Lots and lots of cops in front of our house right now. They’re not after us; there’s a stand-off in the house across the street. They’ve got someone trapped in there who shot a cop earlier this week. Earlier, they were telling him through a megaphone to come out and he won’t be hurt.
They’ve got cars parked blocking access to our block from every direction; when Kim got home, she had to park a block away, and then a cop with a big black police dog walked her to the door. They also arrested a woman – we saw them lead her in handcuffs to one of the five parked police cars we can see from our window. Her coat was slipping down, and she was trying to shrug it back onto her shoulders, but couldn’t with her hands cuffed behind her.
A few minutes ago, a cop came to our door with the six-year-old girl who lives across the street – apparently they have her and her father sitting in one of the cars. They asked if she could use our bathroom. We let her use it, of course. We offered to let her stay here and watch TV, but they didn’t even bother saying “no” to that, it was so clearly not something they were going to do. Poor girl.
I think we’re perfectly safe – there are cops crawling all over the neighborhood, and we’re white, so they’ll probably protect us rather than shoot us. Even if there’s gunfire – and there probably won’t be – the odds of a stray bullet hitting one of us is incredibly low.
Morbid thought: If a stray bullet does by a billion-to-one chance hit and kill me, that plus the fact that I wrote this blog entry probably means that I’ll get into the newspaper. It might even get “Alas” more traffic than that time Neil Gaiman linked to me.
Morbid thought the second: Once – just once – I’d like to live in a house where the next door neighbors aren’t arrested or put under seige by the cops. This house, cop shooter; previous house, drug dealer in basement (moved out just before we moved in); previous house, bank robber; previous house, drug dealer (the cops sat outside our house shining a spotlight at us until they figured out they had the wrong address and moved one house over). Also at previous house, a shooting on the bus. If we include down the street stuff, we can include an insane man shot by the police at the previous house, and a man killed by a bouncer at the bar down the street from our current house.
Hmmm…that’s the sort of thing that always gives me pause. I’m white and so usually exempt from police scrutiny. However, my partner is Hispanic and so when we are together in the wrong neighborhoods, we get treated like criminals for no other reason than that cops think a racially mixed couple must be up to no good. My neighborhood is racially mixed, and notoriously sexually mixed with a large percentage of gay and lesbian couples. Across the street from me live a couple of black men around my age who wear clothes that are generally perceived as thuggish; they have a lot of friends that come and go at all hours, so that encourages that feeling amongst my white friends who come and go at all hours. ;)
I like that those guys are there. They seem to have the same house rules that I have no matter what kind of fucked up crazy people are at my home–do what you will, but smoke outside. And therefore those guys and their friends are always outside smoking like we are here. Which means that if anyone ever was to break into my home, they would see. It’s like having a free burglary alarm.
I know it’s wrong not to be overly upset, but I’m amused by white friends of mine from middle class backgrounds who get bent out of shape at the very sight of black men who dress young. They have no clue and they don’t know why….
I lived in two houses in a row in which the house nextdoor burned down the day after I moved in. In the first case, it was widely believed to retaliation between rival factions of the Russian mafia. In the second case, it was ruled an arson-suicide by the very elderly woman who lived in the basement–she paid her rent in cash for 10 years, and no one even knew her last name. I kinda freaked out my current neighbors by telling them that story when I moved into my current place.
Geeze. Take care, y’all.
Be Safe! I hate that feeling – I’ve had to call the cops most places I’ve lived over domestic violence. One night a woman who lived in a basement apartment got drunk and went outside and kicked out all the windows in her place. Another time a woman who had just moved in had a jealous boyfriend show up. That was really scary. Check in with us when you can to let us know everything is ok, but only if you can do that from the back of your house.
I’m fine! Sorry, it was inconsiderate of me not to post an update. They caught the dude hours ago; I went to the airport and caught a flight, and I’m currently in Dallas, waiting for the next leg of my trip to Florida to board.
I’m glad it got resolved peacefully; have a wonderful trip to Florida.
Of course, if you did get killed you’d have people like me telling everyone, with tears in our eyes, “Barry Deutsche was the greatest cartoonist to ever live. Hereville is the best comic creation since Pogo, and now it’s unfinished because people like you didn’t appreciate Barry enough. Also, his farts smelled like bakery fresh cinammon rolls.” Then everyone else would be guilted into reading all your stuff. Original Hereville and Ampersand artwork would sell for millions at charity auctions, and you’d emerge as this century’s Vincent Van Gogh. In a hundred years, there would be a museum based on your work over in Manhattan.
Oh well, have fun in Florida.
the reporter would be “what’s a Pogo? Is it some kind of snacky treat?”
and unless the stray bullet that kills him rips of his ear, he can’t be a new Van Gogh. maybe a new Norman Rockwell…
Then I’d sigh and say, “Fine, best comic since Garfield.” Then they’d say, “Oooh, I love Garfield, those jokes are hilariously inoffensive and predictable! Did you see yesterday’s comics where he ate lasagna, or kicked Odie, or John couldn’t get a date? Comedy gold!” And then I’d kill myself.
Yeah, Amanda I had a boyfriend who was Latino, same experiences. You’re what’s known as a race traitor. It took me a while to realize that’s how the white cops saw it. In our agency, they ran around and told the white girlfriends of one Black officer that they didn’t approve of her relationship with him and that they wanted her to end it, and the few white officers who date or marry outside their race usually kept it secret. Right after one marriage was outed(during an internal affairs investigation), that cop and his wife divorced.
The guy was lucky to come out with his life after shooting a cop. We had one guy here accused of shooting a cop who came out naked so that they wouldn’t shoot him and later said he was reaching for a weapon.
