Even if you don’t mean it as an insult, please don’t call me “shorty,” “brother,” “boo,” or “dog.”
Category: Police
-
Wait till next week
My father recently passed away. He will be missed by many. He was a good man and a very good father.
After the funeral I have a previously scheduled (and unrelated) engagement. The next post will be around June 16. See you then.
Meanwhile “Officer Pete Says” is on autopilot and will continue to post every other day.
-
Officer Pete says (rule 12):
Don’t piss off police, some of us are assholes.
-
Officer Pete says (rule 13):
Don’t be surprised when we arrest someone, there really isn’t much else we can do.
-
Drug Massacre Leaves a Mexican Town Terrorized
As reported by James McKinley Jr. in the New York Times:
On the night of May 17, dozens of men with assault rifles rolled into town in several trucks and shot up the place [Villa Ahumada]. They killed the police chief, two officers and three civilians. Then they carried off about 10 people, witnesses said. Only one has been found, dead and wrapped in a carpet in Ciudad Juárez.
The entire municipal police force quit after the attack, and officials fled the town for several days, leaving so hastily that they did not release the petty criminals held in the town lockup. The state and federal governments sent in 300 troops and 16 state police officers, restoring an uneasy semblance of order. But townspeople remain terrified.
-
Officer Pete says (rule 14):
It doesn’t matter if you’re right. Nobody will believe you if you’re in jail.
-
Cop in the Hood for sale (again)!
Amazon finally has Cop in the Hood looking good and back for sale.
Go buy your copy today. Less than $20 is always a bargain. Amazon lists June 17th as the date of publication. But the book will be coming off the presses next week and Amazon gets their copies very quickly. I would guess they’ll be shipping the first week of June.
-
Take your $1.4 billion and stuff it!
That’s what Mexico may tell the U.S. So reports Laurence Iliff in the Dallas Morning News. Good for them.
Here’s the backstory: The U.S. offers money to other countries so they can join our glorious war on drugs. To get the money–and here’s the catch–other countries had to pass a formal (now less formal) “certification” process where we tell them if they’re doing enough to fight the war on drugs, if their judicial system is good, and if their human rights record passes our test. We obviously can judge these things, you know, because our record in the war on drugs has been nothing but success after success in what is now a drug-free America!
Mexico considered certification a violation of its sovereignty. “Why don’t we tell the Americans to use those [funds] for their own interdiction forces or interception forces … and stop the flow of weapons,” [Mexican assistant attorney general for international affairs] Santiago Vasconcelos said in a radio interview. “Rather than giving them to Mexico, they can be used by the Americans to reinforce their Customs service, their Border Patrol, and stop the arms trafficking to our country.”
Oh, snap!
I’m always amazed how arrogant the war on drugs makes us. Mexican police are getting killed in battle right and left, but we’ll tell them if they’re doing enough to fight drugs. Can you imagine our reaction if, after September 11, 2001, other countries offered us big bucks but only if we could certify to their standards that we were really serious about fighting terrorists?
What if Mexico offered us billions of pesos to protect New Orleans from hurricane damage, but only if we let their army corp of engineers certify the quality of our levies? (I mention this example because time and time again, Mexico proves very able at hurricane disaster relief. Kudos to them.)
Can you imagine how insulted we would be if Cuba offered us billions of dollars, but only if we, say, ended the practice of electing judges, abolished the death penalty, found a way to cut our prison population by 80%, and agreed to end our Cuban embargo?
As soon as New Orleans was destroyed by hurricane Katrina, Cuba offered us 1,500 doctors and 26 tones of medicine and aid. No strings attached (except political embarrassment)! We turned them down. Seems we were already doing a heck of a job. About 2,000 people died (we don’t even know for sure) and we couldn’t get clean water in for days.
Anyway, I hope Mexico doestell the U.S. to stuff it. Often these countries know the war on the drugs is stupid and hurts them, but $1.4 billion sure is tough to turn down. That’s a lot of change to fill a lot of pockets. If we bribe enough people, they’ll poison their fields or arm militias or whatever else we tell them to do. I’ve been to both Mexico and Egypt, and let me tell you, they sure have nice police cars… thanks to our money. Too bad none of this money is going to the Baltimore P.D.
-
Don’t eat the paint
Why is there so much violence in Baltimore? Maybe it’s the lead. Or you could say, “It’s the lead, stupid!” There’s a lot of lead paint in Baltimore, especially in poor neighborhoods.
Greg Toppo reports in USA Today.
In the academy, a friend and I used to joke that one of our dim classmates had licked the windowsill one too many times. Maybe he had.
-
The Beautiful Struggle
Two nights ago I read Ta-Nehisi Coates The Beautiful Struggle: A father, two sons, and an unlikely road to manhood (Spiegel and Grau). It’s about a man, a black man, growing up in Baltimore. Despite the horribly sappy title, it’s neither horrible nor sappy. In fact, it’s quite good and is written with a very strong 1st-person voice.
If you think “The Wire” is hard to understand at times, you’ll have to read parts of Coates’s book very slowly. He uses Baltimore slang like it’s straight from Noah Webster’s mouth. But the style of speech adds a lot to the book. And overall it’s a good quick read.
I’m not a huge fan of memoirs because they often lack a point. So I tried to figure out a point to this book. It seems to me that the main problem that leads to so much bad in places like West Baltimore begins with young kids getting jumped by other kids while walking to and from school.
This made me think of Geoffrey Canada’s Fist Stick Knife Gun. I read Canada’s book over 10 years ago and don’t remember it that well. But I think he talks about and identifies the same problem.
At first, these aren’t fights, or muggings, or even beefs. They’re just kids banking other kids because they can. It’s about dominance, power, respect, and just for the hell of it because it’s fun.
I’m sure this in oversimplifying things somewhat. But maybe not. You get jumped. You start hanging around others for protection. Things escalate.
So my question is this: In neighborhoods like East and West Baltimore, how can we stop little gangs of little (and not so little) kids from jumping and terrorizing other little kids?
Here’s an excerpt from Coates’s book:
…Painfully I’d come to know that face must be held against everything, that flagrant dishonor follows you, haunting every handshake with all your niggers, disputing every advance on a jenny. Shawn was, at first, true to his better nature, and backed down and held up open hands. But I’d come too far to be gracious. I stuck my finger in his grill—
That’s right. ’Cause you a bitch-ass nigger.
—and walked out.
Nowadays, I cut on the tube and see the dumbfounded looks, when over some minor violation of name and respect, a black boy is found leaking on the street. The anchors shake their heads. The activists give their stupid speeches, praising mythical days when all disputes were handled down at Ray’s Gym. Politicians step up to the mic, claim the young have gone mad, their brains infected, and turned superpredator. Fuck you all who’ve ever spoken foolishly, who’ve opened your mouths like we don’t know what this is. We have read the books you own, the scorecards you keep—done the math and emerged prophetic. We know how we will die—with cousins in double murder suicides, in wars that are mere theory to you, convalescing in hospitals, slowly choked out by angina and cholesterol. We are the walking lowest rung, and all the stands between us and beast, between us and the local zoo, is respect, the respect you take as natural as sugar and shit. We know what we are, that we walk like we are not long for this world, that this world has never longed for us.