At 2:54 PM -0400 24/7/09, Doug Henwood wrote:
>POLITICO Breaking News:
>-----------------------------------------------------
>
>In a surprise appearance in the White House briefing room, President
>Obama said he has spoken to Cambridge Police Sergeant James Crowley.
>"In my choice of words, I unfortunately gave the impression that I
>was maligning the Cambridge Police Department or Sergeant Crowley
>specifically," Obama said.
He was certainly maligning cops, he hasn't denied that. If not those specific cops, then it must be all cops he was maligning.
Surely this is going too far? Surely there must be cops somewhere who don't deserve that?
And Joanna:
>You might get the army on your side, but the police, never.
Defeatism!
===
I had a cop turn up at the door a few weeks ago, incidentally. He told me someone had complained about me shooting rabbits along the river next to my house. And he wanted me to stop doing it.
"You can't go around firing a rifle within 500 metres of a house or public road," he warned.
"How do you know it was me?" I said, pitifully.
"You have been seen." He smiled, confidently. Perhaps it was the absence of an actual denial that gave me away, or perhaps he really had a witness.
My mind raced. One of the new people who had moved into town recently, I guessed.
But it was highly unlikely such a person would offer to give evidence in court. "But this is *Bracknell*," I protested, "half the town uses firearms around their house."
"Well, times have changed," he explained patiently. "You can't do that sort of thing anymore".
"OK," I said, "I don't want any trouble. But are you planning on telling everyone that?" "I'm not the only one around here with a gun."
"You are the one who has been seen." Flatly.
"Yeah, but... just because I stop, doesn't mean anyone else will stop. Are you going to be on my back every time a gunshot is heard in Bracknell?"
"If you tell me it wasn't you, I'll take your word for it," He said, reasonably.
That took the wind out of my sails. In all my born days it never occurred to me that a cop would consider just taking the word of a suspect. It has niggled at me ever since.
The only conclusion I can come to is that I must be getting old. I must have appeared harmless to the cop, completely incapable of a convincing lie. Let alone blatant defiance.
Anyhow, he hasn't been back. And gunfire still echoes in the air around Bracknell at all hours of the day and night. But not my gunfire. I now use low velocity (silenced) ammunition in the rifle and don't use the shotgun around the yard at all.
Give the new neighbours time to adjust to the local customs. Or if they couldn't adjust, then move on. Most people didn't adjust to the Bracknell culture. I'm as ignorant as shit, so I will fit right in. Of course I can never be a local. To be a local you have to be born and brought up in Bracknell, and your parents have to be be born and brought up here as well, if you want to be fully accepted.
But I don't care if I'm accepted, so it doesn't bother me in the least. Not everyone can handle that. Hopefully the neighbours with the gun phobia will be the sensitive types and everything will go back to normal. (Normal for the 19th. century American West, that is.)
Speaking of which, they used to have a police station in the town. A few doors up the road from me in fact. It had its own little lock-up and everything, a tiny but very solidly built outhouse sort of thing in the backyard of the police residence. Victim of some fairly recent government cost-cutting. Shame really, the little cell in the middle of the bare back-yard adjacent to the sports oval kind of appealed to a sense of history in some way.
The cop was right I suppose. Times have changed.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas.