I don’t know what else to call this:
This was not the case for a black Pennsylvania family. As KYW Newsradio reports, one family is questioning why the Chester Police Department arrested them—twice—for allegedly “loitering” in their own yard.
The chain of police buffoonery kicked off on Oct. 1, when Officer Pasquale Storace III arrested Rachel Briggs’ sons and nephew for playing in her front yard; Storace, who is white, charged the young men with “loitering.”
According to Briggs, the boys were thrown in jail, forcing their families to scramble to raise money for their bail. When they were freed the next day, family members were on hand to welcome them back—right back on Briggs’ front lawn.
Some of the arrests were caught on video. As police arrest two of the family members, family members scream and beg for an explanation.
“They maced my son. He got asthma,” Briggs says later, as her son sits in the cop car. “My son can’t breathe, sir.”
Obviously, we don’t know all the facts in this case, but do we really need to? Even if they were being loud and boisterous enough to cause their (presumably) white neighbor to call the police, they clearly were not loitering, as they were on their own property. They weren’t drunk, on drugs, armed, or anything. They were in their yard. And the cops came and arrested them. Two days in a row.
Hopefully soon, they will receive a multimillion dollar settlement from the town, and can move out of that shithole.
JDM
But you know what the real scandal is? When Michelle Obama said she wasn’t always proud to be an American.
Between things like this and the woman being killed in her apartment by the police her neighbors had called to see if she needed help, can any sane person think that calling the police for help is a smart thing to do?
Just Chuck
Once you get out of Pittsburgh or Philly, Pennsylvania might as well be the South
Roger Moore
I don’t know if this would classify as state-sponsored terrorism, but it’s sure as hell a civil rights violation. IMO, we also need to create a civil tort for the people who call the police for stupid shit like this, so the bigoted neighbors get hit with some fines as well as the city.
debbie
@Roger Moore:
Paging the ACLU…
Mike in NC
Saw a photo from Fat Bastard’s recent hate rally in Minnesota. Most of the lily white supporters in the background were wearing red t-shirts that read “COPS FOR TRUMP”. Obviously few if any were actual police officers, but he loves to play fascist dictator who plans on staying where he is for “10 or 14 years” (part of the latest stump speech) and they love it.
Mike in NC
@Just Chuck: The old saying went “Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, with Alabama in between”.
Mandalay
As noted in the OP, there probably is a bit more to the story, and one possibility is a complaint from a white neighbor led to the brouhaha. But the deafening silence from the police department on what happened is telling.
And there’s a familiar pattern of police conduct going on here, since the “family is charged with loitering, resisting arrest and other offenses“: the cops make a bullshit arrest, and then add on “resisting arrest” so they have got you for something when their bullshit arrest gets tossed out by the judge.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
“Why people of color kneel”.
Onto other topics,I’m thinking of the Kingsmen rip-off video, and one thought crossed my mind – and know way that lumpy orange piece of shit can move like that. He’d collapse, wheezing, about 15 seconds in.
jl
Making the case about loitering is weird, and seems discriminatory. What was the real problem. Noise? Then why didn’t the cops make it about that?
Seems like a pattern of whites lodging unjustified and exaggerated complaints about blacks doing some random thing the whites don’t like and then the cops not only taking the complaints at face value. but escalating from there.
This reminds me of the fuss over blacks supposedly BBQing in no-BBQ areas around Lake Merritt in Oakland CA. Whites called 911. to complain. Why weren’t the whites in just as much trouble for abusing the 911 system as blacks were for violating park regulations (if they even were, the issues of whether those regulations were even violated, or enforced on a consistent basis didn’t even seem worth reporting in the local news media)? If whites complain about blacks, seems automatic reflex to take whatever the whited do to be correct and blacks in the wrong, without any further examination, even retrospectively.
delk
WTF? State Department web front page.
Aleta
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Pretty sure he can’t even lift his arms straight out.
Jess
I’m wondering how Penn ended up so backwards and racist when it started out a Quaker settlement. I know even the Quakers didn’t have a clean track record when it came slavery originally, but they were among the first to reject it. Anybody have any ideas about how Penn lost its original culture?
Nora
@delk: Holy shit. Calling the ACLU — something about establishment of religion?
MrSnrub
Chester? No surprise from me.
