#the police department is not going to call you to panhandle

[medinaquirin]

Trying to explain to my dad how not to fall for scams, which is a hoot bc he only seems interested in defending his position of "why I fell for the scam."

[igettalk]

Texas Authorities Issue Blue Alert For 33-Year-Old Seth Altman Who Is Suspected of Harming a Police Officer

Early Friday morning, the Texas Department of Public Safety issued a statewide Blue Alert for Seth Altman, a 33-year-old man suspected of seriously injuring a law enforcement officer. The alert, sent out shortly before 5 a.m., woke many Texans and started a manhunt across the state. Altman was last seen around 11 p.m. Thursday in Memphis, Texas, a small town about 80 miles south of Amarillo in the Texas Panhandle. He was reportedly on foot in the 200 block of South 4th Street, heading toward U.S. 287. The suspect is described as a white male, 6 feet 2 inches tall, weighing 220 pounds, with red or auburn hair and blue eyes. He was last seen wearing a blue T-shirt and blue jeans. Authorities consider Seth Altman armed and dangerous, warning the public not to approach him if spotted and to call 911 immediately. While official details are limited, local news outlets reported that Memphis Police Chief Rex Plant was shot more than once on Thursday night. The officer was taken to a hospital in Lubbock for treatment but his condition still remains unknown. The Blue Alert system, created in 2008, assists authorities in ensuring public safety and apprehending suspects accused of killing or seriously wounding law enforcement officers. This alert is one of the many public safety notifications used in Texas, alongside AMBER Alerts for missing children and Silver Alerts for missing elderly individuals. However, the early morning alert didn't seem to go down well with some residents. Some users on X complained about being woken up for an incident that occurred hours earlier and far from their location. Some comments read: - Totally unacceptable to blast alerts at this hour. You have no right to intrusively blast sirens on our private phones while we sleep. Who approved this? - Waking the whole state up before 5:00 am for something that happened at 11:00 last night is a sure fire way to get everyone to turn off their government alerts. - Why the whole state of Texas has to be alerted ..still don't know this - Why in the f*ck are you waking up the whole damn state when I’m fucking 6 hours away???? - AMBER ALERT 4AM IN MORNING IS CRAZY. YOU'RE GONNA MAKE PEOPLE TURN OFF THEIR AMBER ALERTS. I FEEL LIKE YOU COULD HAVE WAITED TILL 6AM. Regardless of that, the Texas law enforcement agencies are still urging the public to remain vigilant and report any information that could lead to Seth Altman's arrest. Read the full article

[stevishabitat]

NEW YORK — On a subway platform in the Bronx recently, a girl in a puffer coat strolled past passengers with a basket of M&M’s, Kit Kats and Trident gum slung across her shoulder. She looked to be 7 or 8. One rider captured her on a video posted on X, formerly Twitter, calling out, “No parent, no parent, where the parent at?” as she walked by. Of all the manifestations of human misery that the two-year-old migrant crisis has brought to New York City, few trouble the conscience more than the sight of children selling candy on the subway — sometimes during school hours, sometimes accompanied by parents, sometimes not.

On trains and on social media, New Yorkers have asked: Isn’t this child labor? Is it illegal? Shouldn’t someone be doing something to help these children? Children between the ages of 6 and 17 are required to be in school. Children under 14 are not allowed to do most jobs. You can’t sell merchandise in the transit system without a permit. But whose job is it to do something? Recent queries to seven city and state agencies found the consensus to be “not mine.”

More than 180,000 migrants have been processed by New York City agencies in the last two years, and about 65,000 are staying in homeless shelters. Many of the newcomers are desperate to find ways to survive in an expensive city, but unable to work legally. Selling food is one of their main sources of income.

A 16-year-old recently spotted selling candy on a downtown 1 train in Manhattan at 10:45 on a weekday morning said she was there “because I have to help my parents.” She refused to give her name.

The Department of Education has “attendance teachers” who work to ensure families send their children to school, but they do not go out on patrol. “I think I’ll refer you to the NYPD on this,” a spokesperson wrote.

