In another case of no black person is safe doing anything anywhere, Martese Johnson, a black student at the University of Virginia, was thrown to the ground and beaten in public by law enforcement because he tried to use a fake ID. Onlookers filmed the incident and noted that Johnson did not try to resist arrest.
.Graduate student Maya Hislop told [Jezebel], “Black students on grounds are highly familiar with this kind of abuse (denied access to places, checking IDs of black students and not checking IDs of white students), but I do not know that it has ever been this violent.
Ever hear of this kind of treatment of a cute white girl trying to get into a club? Yeah, we didn’t think so. Students are outraged and have been protesting and speaking out on campus.
Team Blackness also discussed an update to the strange San Diego case of a gang conspiracy law, where gang members can be charged with a crime even if they weren’t involved but somehow indirectly benefited from it in some way.
Subscribe on iTunes | Subscribe On Stitcher | Direct Download | RSS
Brachiator
This may have been ABC (Alcoholic Beverage Control) officers, not the police. And apparently, when these dopes are in a particularly goonish mood, they will go after sorority girls as well:
“A University of Virginia student had just bought some bottled water, cookie dough and ice cream for a sorority fundraiser when a group of people in plainclothes approached her car. One person jumped on her hood, another pulled a gun on her, and the student, logically, began trying to drive her car as fast as she could out of the parking lot.
Unfortunately for the student, the people attacking her car were state Alcoholic Beverage Control officers, who mistook her purchase of LaCroix sparkling water for a 12-pack of beer.”
Ridnik Chrome
The Post So Good, They Posted It Thrice…
Another Holocene Human
When Gainesville decided to start enforcing the law about not serving alcohol to under 21’s and the police actually showed up at frat hangout Swamp Restaurant and were all no-legit-ID, no-beer-ee, the howls of outrage could be heard for miles around.
How DARE they. Did those officers KNOW WHO THEY WERE?
Another Holocene Human
@Brachiator: That’s completely fucked up.
My brother got jumped on by a bunch of county cops (it was in Mass so county cops is a big fat joke) but at least they were in uniform, so he stayed calm. They were SURE he had cocaine on him because he’d been hanging out with his stupid coke dealer friend, but all he had in the bag was beer … which … in MA … is not illegal to POSESS.
It goes without saying, my brother is white.
The Moar You Know
Three posts?
Dude, what is your malfunction?
Steppan
Yes, these were ABC officers.
http://www.dailyprogress.com/news/local/uva-student-martese-johnson-bloodied-during-arrest-by-abc-agents/article_cd981c10-cda5-11e4-a80b-93db28a3b7b2.html
Couldn't Stand the Weather
So tired of this shit. Even cops around here weren’t that bad.
Back in the day, the cops just told you to pour it out if you had booze in public. Or, in the case of the college kids, the police confiscated the fake ID.
Paul in KY
A triple post today! haven’t seen one of them in a while.
spudvol
Three threads enter, only one thread leaves.
Villago Delenda Est
But…but….John Roberts has ASSURED me that we’re living in post-racial America!
Bobby B.
Triple posting is what it takes to get police state incidents noticed around here.(he said, wiping cheeseburger off his chin).
NonyNony
@Brachiator:
Wait – Alcoholic Beverage Control officers are not police but they carry guns? That they can pull on people for suspicion of buying alcohol while underage?
And I thought my undergrad campus had some screwy alcohol stances. I can’t think of anyone ever getting a gun pulled on them because of the suspicion that they might be carrying a six pack.
Rex Tremendae
I liked the middle post the best.
Another Holocene Human
@Couldn’t Stand the Weather: Some towns have terrible student-resident relations. A white friend of mine got tossed in the drunk tank when he went to college in Ohio. He had been imbibing (or was high, I wasn’t there and I don’t remember the details) and basically decided that he loved everything and wanted to take a big old walk. So he got arrested for walking under the influence.
He found jail really traumatizing, probably didn’t help that he was intoxicated at the time. He’s on the trans* spectrum, so that didn’t help.
