American cops were threatening all the time, and I'm an older white male with an educated accent, short haired, who wears jackets. I can't imagine what they must be like for a young Black guy.

It took me a long time to get over this - and I was never scared of cops in the US, but I would never challenge their authority.

I was walking through a train station in Amsterdam and a cop was leaning on one of the barriers. In exactly that situation in NYC, I'd tried to go through and been told, "Go around!" as an order.

I asked the cop in Dutch if I could go through and he teased me about my Dutch in Dutch - "Je kunt als je kunt!", "You can if you can!"

In Dutch and German at least, "can" is reserved entirely for "the ability to do something", and there are other verbs for "Do I have permission to do something?" So he was both correcting my Dutch and saying, "You don't need my permission!", in a funny way.

I realized, right, these are just professional guys doing their job.

The idea that their uniforms puts them on a different power level to me, a law-abiding citizen, is basically alien to them, whereas this is mother's milk to US cops - even the good ones!