A disturbing trend has surfaced in New York law enforcement. First, Eric Garner, an asthmatic Staten Island father of six was put in a chokehold and now he’s dead. All for apparently selling loosies. Now photos have surfaced of a 7-months-pregnant East New York woman being put in a chokehold by police for illegally grilling on the sidewalk.
Where do we start? The fact that chokeholds are an illegal police protocol? That people are being arrested for ridiculous “crimes”? That brown people are still being targeted and harassed by the police everyday for nothing?
How do we fix this problem? Well, this NJ reporter had a brilliant idea:
Yup. The problem must be lack of black fathers. Of course, Eric Garner was a black father.
Team Blackness also discussed Nicki Minaj’s new airbrushed album cover, updates from Netroots Nation 2014, and new delightfully ignorant insight from everyone’s favorite homodemon identifier.
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Belafon
But somewhere in Eric Garner’s family tree one of them grew up without his or her black father, but that obviously has nothing to do with slavery.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
It’s amazing how many problems in America can be brushed aside by simply saying ‘It’s all because Black Culture is so inferior/violent/dangerous/(insert derogatory inference here)’. Not to mention a (un)healthy dose of victim-blame.
beth
I heard a little bit of a Sean Hannity show on the car radio last week discussing this case and Sean said something to the effect that the important part of this case was that New York taxes are so high people have to sell black market cigs on the street. Not that another human being was unnecessarily killed by the police but that taxes are too damn high. Disgusting.
Lurking Canadian
The lack of a black father is certainly a problem for the Garner family now, but that’s probably not what Berin meant.
Suffern ACE
They’ve got mascots in Times Square to tamp down on. And jokesters who put white flags on the Brooklyn Bridge to seek and destroy (and skateboarders to harass because of that). Terrorists, I tell you. Grillers, loosie sellers, mascots and skaters – just the type of disorder you’d expect to find now that Bloomberg is gone and people think there can be a free for all.
Roger Moore
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik:
Any time you hear somebody blame “black culture being (bad)” for a social problem, you can reliably substitute “white racism, which I am a part of and helping to cover for” and get much closer to the truth.
Another Holocene Human (now with new computer)
@Roger Moore: This. Culture is a second order effect, but it’s a favorite (usually in a fact free, high bullshit environment) buzzword for white supremacists who want you to “Look! A squirrel!” whenever racism and white supremacy come into the conversation, especially institutional and structural racism.
SatanicPanic
Sean Bergin “the underlying cause for all this, young black men without fathers… unfortunately,no one in the news media has the courage to cover it”. yeah dude, just ignore FOX like it’s not there
Brian R.
What the fuck was that reporter thinking?
I love the way he threw in the “of course” like there was no way to disagree with his ironclad logic about the lack of black fathers.
Another Holocene Human (now with new computer)
Criminologists tell us that the overincarceration regime actually increases recidivism. So US crime rates went down despite the lock’em’up fanaticism. This seems to be a strong, first order effect–the few states that made strident efforts to reduce their prison population have seen above the line reductions in crime.
There are some anti-social folks out there who proceed from burglary to rape to murder. Which is a good argument to treat rape more seriously, not to arm thugs to rough up citizens with unapproved cookfires, suspend 5 year olds from pre-school, and turn out schoolboys’ pockets in search of the demon weed.
Another Holocene Human (now with new computer)
@SatanicPanic: I guess the Moynihan Report has been disappeared down the memory hole.
Tone In DC
A woman, seven months pregnant, put in a chokehold by these refugees from Judge Dredd.
For the crime of cooking in public.
And there are pictures.
I cannot find the fucking WORDS. If she doesn’t have a good lawyer by now, then I may have to find her one.
Another Holocene Human (now with new computer)
@SatanicPanic:
“Courage” to report/speak the “reality” versus the “MSM” is standard white supremacist boilerplate.
This shit is typical fascist Newspeak, really Putin’s BiP-legions of propagandists calling Ukrainians fascists, anti-Semites and banderites while Russians wank to Ukraine invasion porn couldn’t do it any better than this.
rikyrah
IF YOU can’t handle a 7 month pregnant woman without a chokehold, you don’t need to be a police officer.
Citizen_X
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik: Along those lines, Bill O’Reilly, the original ice-tea drinking motherfucker, says that
So don’t ever legalize. We won’t be able to help the black kids, by jailing them.
Belafon
@SatanicPanic: That’s where he heard no one was covering it.
Roger Moore
@Another Holocene Human (now with new computer):
It’s standard boilerplate for everyone, including plenty of people whose every utterance is repeated like it was a pronouncement from God. As far as I can tell, it roughly translates as “some people have the temerity to disagree”.
srv
Morehouse Men
SatanicPanic
@Belafon: Yeah, it’s not like this guy was a sociologist conducting research. He’s just some local news dumbass.
SatanicPanic
@Citizen_X: O’Reilly’s right. I don’t like the idea of 9 year olds smoking pot. I also don’t like sending police after them.
