In what may be one of the most impressively horrifying situations of police ignoring an individual’s rights, Texas deputies forced a black woman to have a vaginal cavity search in a Texaco parking lot because they thought they smelled marijuana. After police pulled her over for allegedly driving through a red light, police smelled marijuana and searched her car. Finding no drugs, what then proceeded can be described as nothing less than a sexual assault:
But when he got back in his patrol car he said he could still smell it, so called a female deputy to carry out a cavity search. Corley told KTRK: ‘She tells me to pull my pants down. I said, “Ma’am, I don’t have any underwear on.” She says, “Well, that doesn’t matter. Pull your pants down.” The officer then told her to spread her legs, Corley claims, and threatened to break them when she protested. ‘I bend over and she proceeds to try to force her hand inside of me. I tell her, “Ma’am, No. You cannot do this.”‘ Officers did not find anything from the cavity search, but found 0.2 ounces of marijuana ‘on her person’.
What in the ever-loving hell?
Team Blackness also discussed Darren Wilson Day and continual blowback from the Black Lives Matter Bernie Sanders Seattle action.
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Scotius
The scary thing is she got off lucky compared to this man:
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/01/14/new-mexico-man-given-forced-colonoscopy-by-cops-wins-16-million-settlement
scav
Don’f forget the many upstanding officers that piously claim they don’t want body or other cameras because they violate people’s privacy.
jon
Dang you, Comedy Central. Dang you to Heck!
rikyrah
sigh.
another day ….some more police abuse.
rikyrah
is that legal?
Lavocat
I think that perhaps the greatest thing that can come from unmitigated horseshit like this is a surge in massive lawsuits. And, with this in mind, I am amazed that no progressive entrepreneurs have figured out how to create a national law firm to monetize these abuses (or perhaps there is one or more already & I am not yet aware of them) for the benefit of the survivors.
I think of it as the “Goodfellas” mentality of fighting back against police forces across the nation: Violate my rights? Fuck you, pay me. Gun down my son in the street? Fuck you, pay me. Shoot an innocent man in the back for no reason? Fuck you, pay me. Millions upon millions.
Make these motherfucking municipalities hemorrhage money from every orifice. Just fucking clog the courts with endless wrongful death suits and 1963 suits. FUCK THEM.
Make these police departments have to hold bake sales to acquire new equipment fer fuck’s sake.
WaterGirl
I read about this yesterday. Completely agree that this is sexual assault by police officers.
@rikyrah: Paging the ACLU…
edit: or the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Roger Moore
Something does not add up here. If they had found marijuana elsewhere on her person before the cavity search, they would have arrested here and done the cavity search back at the station. And there’s no way
they’d do[correction] procedure would call for the cavity search before doing a damned thorough search over the rest of her. So the only way this makes sense is if:A) They’re a bunch of pervs who wanted to do the cavity search just because,
B) They planted the drugs on her after the cavity search turned up nothing, or
C) Both of the above.
BobS
@Lavocat: The problem with those lawsuits is that it’s the (frequently cash-strapped) municipalities/citizenry that suffer the hit, not the police departments and especially not the individual cops. The civil verdicts that are regularly awarded as a result of violent policing should be deducted from the ‘wages and benefits’ of the cops themselves — being forced to take a hit in their take-home and time-off would be an effective way to get all those ‘good’ cops to finally police the shitty ones.
Sophist
“I smell pot” is probable cause for a body cavity search now? So is there anything that still counts as an “unreasonable” search at this point?
Roger Moore
@Sophist:
A search related to white collar crime.
Chris
@Lavocat:
I think the lawyers are probably understandably afraid of taking on police departments that are now essentially legally chartered street gangs. You never know when one of them is going to pull you over and shoot you “resisting arrest.” Sure, maybe your colleagues can sue them after that, but you’ll be dead.
Lavocat
@BobS: Yes, I fully understand this, but, again, I am more one for a scorched earth approach to this nonsense. It would be nice if the specific police departments & criminal cops could be legally liable, but I really don’t care if they are or not. If the states want their municipalities to start making their police departments & individual cops more accountable, then change the fucking laws. Until then, fuck you, pay me – whoever you may happen to be.
