>--Of COURSE anyone should be appalled that cops more or less have license
>to blow away 4-foot-tall 98-pound mentally ill brown people for
>brandishing vegetable peelers.
a colleague--upstanding, professional, tie-wearing white guy--was celebrating the imminent wedding of a friend the other night: it was a nightclub for 40 and 50 and 60 somethings. Things got out of hand, the bouncers mistook my colleague for someone who had been causing problems, they beat him to a pulp. the cops showed up and started kicking him while he lay there bleeding and unconscious.
onlookers asked the cop why and he said, "he's just a drunken fool."
i have some choice experiences with the sizzlean and i don't give a shit what kind of jeopardy they're in. i _do_ try to understand, because not more than a few of my circle of friends and family are in law enforcement. none of them a creeps by nature. it is the structural and organizational condition of their work that contributes to the creation of these monstrous, criminal asschomps. however, i am sick to death of cutting them slack. especially after what happened last friday night.
they_want_ to use DV as an excuse to come in guns blazing. or, at least, to use it as an excuse to bang on your door, not identify themselves, and try to push themselves inside.
i've had this happen to me, not once. not twice, not three times. not four times.
Five--count 'em five--times. the first two times, they simply walked in when they door was not locked. for no good reason save for a 911 call from a neighbor claiming to hear loud noises! that is NOT a good reason.
the fourth time, _I_ broke down and called the sizzlean because I had a drunken guy beating on my door. he was mistaken as to which apartment he wanted. after fifteen minutes of that, i relented and called the cops for some help.
When i opened the door a crack to answer the officer, he pushed his hand on my door and tried to push the door open so he could do what they do: try to stick their foot in, get their body in and quickly move into the apartment and then, of course, start intimidating you into a search.
i wouldn't let him in and he got pissed at me because i wouldn't comply. have you ever told a cop "no, you can't search my home." i thought one guy was going to lunge at me for refusing. imagine you're poor, little education, got something to hide, or rather have lived all your life being treated as if you have to hide and are guilty of something.... imagine how hard it is to resist the pressure of these fuckers.
the fifth time, they _claimed_ someone made a 911 call from my home. utterly impossible since i was home alone and on a conference call to Europe during the time they claimed to have rec'd the 911. since i was busy, i didn't answer the door. since no one said who it was but kept pounding, i got nervous after the call ended.
eventually, i heard voices and felt safe enough to answer. well, it was my friends, the sizzlean. a neighbor got sick of the pounding.
when i asked the shithead why they hide when i look out the peephole, he informed me that it was to protect himself.
i see. yeahsureright.
bull shit. protect himself from what?
i asked him what he would have done if it were a house. you can't hide from crazy wackos when you're calling on a house, can you? so give me a fucking break.
i then informed both of them--both black--that they were racist and classist.
he told me not to go there. gee, i wonder why!
kelley