It's not all bad

general topics
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I know how easy it is to get down and feel hopeless, especially with so many high-publicity police related killings.

But there’s something a little poisonous about just attacking and being angry without having something to aspire to…without having somewhere we want to go.

So, that in mind. Anybody have any GOOD interactions between authority figures and minorities? Ones that you just can’t help but smile at? We can still be angry, but we also need to dream, don’t we?

I’ll go first.

That’s how you do it, right?

Edit: Here’s the summary of the video (it’s really nifty!)

A police officer has defused a confrontation between teenagers in Washington DC not by force, but by dance.

Police broke up a group of fighting teenagers on Monday (local time), asking them to clear out of the area.

Instead of leaving, according to the Washington Post, 17-year-old Aaliyah Taylor approached a female officer while playing the hit song Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae) on her phone and doing her version of the signature shoulder-swaying dance.

Rather than responding with force, the officer laughed and said she had better dance moves than that, Ms Taylor told the Washington Post.

“Instead of us fighting, she tried to turn it around and make it something fun,” Ms Taylor said.

"I never expected cops to be that cool. There are some good cops.

"I mostly hold my head down when I dance, so I didn’t really see her.

“But when I looked at the video after, I was like ‘Oh, she has some moves’.”

By the time the resulting dance-off was over — with both sides reportedly claiming victory — the tension had lifted.

President Barack Obama singled out the dance-off as a model for police looking to build relationships with neighbourhoods — a pressing issue as outrage at police brutality has grown in the past year.

“Who knew community policing could involve the Nae Nae? Great example of police having fun while keeping us safe,” he tweeted.

Washington Police chief Cathy Lanier said the dance-off was no exception.

“Engaging with residents thru dance is part of our dedicated community policing effort in the nation’s capital,” she tweeted.

Mayor Muriel Bowser also praised the move, posting on Facebook that “DC has innovative ways to keep our community #saferstronger”.

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Here’s one from up in Canada:

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That’s awesome!

Ha, and the kid getting the ticket at the bottom is hilariously adorable!

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And we have lots of allies in the force too!

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Bookmarking this post to come back to later; I’ve got a story to share, but I seriously need to log off, go get my ass dressed and on my way.

Laters.

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I saw this one one Twitter earlier:

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A lesson in “you get what you ask for”:

Me (wandering into living room after reading this post): Do you think most cops are good or bad?
My husband: I think most people are bad, so cops are just a subset of that.
Me: [internally, DID YOU REALLY THINK YOU’D GET A DIFFERENT ANSWER? YOU’VE KNOWN HIM FOR 20 YEARS.]

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Oh man. Is someone cutting onions in here or what?

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Remembered another one from Twitter yesterday. The cop doesn’t enter the story til the end.

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We need more Canadians here in the U.S.!

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I asked some police how hard it was now to wear hat uniform. It’s how police identify someone in the know.

It’s just a role they agree to play, and no one I’ve ever met does it out of spite. They do it to help.

They complained about the DA. And they complained about the anti-police resentment. Those things aren’t new.

Their fear was. They’re all terrified. One policewoman rookie asked me about how I suggested they take out a live shooter.

I’ve been shot at. Its… not pleasant. Whistles of bullets let you know how close they were. I wasn’t panicking.

They were. They’re green. I get it.

We can’t put people who aren’t warriors into a warzone. And police are police. Not warriors. They’re peacekeepers.

And they will stop if we can’t keep them safe. And they’ll never be safe if we don’t give them tools of peacekeeping. And keep giving them cast off war toys.

Try asking an officer how it is to wear that uniform. They’ll see you mean to speak to them, not to the badge, and the conversation will change.

They’re just like us. Give it a try. Human beings in roles they didn’t define, just filled.

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Things are sadly different over here these days, but it wasn’t always like this.

From Bill Bryson’s In a Sunburned Country:

If we try, we could make a country like that again.

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Okay, so I finally remembered to come post my story about it.

Like to hear it? Here it go:

So as shit happens sometimes, I got laid off last year 10 days before Xmas.

Not great timing, but also not as fucked up as it could have been.

Anyhoos, the point is that after the new year, I was back on the grind looking for a job.

Now as some of you may recall, I’m without a vehicle and I use public transit to get around.

So one day I have a job interview scheduled, and I do all my due diligence. I have everything prepared, but the bus I’m riding on goes out of service while we are en route, causing me to jump off and start running in order to make my connecting bus… which I just miss, right before it turns into the freeway tunnel that I need to go through to get to my interview.

And just fyi, the driver totally saw me trying to flag him down and the fucker just kept going.

Now I’m about to be late to a interview for a new job, and it’s not my fault, but I still have to make my best effort to get there are as soon as I can…

So I start walking. Right through the tunnel, along the walkway reserved for maintenance.

I call the place where I’m interviewing and explain that I’m going to be tardy and that it was beyond my control.

And then I keep walking, with cars and trucks roaring at ‘ludicrous speed’ past me; scared as shit, but determined to get to my damn interview.

So once I finally get to the end of the tunnel, guess what happens?

A cop car pulls up.

Of course various people had called the police about a “crazy woman walking through the tunnel, talking to herself and crying.”

(I was irritated and sweaty as fuck, but I never shed a single tear… but assholes will see what they want to see.)

As soon as I saw the officer pull over, I explained my desperate situation, hoping the whole time that she wasn’t going to make me even later while writing me a ticket.

And the funniest thing happened. The petite blonde woman in uniform smiled at me sympathetically, and offered me a ride for the last leg of my journey which I gratefully accepted… and she even let me out slightly away from the main entrance, so that my prospective new employers wouldn’t see me arriving in the back of a squad car.

(What an impression that would have made!)

And the ‘happy ending’ to this tale is that not only was the situation not escalated, and I walked away from the encounter without a single scratch on my body OR my dignity… but I also got the job.

Sometimes, truth is stranger (and better) than fiction.

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Holy crap, that’s a guaranteed twenty points to the blood pressure right there. I’ve never had that happen and even hearing about it made my pulse race a little!

Did getting dropped off a distance away occur to you? I bet it wouldn’t have occurred to me at all.

Glad things worked out!

Here’s one from a friend of mine a couple of days ago…I giggled when I read it.

So, last night I got pulled over for driving erratically in a parking lot. When the officer got to the window I showed him Pokemon Go on the phone.

He just said “Oh no”, shook his head, and just walked back to his car.

And he’s not white! But he looks a bit like Erkel and wears a bow tie, so I’m not sure how much we can count that. (He’s joking about starting a life-saving bow-tie business for African American men)

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It’s an achievable dream. Even if that rose-tinted view of the past is mostly just illusory, it can very definitely be a present. And the nostalgia element won’t hurt in getting to that present, either. :smiley:

One thing I have enjoyed is the posters that I’ve heard are springing up all over the place.

Nice.

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It’ll never work; they’ll only be confused for members of the Nation of Islam, trying to sell copies of the Final Call.

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I was at a Forth of July celebration with my famiy. As we walked back to our car, a bicycle cop was handing out trading cards to a young muslim girl. I felt really good about being an American that day.

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The Australian xenophobic right likes to use “boat people” as an epithet to describe refugees.

Which is why I own a shirt that looks like this:

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