"It seems that we are being boarded." Dianna said. I was assuming that the bus had stopped because the electrical wires and the big arms that reach up from the top of the bus had lost their connection to each other.
But two uniformed Seattle Police Department* officers boarded the bus, just as Dianna had warned.
"Yeah, there are two," the driver told the cops in a low, but-not-so-low-that-the-whole-bus-didn't-hear-him voice, and walked them to one young black man and one asian kid, maybe, though I seriously doubt it, maybe 18 years old.
"Can I see your transfer?" one of the Men In Blue asked. The first man took out his transfer instantly, with a bit of a smirk.
He asked the same question of the asian kid. He looked through his bag unable to find it.
"I can't find it."
"Either pay or get off!" one of the cops demanded.
So kid asked around, "Can I borrow 50 cents?"
A guy behind him, as baffled at the absurdity of what was going on as anyone else on the bus, offered him a dollar.
"No, I only need 50 cents."
The guy behind the kid offered the dollar again, and again the kid refused. He wasn't going to give the city a penny more than it deserved.
Someone else dug the half-dollar youth-fair out of his pocket and handed it to the kid.

The first man, the one who was quick to offer his transfer seemed amused.
"That shit was fucking racial profiling!" which it clearly was. Though he and the people around him were laughing. There was a certain smugness at being able to instantly proove the bus driver and his henchmen to be the assholes in the situation.

The kid was much less happy about it all. He resented paying twice for the bus, and further resented the idea that two fucking cops were needed to get 50 cents from him because the bus driver wouldn't say, "I'm sorry, sir, I didn't see your transfer."

Dianna and I got off at the same stop as the kid and his friends. As they left one of them said to the driver, "thanks a lot Big Brother," making an apt, if uncomfortably obvious comment on the state of a world and a city in which a seventeen year old who has lost his transfer, or worse may not have the 50 cents to cover the ride from downtown to capital hill is seen as a threat requiring two large police officers.

*I think that it was SPD, though logic would sugest that it may have been the Metro Transit Police.