It’s really all about legally inflicting the maximum pain – wherever that pain might fall. And apart from losing one’s own life & health, nothing hurts more than losing one’s wealth.
sparrow
@Lavocat: We already pay and pay and pay in Baltimore for police abuses (some hundreds of millions just in recent years). I don’t begrudge paying the victims — they deserve SOMETHING since most of the time they can’t even get justice (much less respect and not being abused in the first place). But the bleeding of money hasn’t woken anyone up here (that wasn’t already woke). Our property taxes are already sky-high and the mayor is so incompetent she can’t tell where some hundreds of millions in the budget even goes, the Baltimore Sun is uselessly running pictures of SPORTSBALL on every paper because definitely grown men throwing balls around is the most important thing going on in our city and no, we can’t have nice things fuck you all.
The Other Chuck
And yet still, police are mystified when the masses don’t genuflect in the presence of their protectors or rend their garments in sympathy when one of their own is gunned down.
There are no good cops anymore. Just bad cops and cops who cover for them.
Belafon
And they did an hour long search on the car before the assault.
Lavocat
@sparrow: Bleeding money ALWAYS hurts. Either someone isn’t bleeding money enough or they’ve found a way to insulate themselves from the pain. Bottomline is that police departments need to be made legally liable for their actions and those of each individual cop. Until then, they will feel no real pain.
And if I lived in a municipality whose justice system was so fucking broken, I’d be gone in no time. Not because I had high taxes but because I’d be wondering when I would be the next victim of the police.
Omnes Omnibus
@rikyrah: No.
Geeno
@Omnes Omnibus: Oh just wait ’til Sam “Strip Search Kids” Alito gets to write the opinion.
Sophist
@Lavocat:
Being able to pull up stakes and move to another city is a luxury and privilege that most people in this country do not enjoy.
BobS
@Lavocat: Except it’s often poor people losing wealth they don’t have. The city of Inkster (a relatively poor suburb of Detroit with approx 40% of the population living below the poverty line) recently had to levy a millage of approx $175/property owner to pay for a well-deserved $1.4M judgement in a police beating case caught on video (it’s also one of the rare instances where the cop is facing felony charges).
Splitting Image
@Roger Moore:
This was my reaction as well. I also loved the “on her person” euphemism. I’m guessing that wherever they “found” the weed didn’t sound too good after doing the search.
Arresting officer: “We performed a full body-cavity search and found nothing, but we then proceeded to check the suspect’s jacket pockets and discovered 0.2 ounces of marajuana.”
Judge: “Wait, what?”
Adam L Silverman
This is actually the third documented time this has happened in Texas over the past three years or so. In both previous cases it involved two women at each stop, passenger and driver. In one case the women were white in the other African-American. In both cases lawsuits are still pending. Depending on how the search was done, these are all, at least, sexual assaults under color of law if not rapes under color of law.
sparrow
@Sophist: Side-note, but a weird demographic shift is happening in Baltimore (nothing new, just more of what has been going on for a while). The middle-class blacks that have lived in the city forever are still moving to the suburbs. At the same time there is now an appreciable influx or “urban whites” (and some “urban non-whites”) (usually labeled “hipsters” but I honestly think that’s not even most of them) back into the city in certain “reviving” neighborhoods. Sure, it’s basically the same gentrification that has been happening all over, but it’s still interesting because the city leadership has done as little as possible to attract it. Of course, dirt-cheap urban housing (by East Coast standards) helps people get over the sticker-shock of city taxes.
brantl
Somebody needs to make an app that takes what you’re recording on your phone, and send it to someone else, IN REAL TIME. As soon as they know they can’t throw the phone away, or wreck it, watch how much better Cops are going to behave..
kc
@Scotius:
I remember that! Horrifying.
ETA: I wouldn’t say “she got off lucky,” but yeah, that man went through a hell of a protracted ordeal at the hands of the cops.
