It’s hard for me to understand someone who would call the police on a kid mowing yards. You hear all these complaints from the older generation about kids these days not knowing the value of hard work or being too “soft” because they spend all their time in front of a screen. This is an example of a young person going out and offering useful manual labor to their neighbors in order to earn money for something they want. It’s exactly how kids learn the value of hard work. Who could have a problem with this? I’m glad the police were willing to help him out, but I feel like at least one of his neighbors needs a slap to the face.
It’s hard not to be cynical these days. The article didn’t specify what neighborhood this took place in, but I’m sure this was a case of a kid who didn’t “look right” for the neighborhood.
Honestly, just racism. I know a group of people who were knocking on doors advertising a community event and the cops were called on the one black dude they had with them. He always has a big smile on him and doesn’t look threatening at all, so I find it hard to believe that it’s not just racism.
I doubt the neighbor that called said they were just mowing lawns. More likely along the lines of “suspicious black person has been walking around peoples houses” as they conveniently leave out that they are walking behind a lawn mower.
People shoot black kids for ringing bells, calling the cops is actually pretty mild. They want to scare minorities away from their neighborhood, and this is the legal way to do it.
I can understand not wanting to pay a kid for lawn work, I’ve been broke before. Just say no thank you and go on with life.
That being said, we hire kids in our neighborhood all the time.
We have two girls (9 and 6, I think, never met them, grandma drives and “supervises”) who come pick up dog poop, and we’ve had a kid for a couple years who turned mowing yards in the summer into an LLC and he just hired his first employee to help out with client growth.
I know if he wasn’t a white blonde kid who looks halway decent (long hair, which just makes me jealous, but boomers would have a fit) then the Karen’s would call the cops.
Someone in the neighborhood called the cops about a black woman going through mailboxes. It was a postal worker, in uniform, in a clearly labeled mail truck. I just don’t get it.
“Kids these days stay inside too much” kids go outside and they’re calling the cops. Gee wonder why the kids don’t go outside anymore.
You know, nothing summed it up quite like the whole Pokemon Go craze. It was wild, people of all ages were out like it was a festival every day. I’ve never seen main street so active before or since, and the parks too. That was like the best four weeks, perhaps a feeling I haven’t had since being a kid on summer vacation, it really felt like summer meant something again.
And oh my god the old folks were livid. At kids playing. In the park. There are people in the city park, there aren’t supposed to be people there, it’s supposed to be empty and dilapidated.
Man it’s wild to me how hard people hate on kids having areas to play. I live near an empty lot that used to be a pool and the city wanted to turn it into a skate park. There’s some old grump with a homemade sign slung over their fence with “WE DON’T WANT A SKATE PARK” scrawled on it like?? Come on, give the local kids a safe place to play that isn’t a parking lot. I’m for it and I don’t even have kids!
In general, I agree when that one gets called, however this case just feels mostly feel-good (once you get past the obvious racism). The kid wasn’t out there trying to make money for a wheelchair or his parents rent or so he could eat. He was saving for a PS5, a luxury good, and taking the initiative to try to make his own money for it. Karen, being racist, called the cops. And the cops decided (correctly) that Karen was full of shit, and decided to help the kid buy something he wants. Not needs to survive, just wants.
So rare, I doubt they’d last long in the force. Either you stay long enough and get corrupted yourself, or you’ll get fired the moment you call-out the bad cop.
Good cops do exist. The problem is that when a good cops does something like this it makes a kid really happy, but when there’s a bad cop somebody fucking dies. It’s not that there aren’t enough good cops, it’s that any amount of bad cops is too many and instead of purging them the system protects them. I’d rather have 100% neutral competent cops than 99% good cops and 1% bad cops who are protected by the system to continue murdering people.
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.
So they call the cops on you for mowing while black, too? Geez, just tell the kid "I have someone take care of that for me, sorry" and let it go at that.
Le wholesome agent of the biggest carceral state in the world.
I dont care what little nice things cops might do when they exist to enforce a system of law designed to ignore the crimes of the wealthy while punishing the poor for the societal conditions the rich have created.
If theyre good people at heart they should take a career that actually serves society.
The US has a 25% of the world’s prison population while only being 5% of the global population. ACAB, ACAB and ACAB.
Seriously, it makes me so mad that people dont see how shameful it is to praise a cop for being nice to a black kid while working in an institution that has been intentionally destroying black communities since its inception.
I dont care what … cops might do when they exist to enforce a system of law designed to ignore the crimes of the wealthy while punishing the poor for the societal conditions the rich have created.
This sounds like a systemic problem, not a cop problem. Don’t get me wrong, but you’re complaining about the wrong people if that’s all your argument is based on. Law enforcement is just one part of the shit sundae that’s the judicial system. They have the most power to immediately end someone’s life, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s the legislators that both give them that power and their directives to follow.
The US has a 25% of the world’s prison population while only being 5% of the global population. ACAB, ACAB and ACAB.
That’s a consequence of a private, for-profit prison system that uses incarcerated individuals as legal slave labor. The cops drag you off the street, but it’s the lawmakers who created the policies that give them an excuse to do that, and the prosecutors and judges who choose to exercise leniency or lack thereof. A lot of cops are bastards, but you know who’s a bigger bunch of corrupt bastards? The fucks in office taking legally-not-bribes bribes from lobbyists representing the prison-industrial complex.
Being shot, in my opinion, is a leniency compared to going through the judicial system. The moment you’re convicted for anything that isn’t a white-collar crime, your life is as good as over. You’re not getting loans or job offers because of your criminal history, and if you’re lucky enough to find a job, your employer knows they can damn-well underpay you because you have nowhere else to go. Unless you have someone willing to bail you out of the situation you’ve been put in or were already rich before getting thrown in prison, you’re probably not getting back on your feet. And when your best source of guaranteed food and shelter is to get thrown in prison again, it’s no fucking wonder why recidivism is so high.
The war on drugs was an abject failure and channel for institutionalized racism, and politicians are getting their pockets lined for neglecting to fix it or even actively making it worse. They are the people who should be held accountable for ruining the lives of millions. Blaming the cops first just distracts from the actual problem.
Want to stop getting hit in the face with a rake whenever you step on your lawn? Get rid of the asshole putting the rakes there first, then get rid of the rakes already on your lawn.
This sounds like a systemic problem, not a cop problem.
You dont think there’s anything wrong with enlisting to enforce this system? Would you do it? Knowing you’d be sending drug addicts to prison, destroying their life even further, when what they need is access to mental health care?
Being a cop is a decision like any other, and we can judge people for it like we judge any other set of actions.
It’s fair to judge someone for willfully enlisting if they were aware of their contribution to this system and wanted to further ingrain it, but dissuading those who want to do it for the right reasons will only skew the demographic towards those that don’t.
An optimistic kid deciding to be a cop when he grows up so he can help people shouldn’t be judged the same as an army reject enlisting because he got kicked out of the military for abusing his authority.
but dissuading those who want to do it for the right reasons will only skew the demographic towards those that don’t
The issue isn’t the individuals deciding to pursue a career as a cop, it’s that policing as an institution itself is broken. You don’t praise dictatorships just because you have a benevolent one right now. The problem isn’t who is in that position, it’s the position itself being vulnerable to (and inclined towards) violence and authoritarianism. If you think you can fix the institution just by filling it with the “right people” then you’ve missed the forest for the trees.
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