Another Holocene Human
@NonyNony: This is why sales should be banned but not possession. The onus is on the retailer. MA liquor retailers can be reeeeeeeeal snippy with you, and it’s not just Yankee ‘tude.
Another Holocene Human
@The Moar You Know: It’s FYWP. I’m on the first post of three and there IS no “next post”. I reloaded it and I see the dupes at the bottom of this page.
This is FYWP’s doing, and none other.
NonyNony
@Another Holocene Human:
I’m gonna guess Kent or Athens.
It might be Bowling Green, but of all the college towns in Ohio I think Kent hates its student population the most followed by Athens.
Cacti
Meanwhile, in Arizona, a violent ex-felon neo nazi went on a shooting spree, killing 1 and injuring 5, and carjacked a high school teacher in the process.
But somehow, police were able to bring him in alive and subdued him with a taser.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Couldn’t Stand the Weather:
A bouncer at a bar tried to have a cop confiscate my (white) friend’s “fake ID,” which freaked her the hell out because it was her real, genuine out of state drivers license (from Michigan). Luckily the cop was able to verify it was a real DL, but the bouncer still wouldn’t let her in
Oh, did I mention she was with a male Asian-American friend of ours, who was also refused admission? Yeah, it was way too obvious what the real reason was for not letting them in.
Tenar Darell
@NonyNony: I can’t find it right now, but wasn’t there a town where the Animal Control officers were armed with guns? (It was a big deal because there was a major grift going on).
Couldn't Stand the Weather
@Another Holocene Human:
These people you speak of hate college kids that bad?
Thing is, the schools in question aren’t going anywhere. The universities aren’t gonna bolt if the football team doesn’t get a new stadium. So, the residents are stuck with the kids, like it or not.
I’ve seen plenty of stupid shit with alcohol and undergrads, but not like this beatdown at UVA.
Waldo
@Cacti: I was more surprised by this IOKIYW story than by those of Cliven Bundy or the drunk Open Carry standoff dude. This guy wasn’t simply a potential threat — he was in the middle of a shooting spree! Can’t believe the cops felt safe enough to get within taser range, but there you have it.
jl
I have to admit that I have seen the differential treatment students of many colors get from various cops who patrol around campuses in Southern California back in the late 80s and early 90s. Somehow if you weren’t white, it was very suspicious that you would be walking around a college campus.
Who got hassled depended on what was the color under most suspicion in the area. in OC it was SE Asians where they were a large working class and poor population. In LA it as blacks.
As a white guy, I would like to say it was ‘understandable statistical discrimination’, except I remember one particularly noxious campus cop who had a regular beat and new damn well who the African-American and African students who were in student housing. He routinely hassled and ID’d them anyway. After a couple of times the black students got, let us say, a little miffed about it. The more mature ones tried to build a relationship with this (IMHO) very bad campus cop, but it made no difference.
I happened by a particularly ugly confrontation and vouched for the black student, whom I knew well, and had what I thought were a few respectful and polite words with the cop, and I got on his shit list. The miserable cop later had an excuse to draw a gun on me over a minor problem with a computer lab reservation, and threatened to have me expelled. Real nice a hole, this cop.
Another Holocene Human
@Cacti: Isolated incident! Mental illness! Benghazi!!!!
Tenar Darell
@jl: You got a gun drawn on you by a campus cop because of a computer reservation. Whoah. Was he finally fired then?
jl
@jl: It was these repeated and pointless hassles by cops that prompted a couple of older African students, and few instructors, to tell me that in some ways race relations in the US were more stressful and dangerous than in South Africa. Several of them had gone to So Africa to work or study. They said you had your internal passbook in order and acted and dressed respectably, you at least knew what to expect. In the US, you never knew what to expect, no matter what you did.
Another Holocene Human
@jl: When I was in college I had a friend who dressed “old” and carried a briefcase. Even though he had no actual right to be there* the Harvard cops paid him absolutely no mind as he strolled around the Yaaahd with impunity.