Belafon
@SatanicPanic: Every so often, a DK front page story has the O’Reilly quote:
Cassidy
Hey, let’s be positive. This is just another opportunity for our wingnut family and acquaintances to pass that Bill Cosby does it again post around Facebook and prove they’re not bigots.
Villago Delenda Est
@Belafon: It’s always projection with these motherfuckers.
Always.
CONGRATULATIONS!
My wife is a huge fan of NYC. I am decidedly not. The ever-present cops and cameras – so omnipresent they melt into the background – make me feel like I’m in a police state, being constantly watched and that someone is waiting for me to step one inch out of line so they can beat my fucking head in.
Of course, that is a lot less likely to happen to me than to some others. I’m white. But damn, if you’ve got an iota of self-awareness you can’t help but pick up on the vibe, and I do not like it one bit.
Senyordave
@Citizen_X: Kind of Judge Smails from Caddyshack lecturing Danny Noonan:
I’ve sentenced boys younger than you to the gas chamber. Didn’t want to do it. I felt I owed it to them.
Commenting at Balloon Juice Since 1937
Lack of a male role model results in side walk grilling?
J R in WV
I can’t say I’ve ever felt totally surveilled in NYC, we’ve spent many months (in toto) there over the past 40 years. Maybe I’m just insensitive?
But the jazz and new music and classical music; the museums and shops; the restaurants and multi-cultural atmosphere. It is a fabulous city, with great life-expanding opportunities all around.
The history, the architecture, the neighborhoods, the floral district, the diamond district, the antique shops, concerts, events, it amazes me, and we love it – for a little while. After 2 or 3 weeks, tops, it begins to wear one down a little. You begin to yearn for (on our case) the quiet and privacy of the woods.
The first night I spent in NYC as an adult with my wife, she had an apartment on 55th street. There were fabulous pastry shops right in the neighborhood, and a French bistro across the street. We ate well, and went to bed early – 10 or 10:30, sleeping soundly.
I was awakened about 12:30 by a thunderous crash, as if one had pushed a dumpster off the top of a big parking deck, and it had plunged unimpeded to the concrete street below. Then another, amazing sounds! It went on all night!
In the morning we found that the description of the sound of concrete and dumpster impacting was perfect, they were tearing up pavement and dumping giant slabs of concrete into dumpsters, from 12 midnight to 6 am, for the duration. When else can you work on the street in downtown Manhattan?
NYC, where the tables in most restaurants are so close together you can’t help but hear everyone else’s conversation – a fact that leads me to believe that the Art of Woody Allen is in fact stark literal truth stolen from everyone he meets in the city. All that strange, it is reality!
PurpleGirl
@CONGRATULATIONS!: After the cameras were covered and the flags were changed on the Brooklyn Bridge, I’m not sure there is anything special about the extra security at the Brooklyn Bridge or any where else in the City.
Suffern ACE
@PurpleGirl: And the press and the NYPD is flipping out about that “terrorist” attack. There is something special about the city and the way its officials flip out and label all sorts of people terrorists.
Woodrow/asim Jarvis Hill
@srv: Really. Do I have to go dig up all the damn criticism from the African-American community around people like Obama and Bill Cosby saying stuff like that?
Sure, I’ll do some research for you, since the Google button on your keyboard is clearly busted. Here’s Francophile Coates on the matter:
Jonny Scrum-half
1. Bergin has no basis to draw a connection between kids growing up without Dads and anti-police attitudes in the inner city.
2. He’s not wrong, however, that the stability of the family is an issue worth addressing. I wonder how he’d respond to an argument that at least part of the reason for Black kids growing up without fathers is the “War on Drugs.”
3. Regarding “what was he thinking,” it was a smart career move. He’s now been interviewed on Fox, and if he gets fired he’ll be a martyr with a good chance at landing a gig at a conservative media source that pays a lot better than the local New Jersey Cable TV news.
4. I wish that it was considered within the range of reasonable discourse to question the police, from their tactics to their compensation. Unfortunately, they’re untouchable because they “put their lives on the line” for us. (Not to belittle the difficulty and importance of the job, but truthfully most police officers don’t risk their lives, and many have a tendency to misuse the power that we’ve given them.)
Mandalay
@Jonny Scrum-half:
We’ll see, since now he’s looking for a job: After initially being suspended, Bergin chose to step down.
I think his comments were a bit too toxic for a full time job at Fox.
Mandalay
You cannot make this stuff up. After he lost his job and whined to anyone who would listen, Bergin said this:
The poor bastard has a great news story right under his nose, but he’s too dumb to see it.
Mnemosyne
Why do I have a feeling that NYPD was told to stop using tasers so much because they were accidentally killing people, so they came up with the great idea of crushing people’s windpipes instead, because it’s not like you could kill someone that way, amirite?
srv
@Woodrow/asim Jarvis Hill: Well, at least a pay cut.
mark
@rikyrah:
Thank you. Yes, exactly!
What about all these cops killing dogs. Everyday on one website (rawstory.com for ex.) or another a cop is shooting a family dog, many times in front of children. Beyond cruel and bizarre. Check it out, it is every day. Either something is going increasingly wrong or its all the phone cams capturing this. Probably both?