Timurid
@delk:
That creeping Sharia finally got us…
jl
@Timurid: Internal polling must look horrible, and getting every single white Evangelical out to vote is their only chance at avoiding a tidal wave in 2020. If that is the explanation, then that is a bright side of the juconstitutional mess.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mandalay: Actually, resisting arrest charges tend to get dropped when the original grounds for the arrest are found to be without merit. You cannot be punished for resisting an illegal arrest.
hells littlest angel
@delk: Remember when Jesus asked Lazarus’ family to do him a favor before he could do the resurrection?
Another Scott
“police buffoonery”
??!?!?
“noun – behavior that is ridiculous but amusing.”
!!!*!*!*!@#J$!J@L#$L!:@#!@#!!!!
“police buffoonery”
Grrr….!!
Cheers,
Scott.
sukabi
@delk: (mobile version) looks like Pompeo’s personal advertorial page…like maybe he’s still lobbying for a job, not an official government department page. And talk about erasing the line between church and state, they’ve buried it under a mountain of self-righteousness.
japa21
@delk: Doesn’t that violate the separation of church and department of state clause of the first amendment?
Besides, what would Pompeo know about being a Christian leader?
jl
At least the cops did not arrive and open fire immediately. I guess should be thankful for that.
Kent
Isn’t Chester basically working class suburban south Philly?
Penn really only settled the southeastern corner of PA. During Penn’s time the rest of PA was mostly still wilderness and Indian lands until at least the 1750s. The way to really understand central PA is to look at this map of Appalachia: medium.com/migration-issues/where-is-appalachia-2d240d74161b and understand that most of PA shares much more in common with Kentucky than it does with say Mass.
sukabi
@Jess:
just a guess, but it probably happened the same way the Northwest has fervent Confederates, racist migration and a lack of honest, truthful history education
leeleeFL
@jl: Sadly, my first thought as well.
Ruckus
@Omnes Omnibus:
Is that true everywhere? I’d believe the resisting charge would be dropped along with the others in many jurisdictions, but not convinced that it would happen everywhere. And I understand that if the rest of the charges are BS then it is impossible to be resisting, but I’m not sure that logic is used across the board. I’d bet it’s more like “Even though the arrest charges are not valid, one still has to abide the orders of the police and let the court decide.”
Kattails
@delk: The phrase JHC being inappropriate!! Amendment 1. Contact info at bottom of page. Also call House/senate, and ACLU. Better screen-shoot as well.
rp
@Jess: Scots-Irish who settled in Appalachia. It’s a slice that runs from Penn, Western MD, WV, Western VA, TN, KY, OH, and parts of GA, AL, and MS.
MJS
@Just Chuck: Pretty ill-informed take.
balconesfault
These aren’t even Pennsyltuckians … suburban Philly, an industrial area along the Delaware.
Just frigging cops gone wild.
I’m imagining the signals from the DOJ over the last couple years aren’t particularly strong on this count.
patrick II
@Mike in NC:
He’s not playing.
Jess
@Kent:
This is very interesting–thanks for sharing the link! I’m still trying to make sense of it…I’m descended from the Quakers that settled in the Virginia area and then moved to Ohio, and eventually California (my grandfather’s great-grandfather was the founder of Whittier), so I’ve been poking around to find out more about the history. Very complicated!
Cacti
@rp:
Also both Carolinas.
Jess
@rp: The indentured servant class bringing their bad attitude to the table? Lots of those in my family tree…
Leto
@Just Chuck: Have to agree with this comment; I live in neighboring Montgomery County and the number of Confederate, NRA, Trump, and other dipshit stickers I’ve seen on vehicles continues to irritate the absolute living shit out of me. I’ve also seen an S.S. skull and bones medallion on the front of a Harley motorcycle, and for about year on my commute into work, there was a late model Ford 150 that absolutely bedazzled in Trump/Pence paint and stickers. On both sides of the truck were “TRUMP” in big bold paint, and two American flags crying in the breeze while they were being drug behind that jackass. The poor McDonald’s workers who had to see that every morning… Jeebus, ain’t their life hard enough?
Honestly I can’t really think of anywhere on this planet where I want to live that isn’t surrounded by jackasses.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ruckus: I wouldn’t know if it is universal or not. I used “tend to” for a reason.
Brachiator
Well, yeah. I doubt that there will be anything to that will justify the police officer’s actions, but yeah, you need the facts.
Yeah, there will probably and righteously be a settlement, but this is not a solution. Who says that the people considered their home or neighborhood to be a shithole?
And the larger problem is a white dominated society and state and local government which essentially views black citizens as vagrants, to be bullied and terrorized at the whim of white racist fools. Where do you move in order to get away from this?