Meanwhile, a few streets over, actual Professor, not cosplayer, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was foolish enough to return from a trip….
*-Harvard opts out of most of the intercollegiate sharing and stuff, unless you go to MIT, then it’s all good–needless to say I went to one of the “peasant” schools in the area
Mandalay
@Another Holocene Human:
Not quite. It is a combination of two issues, and both must be present for multiple posts to appear:
– A malfunctioning mouse, which may incorrectly submit the same form multiple times in very rapid succession when clicked.
– Submission to the godawful WP, which does not detect the multiple submissions due to the very short time window of the submissions.
Ever wonder why this OP is the only one who creates multiple OPs? It’s because he has a FUBAR mouse. If he changes his mouse the problem will go away. How do I know this? Because I used to unintentionally post double/triple posts all the time, and when I changed my mouse the problem disappeared. Try submitting a post twice, and you won’t be able to reproduce the problem. WP will detect that you have already posted, because you cannot manually submit the same post twice quickly enough to fool WP. But a FUBAR mouse can.
Of course WP should still detect the problem, and you can wait for them to fix the problem, but that will happen when Herman Cain becomes our next president.
Another Holocene Human
@jl: Is that fucked or what? At UF this dirty cop who’d been constructively fired (but allowed to resign) from the city police department only a few months earlier shot a disabled African grad student in the face on a fucking welfare check.
Give a sadist a little bit of power…
jl
@Tenar Darell: I filed a complaint. By the time it was clear the campus was not going to do anything, and let me know I had better not make any trouble over it unless I was prepared for deal with major BS, i had calmed down and decided it was better to drop it and graduate with no unnecessary hassles. All I had left was to file my dissertation. Wasn’t worth it.
The Moar You Know
@Another Holocene Human: Mine was quite interesting. Northern California. Both a college town and tourist trap.
Townies HATED the students and tourists.
Cops just routinely robbed the tourists of their recreational drugs during the summer and then sold them to the students in the fall. Cops liked the students. The beatings were reserved for the townies and local Mexicans, and were dished out often and brutally.
The local ABC ignored the few “student” bars and two local “student” liquor stores and went after the others with a vengeance.
Took seven years for me to finally be accepted by the locals. That was unusual, in that it happened at all.
I would probably not live in a college town again. The students have enough numbers to politically hijack the town’s governance, and although in my case I agreed with the outcome, it wasn’t my town or my decision to make. If I’d been a local from day one I’d have been pissed.
MomSense
I swear some of these cops act like they are defending the homeland from ISIS the way they treat minor situations.
jl
What was really obnoxious about two major and very well known campuses I had dealings with (student at one, worked at another) was, that if you were a well known white frat house, you could do pretty much anything, including petty crime and creating almost constant nuisances. Cops did not give a damn, an in one case I remember, hassled people who complained.
Edit: Living in Southern California radicalized me wrt to racism and classism in US. I remember very well the different treatments I received from different types of cops, as my class status and ability to appear in the accepted mode changed. A lot of places in Southern California pretty ugly wrt to community relations with police.
Tommy
I guess I don’t know much but it would seem to me the #1 job of a police officers would be to de-escalate the situation.
Rick Taylor
@Ridnik Chrome:
“The Post So Good, They Posted It Thrice…”
Just the place for a snark! I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.”
Mike in NC
Walking around while black is a misdemeanor in many parts of the country, but a felony in others. Best to check your local regulations.
Pogonip
@Paul in KY: Does that mean Elon wins the trifecta?
The Moar You Know
@Tommy: Pulling your service weapon and blindly discharging it in every direction can actually do that.
jl
@Tommy:
Yes, it would seem so. I did some reading on the history of modern policing a few days ago on Wikipedia.
Looks like the issue of ‘militarization of policing’ has a long history. Sir Robert Peel the UK Conservative politician who the wiki articles said founded the modern Anglo policing system was very concerned about separating police from military.