Tom
@BobS: Is there a reason we can’t get the money from the police pension fund instead of the municipal budget? Maybe it keeps happening because the cops aren’t directly affected.
SiubhanDuinne
Apologies for the O/T, but President Jimmy Carter has just announced he has liver cancer, which has spread to other parts of his body. He’ll undergo treatment at Emory Hospital in Atlanta.
I’m not one to pray for people, but if I were ever going to make an exception it would be for him. I certainly wish him a thorough and comfortable recovery, and I’ll send a card to let him know I’m thinking of him. He’s a good man who has done incredible good around the world, and I’m not ready to say goodbye just yet.
J R in WV
@Scotius:
I don’t know about lucky, no rape is lucky. The victim in the US News report got $1,600,000 from the county and municipality the LEOs work for, the hospital, two doctors and Assistant District Attorney also in the suit haven’t settled as of the date of that story. $1.6 isn’t even enough, unless it came from the actual rapists, who should lose their jobs AND their pensions. That might slow down these abuses.
I guess the victim should be glad he isn’t dead, right? Got off easy, right? A scrap metal dealer, who wouldn’t have looked up his butt for the massive amount of drugs an elderly scrap metal collector can afford, right? RIGHT? NO! Wrong!
They risked his life with that unnecessary “medical” procedure, but, hey, worth it for the grins and giggles. What kind of person looks at someone enema-propelled bowel movement for FUN? Those cops did. I hope they never get over the shame of looking at bowel movements for fun, ever. “Oh, let’s rape this guy’s anus with medical tools, and gloved fingers, and play with his excrement in front of a crowd of onlookers.”
I read about this case earlier, as I drive through that country a couple times a year. The first medical center they went to refused to “cooperate” with the police. So they drove all over southern New Mexico to find doctors who would be compliant with their perversion, by which time their piece of shit search warrant was technically expired.
And those doctors! They knew they were not conducting a real medical procedure, but committing rape with a medical device. The first set of doctors knew! The second set of doctors just wanted to make a buck, so their medical center sent the victim a bill for $6,000 !!!
The evidence shows there is nothing some cops won’t do, no perversion too perverted, no horror too horrible for the lowest of the law enforcement community to stoop to!
I don’t know how to fix this problem, but if we don’t figure out some way to fix it, the cops will destroy the nation. If people don’t trust the law enforcement system, that will end what little democracy we have left!
They sure aren’t trustworthy right now.
BobS
@Tom: That was my point — spreading the financial hit among the working cops would stop abuses more effectively than the system we have in place. With respect to your question, I don’t know the answer, but my guess is that anything that impacts pensions (as well as general wages and benefits) is governed by state and federal labor laws (I’ll confess that my closed fist that is reflexively raised in support of organized labor strains to get above my shoulder when it comes to police unions- probably has something to do with their less than stellar performance in the past when other unions were fighting to improve their own wages, benefits, and working conditions).
No One of Consequence
What I want to say here will not advance the conversation any, at all. I have been trying to catch up on the happenings politics and otherwise over the last couple of days. The protesters that interrupted Bernie in Seattle have me at a loss. For words, for calm and for peace of mind.
I think that their behavior was at best counter-productive and at worst, downright disrespectful and alienating. Folks I speak with about it are dumbfounded. Those that aren’t, are bitching about it. Far too many hold the opinion “Fuck those clowns. BLM can go piss up a rope.”
We have so many problems in this nation. Police brutality and misconduct are serious issues that need collective action by all the citizenry. This won’t happen without a considerable groundswell, strong enough to make wealthy interests nervous. African Americans have born a statistically undeniable burden. I cannot blame them for outrage, fury and exasperation.
That said, I think that their stunt was ill-conceived and ultimately empty. Surely there is a better way? Surely there is someone who can corral the fervor and direct it intelligently, resolutely, with efficacy towards stated/desired ends?
Sorry all, I am just wanting to try to get down what I am feeling, thinking and reacting to. Juicers can provide unvarnished truth sometimes, and unrepentant corrections when needed. All of this has me questioning my own beliefs and to what degree racism taints my views, experiences and hierarchy of reality/worldview/belief system.
