Fools in da' hood

Ah, Copwatch and Indymedia… Never before have I seen such a bunch of pathetic losers venting their impotent rage at the police. I’ve just read on the Bitches in Blue blog about how the local hemorrhoids have been harassing the Chicago Police Department and claiming—without merit—that the police in that city are and always have been power-crazed bullies.

I have to admit that we have those simpletons here in our area too. Mostly they just make harmless noise and I still laugh when I recall the last time that I had anything to do with their antics.

This encounter stemmed from their outrage over the fact that our agency was responding to an increase in violent drug-related crime in a particular public housing complex by engaging in a practice known as “jump-outs”. In a jump-out, officers roll around in a van all inconspicuous until they see what looks like a group of drug dealers or other assorted thugs. The van pulls up, the officers jump out, and everyone in the group gets detained, run for warrants, and at least frisked if not searched. Typically this results in a warrant hit or two and the recovery of some quantity of drugs and/or a weapon is almost guaranteed. You see, jump-out squads don’t just hit up any group of people—or even any group of black males. They know what the signs of drug dealing and gang affiliation are, and they target the ones who fit those criteria. The goal is the interdiction of bad people, not just harassing groups of teens or young adults.

I wasn’t part of the actual jump-out squad, but I was assigned to loiter in the area as rapid-response back-up when needed. If the thugs broke and ran, or someone began to fight, I was right around the corner.

Well we’d been doing this for a few weeks, and we’d wrapped up a number of bad guys. We’d also snared about a dozen guns and a fair bit of narcotics. In fact, it was going so well that the local newspaper got hold of it and did a story on it. And this brought the kook brigade out in force.

Now when you’re policing a minority-majority city (one where the population is predominately black) and there is no outrage from the usual suspect who claim to speak for the black community—the local Al Sharpton/Jesse Jackson wanna-be types in addition to the NAACP—you’re probably on pretty safe ground. And none of these folks were complaining, because they knew that we were surgically removing from the community the very scumbags who were preying on the decent people and making life hard for the elderly and the single moms who just wanted to get through the day without becoming crime victims. But then the angry white kids showed up.

And these are the fools who run websites like Copwatch and the various Indymedia sites. Self-proclaimed “anarchists”, most are really spoiled suburbanite kids whose parents either don’t know how to raise them to be decent, responsible young adults or they just don’t care. Within a day or two, these little nit-wits are posting all sorts of smack talk on the internet, sending letters to the editor at the newspaper, and posting Xerox-copy fliers around the project telling people to rise up and resist the oppressive police.

Yeah, I know… there’s just no curing stupid.

Well that alone wasn’t really very noteworthy, because everyone knows that there aren’t more than a couple dozen of these little turds in the group, and none of them actually live in our city but only commute in to try to rile things up and then go home to mommy’s and daddy’s basement in one of the more trendy suburbs to watch MTV and play video games in lieu of actually working a job or going to school. But in this case, the kids decided to take it a step further and one day they just appeared in the projects with video cameras, looking for our units or any other signs of police activity, and then dipping in from the sidewalk, telling anyone that we were dealing with that they didn’t have to answer our questions or consent to searches. They basically succeeded in getting us to suspend operations for the day because the unit supervisor didn’t want to give them any publicity by letting them gin up some incident to put on Youtube, so in that regard, they actually accomplished something.

However, a couple of hours after we’d pulled out, some of these little cretins actually walked into our station, looking a bit beaten and battered. It seems that after we’d left, some of those “fine, upstanding people” who live in the projects jumped them and took all of their money and their video cameras—the very cameras that they’d been using to harass US—and roughed them up a bit, either because they didn’t immediately comply or because they displayed some of their trademark “We’re superior to you” attitudes. (I’m betting on the latter.) Now—incredibly—they want to make a police report and they want US to roll back up into the neighborhood in force and recover their stuff for them.

We are, of course, professional enough not to laugh in their faces, but I’m sure they could hear us busting up in the hallway behind our lobby area. Karma can be a real bitch at times, can’t it?

Working hard to be stupid

Some people really have to get up early to make sure that they're the stupidest one on the block.

In the case I recall, it was some of the angry upper-class spoiled suburban white kids that make up the local Indymedia / Copwatch faction.

For those not familiar with these losers, it's as I've described--a bunch of patchouli-reeking white kids whose parents sent them to college, probably just to get them out of the house, but who skip classes to sit around smoking dope and hating the police.

Now why would a bunch of suburban white kids hate the police, you ask? It's pretty much a combination of resenting any and all authority (because their parents didn't teach them to respect it) and anger because the police keep getting between them and their dope. So they form a group called "copwatch" that has no purpose other than to harass the fine men and women who go out to protect and serve their often thankless communities. They put up websites where they make up lies about police abusing people and they typically find glee in any situation where a police officer is injured or killed...basically they're punks.

Well it wasn't too long ago that some of these little vermin read in the papers that several of our local police agencies were engaging in proactive police work in a couple of public housing complexes that were seeing a serious spike in street crimes. Part of what we were doing was "jump-outs" where we'd roll around four deep in an unmarked car, or six to eight deep in a van until we saw a suspicious person or group and then we'd...well, we'd jump out, stop them, identify everyone, and determine who was and who wasn't supposed to be in the area. This was easy to do and completely legal because the complexes are municipal property and have posted rules barring non-residents from being present unless visiting a resident. Typically we'd wind up searching a lot of people and recovering all sorts of drugs and guns, and we also scooped up quite a few who were either wanted on outstanding warrants or had been previously barred from the complexes. we made tons of arrests and removed a lot of hard-core criminals from these complexes, undoubtedly while deterring others from even coming around. The street crime numbers started to go back down and life was starting to get a little better for the decent non-lawbreaking residents.

And then the Copwatch kids showed up.

When they found out about our jumpouts and other selective enforcement practices (like towing all unregistered cars), they issued a press release stating that they would start patrolling these complexes to protect the "rights" of the citizens that we were harassing. basically they meant to stop us from stopping the criminals, and to hell with the residents that the criminals were preying on. And after announcing plans to show up and start videotaping us and educating citizens as to their rights vis-a-vis the police, they popped up one fine Saturday and started walking around with their video cameras, eagerly anticipating some police misconduct, no doubt.

Well sad to say, we weren't doing any operations at that particular time, so they didn't get to see any police in action. But they did get to see some real crime, because four of them showed up at our station with assorted black eyes and split lips (still reeking of patchouli) and demanding that we--the police that they hate--DO SOMETHING. Apparently the sight of these dopey white kids walking around this all-black housing project with expensive video cameras, watches and cell phones was just too much for the local hoods to ignore, and the Copwatch kids wound up getting beaten and robbed by the very hood rats that they were there to support.

And then they came to US--their sworn enemy and sole target of their harassment campaigns--and demanded that we go back up in there and find the criminals who had their stuff.

Yeah, ok. Just as soon as we finish laughing at you.

Needless to say, we never saw those particular doofy losers up in 'da hood again. I'm betting that mommy and daddy eventually bought them all new electronic toys to replace the ones that they'd "donated to the Urban Way".