This is an interesting article on Peel’s principles of civilian policing:
Peelian Principles
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_Principles
I think an interesting exercise to go through them and do a compare and contrast with what has happened to policing in many places in the US. Not saying or course that policing in UK is anywhere near perfect or no racial problems there, or US could be same as UK (due to way more guns here), but it seems at least in the UK, they still try. I don’t have confidence that there is still much trying in many places in US.
Ferguson MO situation indicates a lot of places have gone back to what went on from ancient times to early modern era in Europe: police are just branch of military to keep population in line, and/or militarized and violent government tax collectors.
Tenar Darell
@jl: I’ve done that, with other things, but similar idea of “not worth it” decisions for my own sanity and self-protection. You absolutely did the right thing for you, I just wish you could have gotten that guy canned. Damn, if life were like the movies, that’s how this story would end, wouldn’t it?
Calouste
@Cacti:
Probably one of the police officers’ buddies.
elmo
@jl:
A lot of places in Southern California are pretty ugly wrt race relations as well. Tom Metzger was perfectly fine at home in Fallbrook (a San Diego suburb). A quick Google search of “El Cajon white supremacist” gives quite a few links, and my own hometown of Santee (“Klantee”) had a cross burning when I was a kid.
I’ve always said that if you want to see the modern KKK, you don’t go to Birmingham. Go to Bakersfield.
jl
here is the ninth Peelian Principle:
‘ To recognise always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them. ‘
Note that the plan for policing Los Angeles style originated by the old Board of Control disregarded (under a charitable interpretation) that one. Their priority was cheap policing compatible with low taxes: flying squads of police emerging from fortress stations, who bash and remove bad guys, the example of such actions keeping the population in line.
Another Holocene Human
@elmo: OC is full of unreconstructed slave state dead-enders, via OK or KS.
jl
@elmo: I may be biased, since have family near Bakersfield (including large wingnut contingent). But I can think of several places in Southern California worse than Bakersfield.
I remember getting questioned by Bakersfield PD a couple of times when I was doing field picking to earn some quick cash in college. Was so tanned, and looked like farm worker that twice they started the questioning in Spanish, but realized their mistake when they could tell I was obviously not a native Spanish speaker.
Man, I got treated with much more courtesy by Bakersfield PD, than I did as a white guy by LAPD. But maybe i was lucky.
raven
@Calouste: Yea, they barely touched him.
Another Holocene Human
And we’re not just talking the mountain-men-are-always-free whites who lived in slave states but didn’t participate in the plantation economy. In my own family history there is this Welsh/German guy who was a planter in Virginia but gradually moved west until he ended up in KS, minus slaves. My mom chose to believe it was manumission. Yeah, right.
SatanicPanic
@jl: I’ve lived almost all my life in SoCal and I gotta say, there’s really no picking on most racist spot, but I had to, I’d guess it’s somewhere very wealthy, like San Marino or Newport Beach. Not that I know from experience because I don’t go to those places, I’m just guessing.
elmo
@jl: Oh, I don’t really mean to single out Bakersfield in particular as being worse than (for example) Lakeside or Santee. But for people unfamiliar with Southern California, the alliteration works. And Easterners are invariably shocked when I tell them there was a cross-burning in my Southern California hometown in the 1970’s.
I met exactly two Black people before going off to college. One was my fourth-grade teacher, and she didn’t live in the area. The other was a boy in my own grade – the only Black student in the entire school district.
Ella in New Mexico
Something this incident highlights, in addition to what is becoming increasingly more accepted thug-like assaults on citizens by overzealous police officers, is the need to rethink why we have 21 as the legal age to drink alcohol in this country.
The majority of us with teens and young adults grew up in an era when 18 or 19 were common drinking ages. Yes, you could be arrested for doing something bad while drunk but simply for using alcohol? No, you were not a criminal for drinking some Boone’s Farm with your friends in your dorm.
I see absolutely NO change in behaviors–18-20 year olds nationwide still drink. The difference is we now have a whole industry that benefits from having turned otherwise law abiding, legal adults into infanticized criminals.