After watching the video of all of that, it just seemed so damn disrespectful to a target that doesn’t seem that worthy of a recipient of such vitriol.
It makes me sad. And frustrated.
Peace y’all,
– NOoC
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@No One of Consequence:
So you can read a story about two angry black women interrupting a political speech followed by a story about a black woman who was sexually assaulted in public by police officers and still have NO idea why those first two black women might be really, really angry about the police abuse going on in this country?
The dots are right there in front of you, but you refuse to connect them. At this point, I honestly don’t know how to get you to do it.
scav
@No One of Consequence: Well, you’re taking time out of your day to publicaly voice something you admit won’t necessarily further the “conversation” over an event where people publically raised their voices (rather more loudly) in a way some people say won’t further the ‘conversation’. Well, hey. Such is the pressure of things that somehow need to be said. They don’t always strike others others as being appropriate.
Ohio Mom
@SiubhanDuinne: agree with you that this is sad news. I’m pretty sure one does not recover from Stage IV liver cancer, though we can wish him pain-free and peaceful days full of love.
goblue72
@The Other Chuck: The only thing wrong with those guys who fired on the cops in Ferguson is that they missed.
Iowa Old Lady
@Ohio Mom: What constitutes “treatment” in those circumstances? Our treatment of cancer can be pretty brutal.
BobS
@No One of Consequence: You’re right — there were many better targets for their disrespect.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Ohio Mom:
I’m pretty sure that a 90-year-old man with stage IV cancer is made as comfortable as possible. Honestly, anything more aggressive would seem like malpractice to me.
I will be very sorry to lose him, but he has had a very long and productive life that has helped a lot of people, so I think he and his family and friends can be proud of him and how he lived his life. IIRC, SD has a personal connection to the family and has met him a few times.
BobS
@Iowa Old Lady: Palliative care.
shell
Im surprised they called in a female officer
scav
OT For a teeny bit of a break: Martin Luther King recording: Early ‘Dream’ speech found
SiubhanDuinne
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
I wouldn’t call it a “personal connection to the family,” but it is true that before I retired — and even once or twice since then — I met President and Mrs. Carter on many occasions and worked closely on several different projects with senior staffers at The Carter Center.
The Carters have made extensive plans for what will happen to the Center once they are no longer around, and have already implemented some of the administrative provisions. I’m quite sure they have been equally thoughtful regarding their personal end-of-life wishes.
The short statement from The Carter Center earlier today said that they would be releasing additional details next week.
No One of Consequence
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): Oh, I think I have an idea. I’ve been paying attention, you see. There is a thread that runs through most every news account from Garner to Brown to Rice to Martin to all-too-many-others. How long is the list now? How many (thousands) more will we never even be aware of? The story above is no different. It is of a piece. And while my artistic abilities may be meager, I was fairly capable of completing connect-the-dot puzzles in my youth.
Charges should be brought against the officers in the above story, the case should be tried and the outcome should be what the jury of peers determines is fair (in their view). Given the (likely) venue, I do not hold out high hope for the black woman in this case. She should have a slam dunk case, be awarded significant damages, and (my advice) move the hell out of Texas. There are mitigating factors that will inhibit her situation. It’s Texas. Whether the weed was hers or a throw-down brought by the police beforehand, should be immaterial, but it will not be. It is my hope that she receives justice, more-than-just-compensation, and that the offending LEO’s be removed from the force and their pensions taken as part of the damages awarded.
But back to the two Seattle ladies: Net-net, my neck of the woods is not responding well to that. With the intention of ‘grabbing the mic’, they did just that, and effectively shuttered the ears of many of their intended audience. Most folks nowadays don’t do nuance. Don’t have time. Make judgements (however erroneous), and don’t change their minds. The intent of the amplification of the issue has resulted in too many tuning the channel out entirely. A good, worthy cause that should have multiple aspects of a problem addressed, will not even get a hearing in the ears of a chunk of our populous. (I am of course extrapolating my anecdotal experiences to a wider body of individuals, and could be quite mistaken with my guesstimate math.)
