Man, I was sick of Yackety Sax a few decades ago, but the Internet lately has renewed my hatred with a vengeance.
So is it just me, or is the only thing NOT disrupted by the police fence the skateboard race?
I’m not sure exactly what the boys in blue are trying to do there. Did they actually think that net thing was going to stop any significant portion of the skaters?
Maybe it’s just me but it doesn’t look like they were trying to stop them as much as trying to divert them when there was cross-traffic.
I can’t believe they have the resources to commit to this. Isn’t the NYPD supposed to be hunting down Banksy per Bloomberg’s orders?
Looked to me, like they were trying to help the skaters by blocking the cars getting in the way.
Yes, yes they did.
In other news, stop and frisk was down 36% during the race.
Disappointed nobody just straight ollied over the orange fence.
It’s clear to me that they aren’t trying to stop it, just shape the direction. It looks pretty reasonable to be honest.
Also, it is time for a 10,000 year moratorium on that song.
You’re missing the action off to the left where a machine gun crew is mowing down the street surfers.
Looks like fun… but after the biker road rage incident a few weeks ago I don’t think I’d want to participate or be around this event.
When I saw this posted elsewhere, some commenters pointed out that this was not an effort to “catch” skaters in the net, but to divert them off of Broadway, and also possibly toward cops off to the right waiting to arrest them. Notice how the only person they actually stop in the video is someone who doesn’t turn right, and instead walks around.
In terms of the police disrupting traffic here, notice how they move back and forth between streets; they’re only blocking streets while lights are red. The skaters in this race appear to have universally ignored traffic laws, especially lights, and so the only people this should have really disrupted were the skaters. Of course, as seen in the video, the solution appeared to have been to skate on in the middle of the other side, against traffic, and still run red lights.
It’s honestly a bit odd why so many people seem to support this race; it’s dangerous to the skaters and others, and disruptive, and it feels like these are actually some of the major draws. From videos of some of the participants, it feels like the general view was that traffic laws, police, cars, and right of way could be entirely ignored, and pedestrians could be run down with impunity as long as the skater shouted “I’m not stopping!” first.
There were cars and wagons on the side streets to ticket and arrest the skaters. They did this at multiple intersections. They got mostly out of towners and dumb kids. Everyone else had the sense not to get corralled.
NYPD - 40ish (arrests and citations)
Skaters - 2000ish
What’s worse is there’s a similar thing planned for this weekend and it’s going to be even bigger - about 45,000 hooligans are coming to NYC from all over just to flout traffic laws and shut major roads down. Vehicular and even pedestrian traffic will be totally disrupted and there’s really not even a point to it - the only reason these kids want to do it seems to be that they like being in a pack going down the middle of the street, and running red lights. If they were really in it just for the sport, they’d just use a track to run their 26.2 miles.
Thank you for sharing your views and giving us reasonable suspicion to believe you might be a criminal, we will work on finding you.
(Speaking only for myself) I can’t claim to have carefully modeled the likelihoods of what injuries occurring from this event, but I support the spirit of this because – speaking bluntly – the notion of a nanny police state telling everyone that things are dangerous has become a runaway train. I love the resilience of the human spirit that I see the participants of this race showing. They’re not hooligans, they’re not fire-bombing things, they just want to have some fun for half an hour on their skateboards. I love that they didn’t let big brother stop them.
I give the the tri-corner hat of understatement award for the week.
Like herding cats
