police

I thought if someone hadn't passed the Law of Gravity, we would all be floating around in space.

Trudee

When I heard the word "Interpol" for the first time, I figured out it was some very important organization chasing criminals, but I was sure the "pol" stood for "Poland", not "police". Since I'm Polish, I was beaming "See? The bad guys in America fear OUR police!"

Anon

I used to think that you would get arrested if you didn't swing your arms when you walked in public

Anon

As I constantly questioned authority when my parents told me that if I didn't buckle my seat belt in the car the police would write us a ticket.

I somehow came to believe that police officers had a device (which looked vaguely familiar to a gameboy) that they used to scan cars and it would tell them if a seat belt was unbuckled.

Until I was 9 I compulsively buckled all seat belts in the car, even when no one was sitting in that seat.

kay

When I was four years old my aunt and uncle stayed at our house while my parents were on a camping trip. One afternoon they were driving my cousin and I who were acting up in the back seat. My uncle turned his head around and told me that he was going to take me to the police station and give me the electric chair. I couldn’t understand why my aunt thought that was funny. Nevertheless, for most of my early childhood I believed every police station had an electric chair.

JR

When I was about 4 or 5, I was grocery shopping with my Mom, we were at the register putting the groceries on the "conveyor belt" and I noticed that my mom kept grouping the items she put up there in order, like all the frozen juices together, the tin can stuff in a group, the fruit together, the meat all together... I asked her why she was doing that and the CASHIER told me that if we DIDN'T group the foods together like that, the police would come and arrest us --- I believed her of course, and to this day I think about it EVERY SINGLE TIME I put my groceries up on the conveyor (with the items grouped PROPERLY, of course)!

Anon

Until i was about 6, i used to believe that when the police gave you a ticket, it was a ticket to the movies!

mari

Years ago the little tagd attached to pillows, etc which said "Do not remove under penalty of law" did not include the words "except by consumer. When my older sister wanted my younger siblings and I to do something, the would coerce us by saying that is we didn't do what she wanted, she was going to rip the tag off a pillow and call the police and say we did it

Anon

When I was in elementary school, my mom would always complain about the large amount of cops on the roads at the end of the month. She always said that they were "getting their quota in"....I thought she was saying "quarter" and for the longest time I thought cops got paid a quarter for every person they pulled over.

Mary

When I was little my dad was a really bad driver and loved to speed and run red lights with me in the car. Once he told me that getting a ticket from the police was actually a ticket to disney world. This prompted me to encourage him to speed, and break other laws of the road until he eventually got a ticket for zig-zagging across the road. The cop told him he was irresponsible for doing this with a child in the car. Then I asked the officer for the ticket so that we could go to disney. He looked at my dad with disgust.

Kathleen

I thought the law of gravity was an actual law passed by some government in the past and before that everything just floated around..

Absymbel

I thought the police didn't have to follow the law and could do whatever they want. My reasoning was they were the enforcers of the law so who would arrest them or whatever? I wondered why all the bad people didn't just become cops so they could do crimes with impunity.

Brainhead

When I was a kid I thought tasers make people too sleepy to do anything

Anon

Arguing with my friend Chris in Primary School, he told me his dad (who was a Policeman at the time) would come into school and arrest me.

My dad was a farmer. I - for some bizarre reason - retorted with the idea that my dad would run Chris over with a steamroller.

jez

when i was a kid, i believed the news far too literally. when the news reporter said "a man is helping police with their enquiries" i thought a nice bloke had gone to the police station on his day off, with notepad and pen, and said offered to carryout interviews.

Richie, Newcastle, Uk

I grew up in a very small town in Illinois. When my parents took me to Peoria (population about 150,000), I saw my first motorcycle police officer. His motorcycle was beautiful -- low-slung and white, with shining white saddlebags across the back. I just KNEW they contained ice cream.

Kate M.

I used to think whenever I heard the phrase "A man is helping police with their inquiries" on the news. That there was this really nice man driving around with the police helping them solve the case and find the criminals.

Alan Stewart

I had real trouble believing that the Police were human beings. They wore those pointy helmets, so it followed they had pointy heads. And they had Godlike powers, like being able to tell grownups what to do.

St Sauverais

When I was really young, I used to believe that the Speed Limit was actually called the Speed Lemon and I just thought that there was a lemon in the road that you couldn't drive across.

Kyle Shores

When my mom would buy pillows or lawn furniture, there would be a tag attached to it, saying "Do not remove, under penalty of law". I thought that if I tore it off, an alarm would go off at police headquarters, and they would come to my house and arrest me. One time I actually tore one off, then went to my room and sat on my bed, waiting for the police to show up.

Hawk