“There is nothing you can tell the cop at the time of the incident that would prevent you from being arrested.”
Not quite true in this case, since it was in Chicago. The cop himself acknowledges that when he says, if he had known it was a firefighter on his way to work, he would have done everything he could to prevent him from being arrested, even at the risk of his own job. That’s the way it works here. If you can tell the cop, for example, “My dad is a Chicago cop”, or “I work for Alderman XXXX”, etc, then that actually may prevent you from getting arrested in this fair town.