Does that help?
– NOoC
No One of Consequence
@scav: So be it. All the tears in the world will not change a single moment of the past. What has happened, has happened, and (to quote Morpheus) could have happened no other way.
I’m not sad or angry that they ruffled feathers. I am disappointed that a worthy cause will get no more time or consideration in the minds or hearts of some otherwise caring and concerned citizenry.
The offending nose has been cut, but the remaining visage no longer entices.
– NOoC
gwangung
@No One of Consequence: More respectability politics.
Pfah.
Martin Luther King Jr. had some unkind words for you, sir.
And the nose is your own.
Snarki, child of Loki
I look forward to these cops being placed on a Sexual Offender Registry.
scav
@No One of Consequence: yeah, but if they’re only caring and concerned if approached properly and deferentially in the manner that most suits their delicate sensibilities, then I’m not sure they truly can be described as really caring, they’re acting like they own the place and are the gatekeepers to rights that should be fought for as a matter of principle and justice instead of as a hobby one does because you personally get emotionally stroked for it.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@No One of Consequence:
Not really — you claim you understand why African-Americans are enraged about police abuse, but you still tsk-tsk when they actually demonstrate with action that they’re enraged about it.
We see at least one horrific police abuse story like this EVERY DAY and have for over a year at least. People who claim they don’t understand why those women took over the mic have no interest in understanding. They just want people to shut up and not make them feel bad about ignoring what’s going on.
No One of Consequence
@BobS: The targeting I really don’t understand. I think that the ‘softness’ of Bernie’s security/setup entered the calculus. One has not seen such an effort at other candidates’ appearances, though I hardly expect to see attempts be broadcast. I would also imagine that other candidates might very well have ‘harder’ security situations, and not be approachable in the least. (I remember W’s Free Speech Zones.)
I should probably shut up and stop digging, but I am baffled by the approach here. Including the address to the crowd. My experience is that showing someone the back of my hand, and then trying to bring them around to my way of thinking is not very effective. Your mileage may vary, of course.
– NOoC
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@No One of Consequence:
Ah, the pinniped ploy, better known as sealioning:
http://wondermark.com/1k62/
/golf clap
kc
@gwangung:
That’s the second time you’ve channeled MLK.
I’m impressed. Is he with you all the time, or just when you’re online?
No One of Consequence
@gwangung: So you say. I value respect. A few others believe in similar things. I am sure that Dr. King has unkind words for me. As likely would many others of considerable heft (intellectual, social, or otherwise). That said, I would name none my enemy, yourself included.
– NOoC
kc
@No One of Consequence:
Prepare to be corrected unrepentantly. :D
I’m just gonna spectate today . . .
No One of Consequence
@scav: Oh, I don’t think that their sensibilities are all that delicate. Mine aren’t. They don’t demand deference either. I don’t. Hell, I can’t even manage to make a point, or try to puzzle out my own character flaws and other shortcomings in a public forum to which I have been a party for years now.
It may be that I will glean no greater understanding. Foolishly, I hit ‘submit comment’ anyway.
– NOoC
kc
Speaking of police, Mother Jones obtained over 450 local police dept requests for mine-resistant armored vehicles.
BobS
@No One of Consequence: You’ve missed several threads where this topic has been batted back and forth – I tend to share your point of view. I agree that Sanders’ lax security is partly responsible for BLM batting at low-hanging fruit — my guess is that MLK made a similar calculation when he chose Birmingham.
kc
@kc:
Excerpt:
Our Middle East invasions are a gift that just keep on giving.
MomSense
This is a fucking outrage. I am quite sure that if cops smelled marijuana in my car, they wouldn’t double me over, threaten to break my legs, and search my vagina in a parking lot because I am a white woman.
And I have driven with a car that smells of marijuana because one of my sons and his friends either smoked it in my car or smoked it at the beach and then drove in my car. I had to drive my car the next day and was annoyed to say the least, but I never had to worry that I would be sexually assaulted by the police if stopped.
kc
@BobS:
Isn’t that backwards? I thought Birmingham was chosen because it was particularly awful and they expected authorities to respond violently to their non-violent tactics.
