Were there asshats looting, and breaking the windows of small businesses, and setting things on fire? Yes. Sadly, many reports are that the people causing all the ruckus were not even from that neighborhood. It was people who were just opportunistic parasites.
This cauldron of pent up emotions suddenly erupted over the death of Freddie Gray...
Wrong.
Dead fucking wrong.
A cauldron is a large, metal, cooking apparatus. It holds a large quantity of fluid. You can't just strike a match and have the contents suddenly boil over the edges of the cauldron. No. That fire would have to be started. Tended to. Stoked. More fuel to the fire would have to be added over time to increase the volatility of the atoms of what ever was being heated.
So.. Maybe a culmination of events were the last pieces of the fuel. Freddie Gray's nearly being decapitated while in police custody. Coming a couple of weeks after Walter Scott was straight up murdered by a police officer. That came a week after a man was killed by a 73 year old Sheriff's Deputy wanting to taze a suspect who was running away, but grabbed his gun instead. Well, oops.
This all coming after the Ferguson SNAFU. SNAFU means "Situation Normal: All Fucked Up".
And it truly is just that. All fucked up.
I have mentioned the "salt of the Earth types" I work with. Basically rednecks, all of a different degree or hue. And we discussed the situation in Baltimore. They said I wanted to blame "society" for all the things that happened. They maintained that Freddie Gray made his "choice".
I did point out the economic hardships that have plagued Baltimore for decades, the manufacturing bust of the region as those jobs were shipped overseas, education failings of the inner cities, drug culture being almost allowed as long as it doesn't cross certain invisible boundaries, abject poverty, homelessness, minimum wage jobs that do not let a person live... But yeah... He made a "choice".
The Walter Scott murder would have been another "gotten away with it" if it wasn't for the passerby recording the whole thing on his cellphone camera. The cop on his radio states "Shots fired. Suspect is down. He went for my tazer." Which he didn't. The tazer in question was placed next to the handcuffed corpse of Scott. It was moved closer to the handcuffed corpse by another officer. Brothers in blue, indeed. The FIFTY ONE year old man ran from a police officer and the officer fired at him EIGHT times.
In Tulsa, an old bastard, who reads like a man who read one too many Louis L' amour novels, and probably can only get an erection if there is a picture of John Wayne in his line of sight... Well, this old bastard greased the right palms, made the right contributions and donations, and Lo' And Behold... Sheriff's Deputy! At 73...
I have hung around old people. I worked at two old folks homes during, and a little after, high school. And these were not the "Retirement Communities"... No, these were Death's Doorstep Type Places. A lot of old people are racist as all hell. You tell yourself, they "don't know any better" and it "was a different time". You just wince and carry on. And hope to any fucking higher power that no one gives them a fucking badge and a fucking gun.
Or gives them too many options like A) Gun. B) Tazer. Hmm... Choices choices...
"OH, BUT SIR!!! In all those cases those people broke the law and made the choice to run or resist! They were criminals!!!"
True. My commute in the mornings is 1.5 miles. By the time I hit my desk at work, I have committed at least 5 crimes. It is pretty much the same with a vast majority of the population. If stopped, I would probably not run... More on that at the conclusion.
The point being, fleeing arrest, running, and stealing cigarettes SHOULD NOT BE CAPITAL CRIMES. THEY SHOULD NOT WARRANT A DEATH SENTENCE. This being the part where the title makes sense... "Look it up", as my Dad was fond of saying.
In Federal law, there are 41, just 41, capital crimes... States with the idiotic death penalty would probably be somewhere around the same number. The exception more than likely being Texas, where the
With the surplus of military weaponry being flooded into municipalities, some 4.7 BILLION dollars, why are there not more non-lethal options?
If cops are in "fear for their lives" so much... Maybe we need some cops with bigger balls? The ones I continually keep hearing about seem to remind me of Jimbo and Ned from "South Park".
If a suspect is running "away"... How does that equate "fear for your life"? Again with the title.
I think the people who are running are in fear for THEIR lives from those who advertise that they are there to "Protect and Serve". And maybe they heard that one nifty statistic, that in the last 5 years or so, you were 50 times more likely to be killed by a cop than you were a terrorist.
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"You can truly grieve for every officer who's been lost in the line of duty in the country, and still be troubled by cases of police overreach. The two ideas are NOT mutually exclusive. You can have great regard for law enforcement and still want them to be held to a higher standard."
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I will be recording though,
d
This blog brought to you by silence. It was not fun to write. But I wanted to get this out of my head. So many reports and time has been given to this sort of stuff... It is difficult to express without "quasi-plagiarizing", so I have linked and cited for the most part... Ugh... Just sucks.
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