No stupid arbitrary 21 year-old drinking law = no need for fining a 20 year-old $300 bucks and sending them to mandatory substance abuse classes for having a Mike’s Hard Lemonade at a backyard party. Oh, and no right or reason to justify grabbing a “mouthy” black kid and shoving his face into the sidewalk just to teach him a lesson by a Virginia ABC rent-a-cop.
Brachiator
@Another Holocene Human:
This is part of a long, somewhat dishonorable history, and not just in the US.
When I was a college freshman, the drinking age in the state was 21. But not only was wine served in campus dining rooms on special occasions, students could have liquor delivered to their dorms and could buy it outright at stores near the campus. This added to town/gown tensions, but not quite like the old days when there were pitched battles in the streets.
“One of the most famous was the Battle of St. Scholastica Day, which occurred on February 10, 1355, at the University of Oxford. An argument in a tavern – a familiar scenario – escalated into a protracted two-day battle in which local citizens armed with bows attacked the academic village, killing and maiming scores of scholars.”
jl
Just to show I am fair minded, sometimes I do feel sorry for the police and allied policing forces.They have a hard job.
I remember working on a relatives farm near Fresno once. Saw a couple of farmworkers race out of orchard across small field I was irrigating. They sloshed around a few steps and then jumped onto a check levee and raced across RR tracks into another orchard.
Fat border control guy comes lumbering out of the first orchard and sloshes into my field, so huffed he just stops and bends over gasping. I thought he might be having a damn heart attack or he was going to puke. He get his breath, and walks back where he came from. Sees me, yells to himself and me “Aw shit!”.
Violet
@Ella in New Mexico: 18 year olds are theoretically mature enough to vote, join the military, own guns, drive cars, get married, but not mature enough to drink alcohol.
kc
@Another Holocene Human:
What? I thought cops never jumped white guys.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@jl:
Okay, I have to ask because I was going to college in LA during the riots: USC, UCLA, or both? Despite their reputation, USC has usually had pretty good relations with their neighborhood.
jl
@elmo: Thing about Southern California that really grates me is the ignorant, self-satisfied bigotry down there, among whites who have grown in cloistered white suburbs. When I went down there I heard what was to me, shocking bigotry against blacks and Hispanics. They assumed that I was really naive and hand never had any contact with those people, since I came from the supposedly white and conservative Central Valley.
I patiently explained to them that I had worked with all black crews bucking hay, and totally mixed up crews of Hispanics, Sikhs, blacks and Okies picking grapes, working almonds and walnuts and truck farms and whatever.
So, then they said ‘Well, OK, its a cultural thing down here not a race thing.’ And there was sliver of truth to that, wrt to inner city crime, maybe. But, they talked bigoted all the time, had very stereotypical attitudes towards what the average black or Hispanic person was like. Bigotry is bigotry. Even if there was a sliver of truth about how in some places inner city criminal gangs were a valid concern, they were very unwilling to discuss their own attitudes. Which, in my view, were very stereotypical and ignorant and bigoted. Including, the reality of getting by from day to day while dirt poor.
Roger Moore
@SatanicPanic:
I would guess Newport Beach before San Marino. San Marino is now majority Asian-American, which tends to have a substantial effect on those things. That said, the worst racism might be in one of the neighborhoods where there are conflicts between black and Latino gangs; I’ve heard about some really vicious racist attacks on blacks in the poorer parts of Azusa.
kc
No, but here’s a story of a white lady who got brutalized by a cop while she was trying to get out of a club.
gene108
Would it be different than using RICO statutes to prosecute the mob?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeer_Influenced_and_Corrupt_Organizations_Act
elmo
@jl:
Yep. And the areas I’m talking about are very much blue-collar, working-class and working poor areas. But very, very white.
moderateindy
To be fair, I’m sure the kid deserved it. He probably was wearing saggy pants, and at some point had listened to the hippity-hop rap music which we all know turns respectable white guys into racists. So we can only imagine what it does to those thugs. Plus, I’m sure he was uppity, they all are now that the Socialist Kenyan tyrant is destroying our country.