I could be wrong (or maybe I’m just misreading you, in which case, sorry)
No One of Consequence
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): I am a great target for your invective. Hurl away. Get yourself into a righteous froth about it. Go nuts.
I don’t want them to shut up. Truly. The cause needs more volume. More repetition. The only way I think we might see any action on it really. Action will come from collective effort. Such efforts take longer when collecting others to your cause doesn’t seem to concern the leaders(?).
That said, might have taken the civil rights movement a little longer to see some fruition had Dr. King started, “Listen up you motherfucking Crackers, your Honkey asses need to know that I had a fucking Dream!”.
No good will come of this. And I should have taken the very first sentence I wrote in the first post, and stopped there.
My bad. Good luck Memn.
– NOoC
HumboldtBlue
@Lavocat: It doesn’t work that way. The city doesn’t pay the bill, the department doesn’t pay the bill the insurance company pays the bill and there aren’t enough lawsuits to make the premiums unaffordable.
NonyNony
@No One of Consequence:
This is easily the smartest thing that you’ve posted in this thread today.
A better idea? Not posting what you posted in a thread about police abuse, but instead taking it to one of the threads about #BlackLivesMatter disrupting Bernie Sanders’s speech.
Pick an appropriate forum to air your grievances. This is the wrong one. And it’s incredibly uncivil for you to come here and shit all over this thread the way you did (and incredibly disrespectful to the woman that was sexually abused by the cops that Elon is alerting us to here). Don’t be a jackass – learn to moderate your speech and use it in appropriate places not wherever it suits your fancy.
No One of Consequence
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): Really just trying to puzzle out my own mind about all of this, and not resorting to ploys, logical fallacies, circular logic, roofies, or anything else nefarious.
My hope was to put this out to a community that I collectively respect, in the hopes that a conversation of sorts could emerge, and help me get some peace or understanding out of this.
My bad. Please clean your shoes before jumping down my throat, and mind the tonsils, they’re original.
– NOoC
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@No One of Consequence:
You realize that Montgomery was 50 years ago, right? If you’d been talking about the same goddamned thing for 50 years, over and over again, you might be a little frustrated at being told you have to start over at the beginning, again.
I will instead show a video. You are the guy in the red vest:
http://youtu.be/SLVrNht9q_0
No One of Consequence
@kc: Ah. Thanks for the heads up. Will go back and read up.
– NOoC
No One of Consequence
@BobS: Thanks for the info Bob. Much appreciated.
– NOoC
BobS
@kc: You’re misreading — I’m not impressed by BLM antics.
scav
@No One of Consequence: Not delicate? So robust that a single or few events during a political campaign can sour them on the whole issue? Ah the dedication to founding principles. But given your state of self-knowledge, why are you expecting vast social movements comprised of all sorts of people, most of whom have been living with things for far longer than a single campaign event and are not surprisingly just pissed to behave in all circumstances with the délicatesse of a debutant asking a favor at a cotillion? Haven’t we all kicked electronics when they’re somehow just not working?
celticdragonchick
@MomSense:
Uh…yes, they would. It’s Texas.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/troopers-texas-probe-genitals-women-traffic-stops-article-1.1414668
From 2013:
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@celticdragonchick:
There’s two separate stories there to show it’s a pattern of behavior. Guess the race of the second set of women it happened to without looking at their picture.
No One of Consequence
@NonyNony: Uncivil, disrespectful, shitting-all-over jackass who needs to learn how to moderate my speech. (And here I try to make a concerted effort to *not* offend with my speech and to (at least somewhat) carefully consider my words and the choices thereof.)
Got it. I am chastened.
In all seriousness, I certainly do not mean to demean or devalue or disrespect the thread or the subject. I do sincerely apologize. The actions of the LEO’s in the original posting is beyond the pale, and indefensible.
In less seriousness:
Would you prefer that I pre-flight my postings by you first for appropriateness?
