As a European, I’ve heard that people will call the police on you if you happen to stroll through a neighbourhood. Apparently they feel uncomfortable when people move their body without a car
Here’s my pipe, and my last rock. I want you to have it, I want you to keep it. Please, it’s symbolic.
And if I come here and ask for it, I want you to tell me “nooo”, ok?. Even if I hit you hard, with wood. Or grab your arm and bend it up behind your back till it snaps like a fucking kit kat. You still tell me no, right?
I’ve heard this is often a tactic of theirs, especially if they’re being recorded by a body cam or such. Just simply declaring loudly that they smell alcohol or suspect drugs sets it on the record so now it’s your word against the cop’s. If it ever ends up as evidence or in courts, it now appears as if there was probable cause for everything that follows and it’s only your word to say the record straight (good luck!)
I got into an argument with my girlfriend when I was going to University. I jumped on my bike to blow off some steam / just get some space with quiet. I’m riding down the residential street I lived on in a shitty party of town, and the fucking police helicopter lit me up for a good block and a half. That was about 30 years ago. I can’t imagine things have gotten better.
It was a pretty shitty neighborhood in southern California. Police helicopters flew around every night. Still wasn’t cool being lit up when I was just trying to get a little time to myself.
I think this is the root cause. Anecdotal evidence to support:
I’m white, my parents are white, and they lived in a posh neighborhood outside DC. For 3 years, Dad was working/living in England, so my sister and I would check on the house and/or I would go up to DC for a long weekend (I was living in NC at the time).
I arrived on a Friday night, unloaded the car, and was cracking open a beer to relax… And there was a ring of the doorbell. It was the cops. They said a concerned neighbor called, I told them my parents were currently living in England and came up for the weekend. I ended up digging through paperwork of my Mom’s looking for something tying me to the address. While the cops were waiting, they saw multiple pictures of me and my sister hanging on the wall. They said “this will suffice. Enjoy your weekend.”
The neighbor apologized the next day and asked if I had bought a new car.
I was out in front of my own damn house, where I’ve lived for multiple years, taking pictures of birds and shit. Some nutter I’ve never seen before rolls up on me and accuses me of “taking pictures of kids.” There are literally no children outdoors because it’s 107 degrees outside. But they wanted to be mad at someone so they found an excuse.
This is what America is. It’s just a thin veneer of “freedom” on an underlying base of sociopathic paranoia. You’re free to do anything you want, as long as some rando doesn’t murder you for it.
The neighborhood I grew up in was like that. I didn’t notice until I moved away for college and then came back home to visit. It was a 100% residential neighborhood, with no businesses really in walking distance. Anyone out walking was wearing Walking Clothes^TM^.
If someone old enough to drive were just walking down the street as if it was their mode of transportation, not an exercise activity, they would at minimum be stared at with suspicion until they were safely away from the starer’s house and at maximum have the police called “just to check out the situation.”
It didn’t occur to me that this was strange until I moved away to a mixed use neighborhood with businesses and residences and lots of people walking to get where they were going.
I’ve been noticing lately how huge blocks of residential zoning with no allowance for commercial use pretty much guarantees people are going to use cars on a daily basis. Like, need some food? Get in the car and drive several miles away.
And I wish those ‘neighbors’ a lifetime of frustrated celibacy for being assholes. The classy thing to do would have been to give the kid $5 and wish him luck.
When did we go from “the ones not being shitty cops are enabling the ones who are and are therefore bad” to “literally every cop is itching to shoot unarmed harmless ten year olds”
It’s not that every cop is innately murderous, it’s that the institution itself presents violence as it’s main tool and protects its use against scrutiny.
Put another way: to a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
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