Oh Florida… can’t you let another state take a turn at the crazy?
Well, Texas can do just so much and so –
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Quite right. Brunner’s “Shockwave Rider” is much closer to where we are now.
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Hey, we do try. We delivered Cruz to national politics, that should fulfil our crazed and bizarre quota for quite a long time.
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Oh goody. Cuntsable Savage would be right at home then.
Well, hang in. The original reporter intimated that there may well be something more to it - we just don’t know what that is yet. Miami Gardens - could be just about anything. Not that whatever-it-is is any excuse…just don’t trip because they played the race card up front like this. Obviously, somebody wants to try this in the press, first. Might’ve been a good opening strategy, too. Guess we’ll see!
I’ve been stopped for license and registration checks 12 times in my 54 years. Once was in high school. The other 11 times were during the year and a half that I lived in a mostly black neighborhood of NW Atlanta with lily white Cobb County just across the river, and every one of those was the Cobb County cops sitting at the end of that bridge.
Cops are scum.
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That’s what they get for having a revolution. Their powers are now entirely focused on their powers and protecting the powerful.
Here in Canada we are sort of technically still subjects of the Queen, who I suspect couldn’t care less about us and spends most of her time trying to make sure one of her descendents doesn’t get photographed buggering a goat or something equally embarrassing.
Kidding of course, but our governments do seem to be doing their best to test the limits of the Constitutions they purport to defend.
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When I see this kind of thing, I wonder if the cops are way worse, or just now being held accountable for the shit they do.
I WANT to believe not all police are scum. I still think thats the case…
You will do nothing. Move along.
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Not so sure it isn’t race or class, though. The primary evidence - the multiple arrests for trespassing, the falsified reports, the video evidence - can be easily verified, and, if the reporter is even halfway competent, she has done so. To be blunt, if they really had something on Saleh or Sampson, either or both of them would be facing the little guy’s options in the modern legal system by now: the risk of conviction with a ridiculous sentence tacked on, or a plea bargain. It is fairly obvious that the cops have been “looking in” on them for quite a while.
My reference to Brunner wasn’t just the surveillance society, or the close cooperation of Business with Government (and vice versa), however; it’s that government is pretty much run now by organised crime, and cops are pretty much becoming enforcers. What makes it hard to discern is that the really profitable organised crime isn’t so much Mafia-type activities as the kinds of huge frauds that affect municipalities and institutional investors (LIBOR rigging, for instance) that ultimately affect the rest of us. These organised criminals are clever: they own the pols and rig the laws, and, when they do step outside of even those laws (say, by rigging LIBOR, or by selling investors toxic derivatives while simultaneously shorting the securities), they get at most a slap on the wrist,
…and, man, oh man, are they respectable! <cough>
It is, to my mind, significant that this sort of crime (which ultimately affects millions of people) gets overlooked, while what goes on at a dépanneur in Miami Gardens is subject to intense, um… interest. It might be that Saleh and Sampson are uncaught criminals, but I strongly suspect otherwise (given that Sampson’s long rap sheet is almost entirely false arrests). Even if so, they’re small fry. Their real “crime” seems to be an unwillingness to countenance intimidation tactics (and Sampson’s really does seem to be belonging to the class of working poor blacks).
So… one asks oneself why so much effort is being expended trying to intimidate people who are, in the worst case, petty criminals, and, in the most likely case, not even that, especially when there are serious crimes in the community that are evidently not being handled properly (reading between the lines of the descriptions of community rallies, etc.). I think the answer lies in the fact that a community like Miami Gardens holds a lot of disaffected people, and the cops really are enforcers: it’s the squeaky wheels who get, not the oil, but the hammer, and the rest get daily reminders that they can be hammered too.
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There shoud be a police corallary to economic’s Gresham’s Law: Bad cops drive out good.
I remember hearing (anecdote alert) about a cop in Chicago who refused to go on the take. He got sent into the worst neighborhoods on patrol, alone, and no one answered calls for back up. Even if you try to be a good cop, you can’t.
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Eh - tough call. I’m certainly not defending the cops. But in communities like that, the little markets are usually selling piles of drug paraphernalia, and a lot of activities go on right outside their doors while the people outside look the other way. (And sometimes, the cops are just plain dumb about it and don’t even notice.) I don’t know that particular store, and I don’t live in Miami Gardens - but you DO have to wonder why this went on for so long, and Saleh is just now taking some action? Why did he trust this employee so very much? Many, many employers would have just fired him and not even checked the story out. And why were other people getting hassled? Why did the reporter mention any possibility of other issues at all? did the reporter know something but hadn’t been able to confirm yet? There IS clearly more to this one, we just don’t know what that is yet. Not sure anything would surprise me, though.
pjcamp - Gwinnett is like that, too. After my husband getting hassled repeatedly there but not actually busted, one day I got pulled over on the way to work. The cop was very pleasant toward me - explained that he’d been ‘keeping an eye’ on this really badass Mexican gangbanger who had recently moved into the area and drove a similar car.
That car was a classic - only a few hundred in the entire country by then. And the description? Yep - I was married to the ‘badass Mexican gangbanger’. Explained to the nice officer how that 'gangbanger had kicked more little gangbanger wannabe butts than he was likely to find in the entire county. And it was over for a while. His crime? Ink. And not being white enough. And too Native for a guy from Gwinnett to tell from a Mexican, apparently. Not that there were many Mexicans around - most were from Nicaragua and such. Because, goobers. See, that’s the fun part - because in airports, he suddenly turned Arab, too. Quite the chameleon!
It’s not that I don’t see it or haven’t seen it. It’s just that this time, we haven’t seen the other shoe drop…yet. In Cobb or Gwinnett, easy to assume white cops, non-white victims. In Miami area? Not so much. Bet you a beer, on this one…
Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow” - 2013
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It isn’t so much that the cops are scum as the fact that their superiors are scum - they’re the ones who take the money from the rich white folks and then turn around to tell the cops to keep them uppity colored folk in their place.
Alice, are you hiding some agenda? Should Anonymous be keeping tabs on you? They don’t live by laws. That might be justice and if it is then the end would justify the means. Correct?
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They look like undercover cops that went to Party City for their disguises.
I do feel like there are fewer horror stories from Canada, but we do have one tenth of the population (and probably fewer police per capita?). I’m not sure the culture is actually that different, and if you replace “aboriginal” for “black” I’m sure there are lots of things like this going on in some places.
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Oh yeah, absolutely. There was a piece in the Globe & Mail today about the Canadian correctional system. The choice quotes are:
“Between March, 2003, and March, 2013, the number of federal prisoners – a federal sentence is one of two years or more – rose by 2,100, or 16.5 per cent, even as crime rates declined sharply.”
“The entire increase in the prison population, he said, has been made up of aboriginals (who now make up 23 per cent of federal prisoners, though they are just four per cent of Canadians) and members of visible minorities, especially blacks; the number of Caucasian prisoners has dropped three per cent in the past decade.”
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People who commit “real” crimes might shoot back. Better to harass the non-armed not guilty to justify your job. Much safer.