In my old neighborhood, I lived with gang members, drug dealers, on top of an apartment where two men got their sister to rent the apartment then used it to run guns and drugs. Multiple shootings, stray bullets everywhere. Then retaliation for reporting drug dealers, meth labs(which besides their horrible smell can blow an entire apartment building sky high), suicides, murders, DV, dirty cops, etc. Even with that, most of the neighborhood weren’t involved in any of this, were treated as the worst criminals by police even though they were the main victims of almost all the crime. Double bind.
The police only hassle me because I “ask for it” by making their lives difficult I guess, but then that’s not exactly the job description but I guess that’s how they view it.
I’m glad that was resolved, Barry. Enjoy your vacation.
After living my entire life in Maryland in areas that had pretty high crime rates, I definitely enjoy the next-to-nonexistent crime rate in the small Massachusetts town I live in now. If I see or hear a cop car, it’s usually just someone being pulled over for speeding or parking in a “no parking” zone. I don’t freak out seeing cops anymore, not like the way I used to. There were always cops around my grandmother’s house in a high-crime city, and it just wasn’t safe. Here in Small Townville, it’s usually nothing serious.
I talked to a guy today who has a herniated disc b/c he was hit from behind by a drunk off-duty cop who was fleeing another accident, but who couldn’t flee after hitting this guy, b/c she totalled her car. She gets arrested for misdemeanor DUI, and charged with that and misdemeanor hit and run. She plead to only the DUI and gets some probation, 15 days sweeping streets and a fine. Oh, and she gets to keep her job.
The guy? Well, he also worked for the department and when he blew the whistle on what she’d done to the public, he was forced to transfer out by the police chief.
Lovely, just world isn’t it?
Hmm, I’m curious where you’re from radfem. Because, although I’ve never had that long of relations with hispanic women, I’ve never been hastled when dating them. I’m wondering if this reflects the fact that I’m from a small town, the fact that white men with hispanic women isn’t viewed as bad as the other way around, or sheer dumb luck.
I think it’s different if it’s white woman and men of color than vice versa. I think that has to do with history in this country, i.e. miscegenation laws that were geared more towards Black men and White women. Black men including teenagers were lynched and tortured for even looking at white women, whereas White men could abuse and rape Black women with impunity and that was socially accepted and definitely not considered illegal. Sometimes, women like Harriet Jacobs entered into “consensual” relationships with White men to avoid being raped by their slavemasters. She wrote a detailed account of her life experiences.
Maybe part of that has to do with the matrineal(?) lineage of slaves(as decided by Whites), in a country where with Whites, it was patrialineal instead. I don’t really know, probably many reasons but I noticed while researching my city’s police department, that there was this obvious double standard with interracial relationships and LE agencies tend to magnify greatly the institutional racism and sexism in greater society to the 10th degree in many ways. Two officers were married to Black women. One, above divorced after being ‘outed’ by an officer to I.A.(not that that was the purpose of I.A., it was more like what the officer saying he was hiding his marriage from other White cops to avoid being blackballed). When this officer was interviewed by I.A.(an officer he trained alleged racism in the department and said that this officer had told him that racial profiling was part of the training), he denied everything he said about the department being racist. My boss was really hurt by that, b/c she had heard the exact same allegations from him and thought he was different, but when push came to shove–not.
The other White officer married to a Black woman was quite racist, which sounds contradictory but it’s really not, because it happens.
Whereas the Men of color in LE who married White women including a friend of mine, all were hassled or their girlfriends/wives were hassled by White officers.
Among friends of mine in interracial relationships, they haven’t been treated badly, as it is to some extent, tolerated in my city, though not so much in south-western cities in my county, where there’s still a lot of overt racism from white supremacist groups. But the cops have hangups all over the county.
It might depend a lot on the region of the country. I live in a conservative city with an increasing population of Latinos, which mirrors the state which is California.
Vivid memories of my childhood home… the view from my bedroom window… The first image my eyes saw each morning was a pair of weathered tennis shoes. They dengled by their laces from a telephone line in front of the house accross the street from mine, demarking it as a crack house. They were the mistletoe at my schoolbus stop.
Thanks for the flashback…
Well, thanks radfem. That was quite informative.
I think it’s different if it’s white woman and men of color than vice versa. I think that has to do with history in this country, i.e. miscegenation laws that were geared more towards Black men and White women.
well, what nobody wants to say but everybody understands here is that the fear is one parallel to the fear of gay men (much more so than lesbians). it’s the image of a black penis going into a white woman (or any penis going into a man’s parts) that drives the asymmetry. nobody cares what a white guy does with his (mainstream) penis, nor do they worry much about what’s being inserted into black women, so the quintessential feared relationship is the black man (threatening! primal!) “taking” the white woman (pure! civilized!) . . .
jeez, you’d like to think we were past this at the point when we’re talking about the current day and contemporary coworkers, but the fact that it continues on is a tribute to the depth at which the fear imagery is rooted. sigh.
Omigosh, I got off the phone with the I.A. lieutenant and he told me the DA’s office declined to file on the “hit and run” charge b/c they felt they didn’t have enough evidence and the off-duty officer did not appear to realize she had hit the first car(gee, maybe b/c she was plastered?)!
So, naturally without the hit and run, she gets to keep her job….Lovely.
I spent three hours with an NAACP rep. and three people who were advocating for this mentally ill man who was pepperballed 36 times by sheriffs, who responded to a suicidal call. The comments and laughter they made, and the continued firing of eight pepper balls after he was lying on the ground was disgusting…and all on tape.
pepperballs are plastic balls filled with OC(pepper spray) which disperse when they strike the person, or ground. They are fired from a launcher.
Sounds like you’re the bad element, there. Perhaps you have a bad aura following you around or going to the places you plan to live at? Just kidding.
That is freaky. So, did they get the guy? Did you find out why the woman was handcuffed?