Tommy
I am a white dude. Often in a Brooks Brother suit or slacks and a polo shirt. There have been a handful of times I have had interaction with police when I was doing something I shouldn’t have been doing. I always got a free pass. Nothing ever happened to me. I can’t even wrap my mind around what would have happened if my skin color was darker.
PaulW
This is not good: FBI investigating black man’s body found hanging in Mississippi.
kc
@Brachiator:
I’m starting to think all law enforcement officers should be routinely tested for steroids.
Ella in New Mexico
@Violet: Exactly. Absolutely NO real, statistically supported positive impacts can be supported since the 21 year-old drinking age was passed. We do have evidence that it just drove kids to do less safe things and even to an increase in alcohol poisonings. All we have done is create a whole class of criminals to make money off of and who now carry “criminal records” for life. Take a look at your town and how it deals with these “scofflaws”. Here, they either cite them or arrest them and send them to court where they are fined several hundred dollars and forced to complete a “Substance Abuse Program” that costs them in addition to their fine. If they fail to do that, they are further fined or even jailed. More importantly, the courts receive big money from state and federal sources to run these “counseling and education” programs, and what they don’t use to pay their two social workers they use to pay their all their other bills. To the tune of tens of thousands of dollars above the cost of the program, just in my small city alone.
What’s great about it? THE JOBS. It’s essentially a self sustaining jobs program for the cops and the people who run the court system and the classes. As for what it does to help the citizens, not much. Just another intrusion into our freedoms.
Kinda like how in Ferguson a huge number of tickets started being issued for “walking in the street”–like really? What if we just make that a national trend–start ticketing everyone who dared to walk off the sidewalk in their own neighborhoods? Instant criminals = instant revenue. Which is what the 21y/o drinking age is all about.
jl
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): Well, those are two well known schools and they do have big frat rows. As I mentioned before in comments, I got stuck on USC campus during Rodney King riots. I believe that the community relations are good, since before the national guard came in, it was local blacks and Hispanics patrolling the neighborhood. You would see pickups with four of five standing in the truck bed holding shotguns and similar, yelling out the news and advice to students and locals as they drove by.
I remember standing on east side of Vermont among a crowd of USC students also stuck on campus. Local rioters on the other side yelled to us that they were going to light up the stores on the west side in an hour, so if we wanted anything we should come over now and get what we wanted. Also remember walking into a local convenience store after riots were over to look for something to drink, and owner told some white frats to get out and never come back. After they left he started yelling about how he saw frats were doing most of the looting on security cams.
Looks like by the time the rioting got as far north as USC, very little racial animosity between locals and anyone connected with USC. At least I saw not one instance.
I saw ugly bigoted policing at two large well known SoCal campuses.
scav
@gene108: From the little I heard yesterday, the Rico stuff at least requires a pre-existing acts of racketeering and limits the type of relationships to the enterprise that are relevant. This new stuff seems to have gone all fluid in terms of the benefit (can just be in terms of personal prestige) and the types of relationships seem to stretched temporally etc, rather like the guilt by attending the same mosque as a suspected bad guy.
rikyrah
Tara Dowdell @MsTaraDowdell
RT @LinseyDavis #MarteseJohnson roommate says he does not own a fake ID and that he was not intoxicated, blew .02 he says
jl
@jl: I also talked with a friend, a USC instructor from Africa who lived hear campus, and his wingnut gun nut apartment manager. Manager gave my friend one of his pistols and they both went on armed walking tours of the riot south of USC. I heard some interesting stories from them. They said except for some USC campus cops, community relations were very good.
Tommy
@Ella in New Mexico:
I am a walker. Live in a small town so it is easy for me to walk almost everywhere. I jaywalk or walk in the street daily, since much of my town doesn’t have sidewalks. Never once stopped by the police much less ticketed or taken to jail. The police when they see me doing those things just wave at me.
ruemara
@PaulW: I’m sure it will be discovered that it was a suicide. No matter how many people were involved.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@ruemara: That’s why the FBI is investigating.
ruemara
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: I retain my initial judgement until something different happens.
