Posted on 12/18/2009 11:16:25 AM PST by a fool in paradise
A short-sleeved squabble ended suddenly Thursday when Town East Mall security raided a kiosk and seized a stash of T-shirts that had southeast Dallas business owners up in arms.
Half an hour after the raid, a half-dozen Pleasant Grove business owners gathered at the Southeast Dallas Chamber of Commerce and celebrated a medium-sized victory.
In the center of the room, draped across the back of a chair like a pelt, was one of the vanquished T-shirts:
"Welcome to Pleasant Grove," it read below a silkscreen image of a man tossing a body into the trunk of an old Buick.
Like everyone in the room, Pleasant Grove pawnshop owner Joy Vosburg praised the Mesquite mall's quick action.
"It's fantastic," she said. "I don't think any city should be portrayed like that."
Vosburg had first spotted the T-shirts during a Monday evening shopping trip.
"It was horrible," she recalled. "I would have bought them just to get rid of them. But I didn't want to give them money."
...it perpetuates a violent stereotype of Pleasant Grove a blue-collar neighborhood in the heart of southeastern Dallas that the chamber has been working overtime to abolish.
In October, it kicked off a re-branding campaign, including "GroveFest" and "Hands Across the Grove," when residents linked hands along South Buckner Boulevard.
The chamber will even move out of its old digs above the Diaper Store in a neighborhood strip mall and into the brand-new Eastfield College branch up the road...
The clerk, who said she had not known about the warning, mostly ignored the raid. She stared serenely into her till as mall staff filled a cardboard box with the contraband...
Screws said the kiosk owner could pick up the confiscated shirts later but probably would have to pay a fine...
(Excerpt) Read more at dallasnews.com ...
PING
These goons couldn’t care less about the US Constitution. They’re worse then murders in my mind.
Lol...Let’s stick our heads in the sand and pretend it’s not bad over there...
I smell a very large lawsuit.
+ I wouldn’t want my car to break down over there.
Did I somehow miss the repeal of the 1st amendment? Who are these nazis?
I am trying to figure out who has what do what here. I know Malls are considered private property, but the right to regulate the content of T-Shirts sold there would be subject to the contract between vendor and the Mall.
And what is thins about a fine? A fine from whom for what?
This is not a constitutional issue as the government is not involved and it is instead a property rights issue.
However, those who demanded the shirts be removed and those who removed the shirts are Nanny State Thug Wanna Be’s.
*DOH*
r/short/shirt/
Sell ‘em on the street or on the ‘Net.
This was in a privately owned mall. All merchants have contractual agreements with the mall specifying what they can and can’t sell, what kind of signage they can and can’t put up, and spelling out that the mall management makes the ultimate decision. Part of this is to maintain the image of the mall — different malls very deliberately craft and maintain certain demographic images, i.e. very upscale, sort of upscale, inexpensive and convenient, etc. Another huge part of it is because each merchant has contracted and paid for specific rights re limiting competing merchants, either anywhere in the mall, or in larger malls within a specified distance of the merchant. Private contracts are private contracts and the Constitution doesn’t put any limits on the terms they may contain.
Did I somehow miss that the First Amendment was extended to prohibit private property owners from dictating what can be said on their property?
If I read the article right it’s the Mall Security that they have to paid the fine to.
Sounds like plain old theft to me. Toss the thieves in jail.
When I was a child, Pleasant Grove was a thriving, white working class neighborhood a place of shady lanes, good schools, and thriving businesses.
In the 1970s, it became a hellhole. It is a ghetto now a war zone of abandoned cars, empty shopping centers, and houses with razor-wire-topped steel fences around their yards.
What happened to Pleasant Grove? I’ll leave you all to fill in in the answer for yourselves.
Well said.
>>If I read the article right its the Mall Security that they have to paid the fine to<<
I would love to see that contract — it must be the only mall for many miles around...
Presumably a fine from the mall management, for continuing to sell the shirts after they were notified they needed to stop selling them. No reason a mall can’t build a system of fines into its contracts. HOAs do it all the time.
In Houston, the locals have taken to calling Greenspoint Mall “Gunspoint Mall”.
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