We may also see here, as with the settlements for police harassment and murder of nonwhite people, that state and city governments look at these settlements as simply the cost of doing business in order to keep police forces happy. Cop loving communities would rather go broke than control racist cops.
Mandalay
@Ruckus:
No it isn’t; it varies from state to state, and if you are in the wrong state:
– You don’t want to be relying on the sympathy of a judge for a bogus charge to be tossed out. You can end up being convicted of resisting arrest for some bullshit bogus offense.
– The very act of charging someone with resisting arrest when they did nothing wrong affects them for life, even if the charge gets thrown out. Many job applications ask “Have you ever been charged with a crime…” and if you answer that honestly you are harming your chances of getting the job, even if the charge was bogus, made by a crooked cop, and dropped.
Aleta
To state the obvious, a lot of people who get hired as police and security shouldn’t ever get close to that power. Some aren’t suited; but I bet for others, the power of carrying a gun + the power of absolute authority corrupts their minds and behavior.
Re the wrong hires, I’d guess it’s things like low wages, hiring/firing standards that aren’t absolute, ‘grading on the curve,’ and higher-ups given discretion to overlook racism, anger management, mood disorder, violence against women.
Mental contamination by myths about the military (and ‘war zones’). Imbalance in training (designed to hard-wire reflexive reactions and rapid firing instead of a lot more training to strengthens inhibition of reflexive responses).
And maybe low standards are an effect of that NRA propaganda that tells people: almost anyone is capable of carrying a weapon and deciding when to use it. I wouldn’t be surprised if NRA-developed courses, and training on NRA-funded ranges, have been treated as though they’re recommendations for preferred hiring/retaining. Deep contamination. Sick society.
Mike J
@Just Chuck:
I think there are a fair number of people who would like to tell you about how enlightened the Philly and Pittsburgh cops are.
opiejeanne
@Mike in NC: The city of Minneapolis told the cops they couldn’t wear their uniforms to appear on stage with any politician. That’s the origin of the t-shirt.
debbie
@Mandalay:
Not one iota of that bit more can have anything to with children standing in the front yard of their own house. If it was an asshole neighbor, where was the cop’s good sense?
Belafon
I want them to own the town and make all those white mf-ers who can’t stand them move out.
trollhattan
@delk:
Good grief. Don’t think for a minute Pompeo doesn’t eyeball Pence thinking, “I can leapfrog you to the top, you cotton-topped moron.” He’s very ambitious.
Brachiator
@Aleta:
Only part of the problem. Police have always been used as agents of social control, to deal with people deemed to be undesirable. This usually means the poor, the mentally ill, and designated nonwhite people.
And then there is the weird tribal fraternity of the police, that leads to “good” officers looking the other way when a cop is particularly brutal or clearly violates law or policy.
And in the Age of Trump, many “law abiding white folk” assume that they themselves will never be the target of improper police actions and are willing to accept brutalizing others so that their own lives can continue undisturbed.
condorcet runner-up
@delk: holy fucking shit.
debbie
@delk:
That should be illegal.
debbie
@Brachiator:
At least around here, they’ve really lowered their standards. GEDs are good enough now and there’s no psychological screening. Combine this with support of deadly force, and it’s easy to see why this shit keeps happening.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
Meanwhile in Georgia: cnn.com/2019/10/14/us/anthony-hill-robert-olsen-trial-not-guilty/index.html
“A former Georgia police officer was found not guilty of murder Monday more than four years after he killed a naked, unarmed black man who was mentally ill.”
Olsen was charged with killing Anthony Hill, a 26-year-old Afghanistan war veteran, Hill had a history of mental illness and struggled to get the support he needed from the Department of Veterans Affairs,
Mandalay
@debbie:
Oh FFS, I’m not defending the cops or anyone else, so dial your virtuousness and poutrage back to 11. All I said was “there probably is a bit more to the story”, just as Cole said “we don’t know all the facts in this case”.
Get a grip.
Kent
@Jess: This map shows the westward progression of settlement and land purchases in PA. William Penn was in the 1680s. The western half of the state was not “purchased” from the indians and settled until over half a century later: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Pennsylvania#/media/File:Pennsylvania_land_purchases.png which I took from here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Pennsylvania
Prior to the American Revolution in 1776 the western boundary of settlement enforced by the British was the Appalachian mountains which cut through the center of the state. That was one of the economic drivers of independence as the colonists wanted to expand west while the British Crown and big corporations like the Hudson’s Bay Company wanted to maintain those western territories for the Indians and for trapping.
zhena gogolia
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
IT’S COLIN FUCKING FIRTH!
