Posted on 08/21/2002 9:34:08 PM PDT by niki
The neighbors' past complaints about rowdy teen behavior late at night in that parking lot gave the police ample justification to enter the parking lot and use ID checking (for curview violations by minors) as a tacit means of cooling everyone off and encouraging them to go somewhere else.
Teens being teens, the situation could easily get rowdy just from that and justify a police order to disperse.
But that didn't happen because Captain Vierra screwed up. He violated procedure by pushing into another captain's jurisdiction, found that the crowd was behaving in a law-abiding manner, and felt he had to justify his jurisdictional violation by ordering mass arrests. He could probably have created an incident if he had tried (see the previous two paragraphs) but for some reason decided not to wait.
I see a bright future for him in airport security.
They did not do that. And the police are not entitled to do that for them absent a request from the businesses, which they did not get.
You are confusing your opinion that the people shouldn't be there with a legal conclusion that they had no right to be there even if the property owners didn't mind. That legal conclusion is incorrect.
If they were doing illegal acts on the parking lot, such as using drugs or fighting, they could be arrested for that. But even if they were racing around the parking lot, which I rather doubt, traffic laws don't apply to private property.
If you want to be angry at anyone, be angry at the businesses for not trying to get rid of the crowds. But there's a reason why they didn't do that. They were making money off of them.
Although this is silly to continue this since I'm not defending the cops for arresting anyone, I'll state this again. I feel that it is highly unlikely.
Next meeting is scheduled for Saturday 15 September at 3:00 pm
---
Freakin' unbelieveable!
Kevin, I agree with a lot of your posts, but not this one. Cap't Aguirre is an out of control cowboy and represents the worst face of law enforcement.
Obviously, we're not dealing with a better man....
For people to park when shopping at K-Mart, something a crowd of 400+, gathered to hang out and race, were not doing. The fact that there is a parking lot there does not imply people have the right to use it for whatever they want. It seems that is what you think.
You are confusing your opinion that the people shouldn't be there with a legal conclusion that they had no right to be there even if the property owners didn't mind. That legal conclusion is incorrect.
400+ people present, after dark, some of which were breaking curfew, some of which were meeting for the purpose of other unlawful acts - K-Mart, or the property owner, does not even have a legal right to allow those people to congregate. I guarantee there are numerous State, city and county laws being violated by the crowd. K-Mart has a parking lot which is there for people to park when they shop. K-Mart can't have a parade at 12:30, 1:00 AM in the lot. They can't have a party. Likewise, no once else can either. We have nuisance and noise laws being broken for sure.
If they were doing illegal acts on the parking lot, such as using drugs or fighting, they could be arrested for that.
Or breaking curfew, or breaking noise laws.......
All I am saying is that the presence of the crowd was reason enough for the cops to enter the property.
YES, THEY SCREWED UP!!!! THEY SHOULD NOT HAVE ARRESTED THOSE WHO WERE NOT MINORS!!!! EVERYONE ELSE SHOULD HAVE BEEN CITED OR TOLD TO LEAVE.
The cops should have arrested all minors, and dispersed the crowd and cited people.
I don't care to continue this any longer.
Oh, in the FreeTally world of brownshirt state fascism, a private property owner doesn't even have the legal right to allow people to use it.
You do not deserve to live in a free society, which is fine because you're obviously uncomfortable in one.
Houston police Captain Mark Aguirre fights his battles on many fronts.
From a battered office in the aging depths of the South Central Division's headquarters, under the large "Don't Tread on Me" flag that dominates one cheaply paneled wall, the stocky 45-year-old oversees 18 square miles of the city. About 90,000 people live within the borders of the area he and his 150 or so officers are charged with protecting, from the gentrifying yuppies lofting into Midtown and Montrose to the established urbanites around Rice University and outside Bellaire, to the more hardened city dwellers near South Main and the east side.
There are the additional tens of thousands who come each day to work or visit the Medical Center. There are the untold numbers of new and not-so-new immigrants in the Asian areas. There are the hundreds of former prison inmates who get dropped off each month at the downtown bus station.
There are hot-sheet hotels on OST. There are stores in the Third Ward selling empty baby-food jars to hold liquid codeine or jeweler bags to hold crack.
There's graffiti on Dumpsters and buildings. There are vacant lots filled with abandoned furniture or appliances or tires.
So Aguirre has plenty of battles to choose from.
He never thought his toughest one would be fighting his own department.
But the navy veteran, the guy who can't remember a time when he didn't want to be a cop, has managed to annoy, offend and exasperate both the police brass above him and the rank-and-file below. He has accused the police chief of perjury; he treats his officers "with total disrespect," according to one police union leader.
The department, Aguirre says, is "filled with political stooges and amoral careerists" who hate to work hard. "The ones that like to work hard, I'm their hero," he says; "the other half are malingerers, crybabies and whiners."
They can all -- the chief, the officers, other divisional captains -- take their place in the complaint line behind the City Hall staffers, the advocates for the homeless, the Greyhound bus company, the civic groups that don't have the proper volunteer spirit: everyone Aguirre has managed to piss off one way or the other in his 22 years on the force.
Aguirre couldn't care less what they think. He insists he knows what works when it comes to policing, and if the city would just listen to him, instead of taking up his time with petty-ass bullshit internal-affairs complaints against him, instead of forcing him to deal with butt-covering politicians in and out of elected office, he could damn well show the world.