Perhaps you and Mnemenome would like to jointly critique and censor as you see fit?
Scratch that, I will save my meager abilities for the genial open threads where consciousnesses are light, and nerves not so bared. Perhaps commenting on the yumminess of a given recipe, or the outlandish antics of Mary So Proud and Tall.
– NOoC
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@celticdragonchick:
Also, I’ll see if I can find it for you, but another poster had a study that was done of fatal shootings by police that showed that about equal numbers of black and white people (mostly men) were killed by police, but that the black people were about 2/3rds more likely to have been unarmed.
And as this ProPublica study shows, equal numbers of deaths for each race actually shows a disproportionate response by police since African-Americans are a smaller percentage of the population:
http://www.propublica.org/article/deadly-force-in-black-and-white
kc
@celticdragonchick:
Here’s yet another one.
kc
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
Yes, it’s absolutely true that black people are disproportionately the victims of police abuse, but it’s a bit dangerous, imo, for white people to think “Oh, that could never happen to me” because it can and does happen to white people every day.
kc
Whoa, this trooper was actually criminally charged and convicted as a result of one of the illegal searches mentioned in celticdragonchick’s article.
That was in 2014. Why tf is the Texas DPS still doing this?
kc
@NonyNony:
It’s not OT; the BLM Seattle protest was discussed in the podcast and mentioned in Elon’s post.
Disraeli
@rikyrah: Is that much of a concern to the Police State and FOSO (Forces of State Oppression)
sukabi
@BobS: should be a way to tap the police union for settle / judgement money if they find a cop was at fault.
Guarantee that if that were the case the ‘thin blue line’ would get thinner. Not going to defend , cover for cops that are putting your retirement money in jeopardy.
Matt McIrvin
@Iowa Old Lady: My grandmother recently died of esophageal cancer at 96. The treatment for that is palliative care, as others have said. There’s not much point in surgery or chemo, even for cases that might be curable in a younger person. I was glad that she was kept comfortable, well-medicated for pain and not subjected to too much in the way of intrusive procedures.
john b
@brantl: There are many such apps.
Cervantes
@No One of Consequence:
I agree: sometimes, you have to laugh in order not to weep.
I’m sure you’ve noticed that people often “read” using “tried and true” filters, and then respond in ways that are exquisitely well rehearsed. In that context, what you’re actually saying is completely incidental, almost irrelevant — but I am grateful that you said it. Thanks.
Another Holocene Human
@sparrow: Actually, the city and the state spent a lot of money on “revitalizing” Baltimore including the harbor redevelopment project, the stadiums, and that streetcar system. While at first it really just brought in white flight suburban dwellers for events, they were well positioned when young people popped up who thought urban living was cool. In fact there were young people moving into Baltimore and commuting to DC in the 1990s, as crazy as that sounds. Of course in the 2000s whole chunks of DC itself rapidly gentrified. Baltimore’s economy hasn’t been as good so the shift has been slower, but palpable. That isn’t to say segregation of housing by jurisdiction in Baltimore metro isn’t quite real and still present. But overall I’d say it’s a good thing that the degree of, extent of, and severity of the city versus county segregation is coming down. Baltimore is and was a pit because it was where all the Black people were corralled while the whites lived in enclaves where they didn’t have to “support” “those people”. Baltimore was a slave city. It’s Atlanta north of the Mason-Dixon line. And the legacy of racism and discrimination continues right up until our times. Money taken from the state budget for Baltimore’s schools and used to steal a football team. Brutality by city cops. A discriminatory transit system–only one rail line of an uncompleted subway is there for residents, otherwise they take buses, while a shiny light rail system was built to bring suburbanites from park and ride lots to sports events, or take convention attendees from the airport to the convention center. Complete with nasty ticket takers doing random-not-random sweeps to keep city people off of it. We stopped once in the middle of nowhere and they threatened to put anyone without a valid ticket off right there.
I visited Portland, OR once, and the ticket checker came on the streetcar and was like, “Hey, I know nobody likes this, but you know why I’m here,” real cool. No barking.