, when I had just moved to the Bay area in 1995 (from Vancouver,BC ) I had gotten a bit lost with friends, and had slowed down, and were stopping at various intersections in East Palo Alto trying to get our bearing. (I just realized - this is something anybody who grows up with GPS enabled smartphones will never have to do) A police office pulled us over to find out what we were doing, and then suggested (once again, really nicely), that we probably shouldn't be stopping in this neighborhood at that time of night (East Palo Alto, unbeknownst to us, was a very high-crime area in 1995)
I guess my point is - Police pull people over when their spidey sense goes off all the time. And it can be all sorts of things that will trigger it. I guess I'm blessed with white skin, but the many interactions I've had with police in which they've engaged me because whatever it was I was doing seemed sketchy at the time, always ended up well. Though, honestly - they've got guns, so I've also been pretty sensitive to the fact that if I made them nervous they might shoot me.
Fundamentally, the problem with that approach to policing is that racism is inherent to human interaction. Without training to recognize it, unconscious bias will set off a person's "spidey-sense" because they perceive someone of a different skin color to be "out of place" subconsciously, which makes them keener to look for reasons to stop at a conscious level. This is to say nothing of people who know they're racist and don't care; I'm thinking specifically of people who haven't been trained in unconscious bias yet.
As the officer, you're not even likely to notice you're doing it. As a person of the "wrong skin color" driving through a high-rent neighborhood, you'll start to notice real fast that your commute is disrupted all the damn time.
My personal story: I'm white, but I used to drive a beater with crappy temperature control and was taking a new route home late at night while wearing a stocking cap. Got pulled over for ostensibly making a left on red (on a deserted road in the middle of the night, when I'm pretty confident the light was green). If the officer's real reason for pulling me over is that I looked like I was casing the neighborhood for a place to rob, I don't really blame him; I was dressed like one of the Wet Bandits from Home Alone. ;)
A "spidey sense" is not a legal basis for anything, so indulging such a sense implicitly involves some degree of fabrication of "objective" causes.
Be that as it may, the "spidey sense" excuse could and should hold at least some water with most people, if they trust the intentions of the police. But I grew up with harassment by the NYPD and then small-time police in the Hudson Valley, and saw non-white friends and bystanders (I'm white) get it ten times worse. Surely, this applies to many in the US.
In the few experiences I've had where police help was legitimately needed, I was met with bored annoyed "what can we do?" apathy. So, forgive me if I respectfully doubt that any significant number of street-level police cultivate some intuitive sense for crime, when routine profiling, harassment, and fabrication (much easier modes of operating) seem to be standard practice.
American relations with law-enforcement are about as low-trust as it gets in a 1st world country, that's the unfortunate reality, which will take decades to turn around, if ever.
On the flip side, a couple years earlier, when I had just moved to the Bay area in 1995 (from Vancouver,BC ) I had gotten a bit lost with friends, and had slowed down, and were stopping at various intersections in East Palo Alto trying to get our bearing. (I just realized - this is something anybody who grows up with GPS enabled smartphones will never have to do) A police office pulled us over to find out what we were doing, and then suggested (once again, really nicely), that we probably shouldn't be stopping in this neighborhood at that time of night (East Palo Alto, unbeknownst to us, was a very high-crime area in 1995)
I guess my point is - Police pull people over when their spidey sense goes off all the time. And it can be all sorts of things that will trigger it. I guess I'm blessed with white skin, but the many interactions I've had with police in which they've engaged me because whatever it was I was doing seemed sketchy at the time, always ended up well. Though, honestly - they've got guns, so I've also been pretty sensitive to the fact that if I made them nervous they might shoot me.