He'll probably never get the chance, though. After three years of shaking up the South Central Division, and much of the rest of the Houston Police Department, he may just have had enough.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Aguirre doesn't know where his lifelong urge to be a cop comes from. "It's just always been an intrinsic desire, and as I grew older it just solidified," he says. "I don't know, maybe in a previous life I was an officer or something."
The urge certainly didn't come from the "gang-infested neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago" where he grew up. "Officer Hidalgo," the local cop in that Hispanic section, "was seen as a traitor to the neighborhood -- he was just real rough with people, and he was from the neighborhood originally," Aguirre says. "People always thought he was just going around settling old scores."
Aguirre ignored the temptations of the gangs -- again, he doesn't know exactly why, it just never seemed an option to be considered -- and headed for the navy after graduating from high school in 1974.
Serving as a signalman on a destroyer escort and an aircraft carrier, he spent two years in Japan and reveled in the discipline and order of military life. He got out in 1978, pretty much broke, and went to live with his parents. His father, a blue-collar installer for Illinois Bell, had by then taken a job with Southwestern Bell, and the family had moved to Houston.
Aguirre found he "loved the climate." He waited out the one-year residency requirement before joining the Houston force in 1979 as "a young skinny policeman" patrolling the Third Ward.
"It was everything I thought it would be," he says of those early days as a cop. "I didn't want to go home and take off my uniform at the end of a shift. I could really relate to baseball players or football players, people who get paid to do something they love."
The department was different back then, he says. It was about half the size it is now, and officers stuck together more. They cared about their jobs more, too; although, Aguirre says, "That's what everyone says when they get old -- 'The kids today aren't like we were.' People have been saying that since time immemorial, so I don't know. But it seems there was more of a sense of brotherhood back then."
He got married, but like a lot of police marriages, it didn't take. She was a college classmate of Aguirre's sister, but after three years, with no kids, the couple split.
"We worked better as boyfriend and girlfriend," says Aguirre, who still hopes to have children someday. "Her mom said we were two chiefs and someone needed to be an Indian. And it wasn't going to be me being the Indian, I can tell you."
Aguirre played a role in two high-profile task forces designed to clean up high-crime areas in Gulfton and the Stella Link/Loop 610 area.
He was working at the jail in February 1990 when he got a call to help out on the Gulfton project from a supervisor who recalled his enthusiasm for the job. "It was in a moribund state, and I received a call from my captain to come over and get it off the ground," he says, "and that was very unusual, because I was not even working in that division at the time. I asked if I could bring some people with me, and we just went over there and made a tremendous, tremendous impact."
The project included assigning patrol units to stay in hot areas and crack down on loitering, public drunkenness and other offenses, coupled with drug raids and other aggressive actions.
The effects were "ephemeral," he says. Once the task force ended (federal funds had been paying for officer overtime costs), the crime returned.
And Aguirre went back to his climb up the HPD ladder, regularly acing the civil service exams. (He's a great reader, loving biographies of people such as Churchill, MacArthur, Napoleon, even noted socialist Eugene V. Debs. Some might say that's a list of monomaniacal fanatics, but Aguirre prefers to think of them as people "who speak to issues of leadership, how to get the most out of people and be true to yourself.")
Slowly, he says -- "like a frog being boiled alive without realizing it" -- things in the department began to change. The officers he came in with got enough seniority and began migrating to the plainclothes divisions. Not Aguirre. "Damn, I just love the street," he says.
Just so you know, I work in Real Estate and have a legal experience with such real estate issues that come in to play with trespassing, noise and nuisance. I KNOW laws cover these things. I know K-Mart could not even allow the crowd to congregate. Thats a very simple concept(non-enclosed area, after dark, no permit for such activitues, etc...)
Never said, nor implied any such thing. Basic laws against nuisances and noise, especially after dark, are very similar from city to city and State to State. I highly doubt that a big city such as Houstin has any less restrictive laws than say Jacksonville, Tallahassee or Pensacola here in Florida. Such gatherings, in unenclosed, undesignated areas are not allowed after dark. The cut-off is usually 9pm, but it may be slightly later from place to place.
But again, you do not even want to hear this. You just want to call me names(something I haven't done to you) and talk about how I'm a tyrant, a police state advocate and whatnot. I agree with you mostly about the arrests being wrong. What I wil not agree with you, and will not back down from, is my opinion that the people 1)Were doing something dangerous, and something they knew they were not supposed to do and b)that the cops had every right to disperse the crowd, regardless of "owners permission". Again, I work day in and day out with real estate and legal issues concerning it. I know such issues as noise and nuisance are addressed in every planning/zoning code and such gatherings are not permitted in such places as K-Mart parkings lots after dark. Its a frikin mixed-use area which includes residences. If a resident can hear the crowd, its not allowed. K-Mart would need a specific permit to have such a gathering, and it would not be allowed in the wee hours of the morning. If you do not believe this, then I am sorry. I will waste no more of my time trying to convince you that this type of behavior is not allowed, whether the property owner wants it or not.
Whether or not the cops would have had the right to disperse the crowd and arrest those who refuse to leave, that would not have given them the right to arrest without warning everyone present (even those who had been leaving as the cops arrived).
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.