I’m seething with rage about the Kurds, but for some reason the defilement of Colin Firth is also hitting me really hard, although I realize it’s not in the same universe of importance.
Ruckus
@Mandalay:
Yep.
Which is the point of a lot of the questions. One more thing to eliminate “undesirables.” Of course it really only works to keep people charged in a permanently undesirable place. Which of course is part of the reason for charging them with bullshit in the first place. They are “undesirables” and are going to be kept in “their place” at any cost.
It’s not about employers or work or even money, it’s bigotry.
zhena gogolia
@delk:
OMFG.
Dude gotta go. Dude gotta go. It’s too late already.
Brachiator
@debbie:
This undoubtedly adds to the problem. You also have to ask why communities allowed these standards to be lowered? Did someone think that it was too expensive? I can’t imagine not doing psychological screening. However, I don’t know if this has been considered to be standard practice.
Sab
@Jess: The PA frontier was settled by Germans (Pennsylvania deutsch) and Scotch Irish, not Quakers.
Betty Cracker
I thought this was going to be about the cops shooting an innocent woman minding her own business in her own home, but no, yet another incident in another place where police are terrorizing our fellow citizens.
Sigh.
schrodingers_cat
Finally saw Gully Boy, loved it.
This is my favorite number.
Train Song from Gully Boy
JR
@Just Chuck: Chester is basically Philly, though.
Brachiator
@Betty Cracker:
Damn. Just, damn.
Origuy
There’s a very good book about the different groups from Britain that settled colonial America, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history), by David Hackett Fischer. It talks about the Puritans who settled New England, the Cavaliers who settled the South, the Quakers who settled the Mid-Atlantic, and the Scots-Irish who settled Appalachia. It covers not only their politics and religion, but their language, food, and games.
Quaker in a Basement
@Betty Cracker: Outstanding.
Mr. Mack
Indeed.
Quaker in a Basement
Last I checked, the Chester police hadn’t even bothered with a pro forma “We’re looking into it” response.
Another Scott
@Brachiator: GlobalResearch.ca:
Short-sighted. :-(
Cheers,
Scott.
Jay C
@japa21:
Unfortunately, stuff like this is a win-win situation for Pomp-ass and his ilk: He gets to post his holy-holy maunderings on an official site, and if anyone complains, he and the rest of the Jump-For-Jesus crowd can go on a whinge-binge about how they are being “persecuted” by the “evil secularists” who want to outlaw Christianity, or whatever. Remember, these are folks who see separation of church and state as a bug, not a feature.
Kayla Rudbek
@Jess: Scotch-Irish immigration?
DaddyJ
Interesting. Someone is posting “ads” on that Root page that throw up scary modal popups, some of them telling you to upgrade something, others implying the site is a phishing or malware site. Don’t click on anything in such messages, just immediately close the browser window or tab. If you know how to disable JavaScript in your browser, do so and you can return to the article to read it without interruption.
Ladyraxterinok
@Mandalay:
In some places, at some times—resisting arrest is the only thing that might save your life!
Does the ACLU still give out that card that lists your rights if you are arrested?
My folks read mysteries. So when I was about 10 they let me read Agatha Christie and Perry Mason stories.
I learned from Perry that in moderate to serious cases you should NEVER answer a cop’s questions without your lawyer being present! That the answers can be used to construct a narrative that is definitely not for your own good!
Ladyraxterinok
@Jess:
Part of my paternal grandmother’s family was part of the Mennonite migration that went from Germany to PA and then to the Shenandoah Valley of VA. Her grandfather moved at the age of 7 with his family to IA.
In IA he served with the 11th Infantry in the Civil War. The relatives who stayed in VA had to deal with the horrific battles in the Shenandoh Valley. A few fought and died on the Confederate side at Gettysburg.
Ladyraxterinok
@Cacti:
My mom’s father’s family was from western NC. The family name was Raxter; she never knew where the family came from. A Pate grandfather of his was apparently an irregular fighter in NC during the CWar
D.W. Gregory
@Jess: Invasion of Scots-Irish.
dnfree
@Ladyraxterinok: my grandchildren who have lawyer parents have been taught that from birth, I think. First and only words if ever being questioned by the police.
Ella in New Mexico
@Omnes Omnibus:
But we’re talking a small town in Pennsyl-fucking-tucky here, so…
Bobby Thomson
Chester is absolutely NOT in central PA. It’s just a few miles south of Philly city limits and its population is 70.8% A-A and only 15.2 % white.
FSM knows you don’t have to be in the sticks to have shitty cops.