Another Holocene Human
OMG, Elon slipped and fell in a puddle of
SIMPLESPECIAL CONOR! I could hear ABL’s eyes rolling RIGHT THROUGH MY COMPUTER SPEAKER. Damn!Another Holocene Human
@Ella in New Mexico: They should be able to serve beer and wine with standardized alcohol content to 18-20 yo in bars and restaurants, and make sure that, like in the northeast, bartenders have the right and responsibility to cut people off when they get drunk.
And FUND PUBLIC TRANSIT. Oh, and stop making it fucking impossible for cabs to operate in the bar area. That is so … stupid …. There isn’t even a word for how awful that is.
Another Holocene Human
@gene108: Time for RICO prosecutions of the Catholic Church.
Time to prosecute the Skverers while we’re at it. We can start with arson and move on from there.
Another Holocene Human
Isn’t it funny (not) how white criminality is cool or amusing, like Moe the bartender in Simpsons running criminal schemes out of the back of his business, while black criminality is sinister and terrifying?
And on TV Black vernacular speech = criminal. Like an Oosaka accent on Tokyo TV. But a lot more harmful.
We are so fucking screwed.
Another Holocene Human
@kc: They jump on white guys who take mysterious packages out of cars owned by known cocaine dealers.
Like, they were right … [name redacted] was dealing coke. They were just too incompetent to actually bust him and justify all those local court fees and federal narc dollars that were spent on their salaries and to kit them up.
Cops stop and frisk whites … the difference is they are much less likely to s&f a random white person and the white guy they s&f is MUCH more likely to have contraband.
Another Holocene Human
Imani: Shut up, Conor.
*nods head*
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@jl:
Just making sure that I was not having overly rosy memories of the riots. ;-) I headed off to Culver City while my two roommates at the time headed towards the rioting — they were both from South LA and went home to help protect their families’ houses.
It was pretty bizarre to be driving back to my on-campus apartment after the worst of it was over and seeing the windows and windshields of the cars parked on Jefferson all smashed … but the campus was untouched.
Of course, all those kids are truly spoiled now — they can go to the big Ralph’s or Smart & Final supermarkets on Vermont and not be stuck with the 32 Market like we were. Luxury!
fleeting expletive
I’m going to OT here big time. Last night I must have stumbled or collapsed in my kitchen. Yes there was vodka involved. I was attempting to empty a dirty paper plate with a banana peel on it in my trash can and this morning I found my glasses broken next to the overturned trash can.
Before I was officially awake this morning I became aware that my eye hurt The mirror tells me I have a crusty bloody gash from just under my right lower eyelid, crosswise to close to my eyebrow. I don’t think I hit my actual eyeball, but I cant see/ naught but a hazy blur in a true color circle. It is sore but not awful.
I had intraocular implants about ten years ago. I could have smushed that plastic lens but that would be more painful. I think maybe I jammed some vitreous fluid out of my eye for a while? True to being me, I woke up and assessed and thought this will pass in a few hours–all is well!! Denial.
There would be no chance for an ophthalmologist appointment for weeks, I think, so I’m planning on going to the ER tomorrow. I sure hope they don’t tell me you’re going to lose your eye.Although I could live with a glass eye I guess. Hope I can still drive all right. I am the proverbial little ole lady who drives on Sunday at 20 miles an hour.
Probably should have gone today.
J R in WV
There was a cross burned next door back in the 1960s, when next dooe was my Grand dad’s place. I’m pretty sure they got mixed up and thought it was our house.
Long story, no real harm done past some black grass.
More politics than racism, probably. Although you never know with racist bigots, no rational thought process sometimes.
AxelFoley
@Violet:
Yeah, I never got that. You can die for your country at 18, but you can’t drink until you’re 21?
Paul in KY
@Pogonip: Nobody does a triple post with Elon’s flair. A win I say!