Posted on 07/23/2009 4:46:52 PM PDT by parsifal
After dropping her young daughter with a baby sitter, Taquana Harris rushed to her hostess job at the fashionable Bowery Bar one night last February, her leopard-print evening gown sweeping elegantly through the dark, icy streets of the East Village. Then a strange woman crudely grabbed her by the arm and demanded to know what she had done with the drugs.
Within seconds, Ms. Harris recalled, she found herself pinned to the steel grating of a bodega by two plainclothes officers engaged in a neighborhood drug sweep.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
My opinion is all the talking heads have it wrong and are missing the real point. It's not about race, but the constitution.
parsy.
Great quote.
That's an amazing quote even more relevant a hundred years after it was initially said. Amazing.
This quote with Obama’s picture would make one hell of a t-shirt...or billboard.
I agree. I’ve had my own encounters with local law dog bullies who did not like it when I asked them about the specifics as to why they pulled me over. One even gave me a speeding ticket even though he did not have his radar on and then lied about it in court. I beat the ticket, but it took a lawyer to do it.
If you want to hassle a cop, do it in court.
I have a family member who is a police officer, and you wouldn’t believe the abuse they take - quietly and without even acknowledging it.
Gates wouldn’t give it up, even though he was in the wrong. He followed them onto the sidewalk, screaming and yelling, and appealing to the crowd that had gathered. Sorry, his “do you know who I am?” tells me all I need to know.
This is the classic liberal line - when my daughter arrested drunk (white) yuppies, they would always say that first off and then go into an anti-cop rant. If they weren’t holding up police business and attracting a crowd, they were usually ignored, but if they wouldn’t let it go, they were arrested.
One actually wrote her a note to apologize when he sobered up. I think there was hope for that boy.
Great quote from a great book. Gates arrest wasn’t racially motivated. It’s far worse than that. Complete abuse of police power.
parsy.
Great quote by a great man. Too bad we can’t have a President that tells it like it is, instead of one who tells it like it isn’t.
How long have you been out?
Yea, right … use the words “colored people” and “Negro” on a t-shirt in this day and age and see what happens, especially if the one with the t-shirt happened to be white. ;-)
IF IT IS ABOUT FREE SPEECH, then let’s let people start up with the jokes about putting bombs in their suitcases when they go through TSA....try joking with the Immigration officers when you come IN to the USA. Personally, my brother joked around with a customs agent, and they had them drop their pants and look up their kazoo....don’t fool around with the guy with the badge, but then again, the guy in the House on Pennsylvania has let the world know we aren’t mean and the law is whatever Sharia says it is......
Sgt Crowley explains what happened...great interview, maybe this man should be the “intellectual”.
Cops have a tough job and I'm sympathetic to what they have to put up with on a daily basis. But, I'm more concerned about the militarization of our civilian police forces than I am about police trying to reduce pressure in a tense situation, even if that means people are arrested for borderline "disturbing the peace" or disorderly conduct charges.
Let me make this very clear. One of the oldest cons in the book is to scream, holler, yell and make a ruckuss when you get caught doing something you shouldn’t be doing. If a cop falls for this he may well be putting his life and the lives of any onlookers in danger.
If Gates was causing the fuss THAT HE ADMITS TO the the officers were 100% correct in getting him out of the area so that things could be settled appropriately. Just because Gates had grey hair and needed a cain in no way shape or form meant that his antics couldn’t have been a signal for an accomplice to skeedaddle out the back door or worse.
There used to be a gay weatherman in Little Rock, who was married and in the closet. He got caught at the local park one night “trolling.” His biggest mistake, outside of looking for love in all the wrong places, was telling the cop “Do you know who I am?”
The answer was probably, “Yeah, the guy I am going to arrest rather than give a warning to.”
Nonetheless, cops are entrusted with a lot of power, and they need to learn when to use the power, and when to end things.
parsy.
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