The Police Department said that it issued more than 1,100 summonses last year for “unlawful vending and unlawful solicitation/panhandling” in the subways. But the department declined to say whether officers are instructed to do anything if they see school-age children selling candy during school hours.

The state Labor Department said it was “difficult to determine” whether the practice of children selling candy in the subway would violate labor law, which generally “regulates employment relationships (i.e., between employers and employees).”

The city’s child welfare agency, the Administration for Children’s Services, said that anyone who sees a child in a situation that seems unsafe can call the state child abuse hotline.

But the State Office of Children and Family Services, which runs the hotline, said that a child selling merchandise or panhandling would not be considered maltreatment or neglect unless there was a specific concern about possible harm, like “children selling candy at a dangerous intersection.” (While crime has declined in the subways in recent years, the governor deployed the National Guard and the State Police to subway stations last week to allay persistent concerns about safety.)

There are logistical hurdles to addressing the issue. By the time someone called the state hotline and the report was evaluated and passed along to ACS, a candy seller could have already moved to a different location. The police can respond more quickly, but they typically are dispatched only in emergencies.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the subways, cited its rule against unauthorized commercial activity, which carries a $50 fine, and referred further inquiries to the police and City Hall.

Most of the candy sellers come from Ecuador, advocates for migrants say, and photos of children selling candy here have stirred concerns there. When Mayor Eric Adams visited Ecuador in October on a whirlwind tour of Latin America to discourage migrants from coming to New York, a local reporter confronted him at a news conference.

“What’s going to happen to our Ecuadorian children, who we have seen selling candy in Times Square, in the subway?” she demanded.

The mayor responded obliquely. “I have noticed children selling candy on the streets of all my countries,” he said, adding, “In New York City, we do not allow our children to be in dangerous environments.”

Migrants are hesitant to talk about their work or where they buy the candy. New York Magazine reported last year that some get it from wholesalers or cheap stores.

Monica Sibri, an Ecuadorian immigrant who advocates for migrants in New York, listed a number of reasons that she said newly arrived migrants had given her for bringing their children with them to sell on the trains.

Some, she said, wrongly assume that their children can miss a semester of school and catch up easily. Some face delays getting their children enrolled because of paperwork and vaccination records. Some, she said, sold candy with their children back in Ecuador and are simply doing the same thing here as a temporary measure.

“The families are not saying they don’t want to put their kids in school,” Sibri said. “What they’re saying is they haven’t figured out the paperwork that they need to be able to put them in, and some of them aren’t trusting the system.”

Sibri and other advocates are holding sessions this spring for migrant children and their families who have become candy sellers, to help provide resources for them to pursue an education and “live with dignity.”

At 2:25 p.m. on Friday on the uptown platform at Columbus Circle in Manhattan, a woman with a small girl and smaller boy was selling Snickers and Welch’s Fruit Snacks.

Kristina Voronaia, a 32-year-old caterer from Kazakhstan, was sitting near them on the bench and glanced over. “It would be better if they were at school,” she said.

The girl went off by herself in search of customers. Josefina Vazquez, 50, a home health aide, asked where her mother was. Close by, the girl said.

“That’s bad,” Vazquez said, “using kids.”

The candy seller said she was 9 years old. She was not in school, she said in Spanish, because she hadn’t gone for a vaccine appointment.

Further down the platform, she approached Sandra Acosta beseechingly. Acosta bought a bag of peanut M&M’s. “She should be in school,” said Acosta, 55, who is also a home health aide. “And it’s dangerous — there’s a lot of crazy people.”

She thought a little more and said she felt sympathy for the child’s mother. “Maybe she doesn’t have anyone to leave them with, to care for them,” she said. “We have to see the balance from both sides.”

c.2024 The New York Times Company

[your-krazy-uncle-bob]

Why do drug addicts get to break the law and ruin the neighborhood for everyone who is trying to contribute to society? Probably because there are an army of activists paid to make sure none of these people go to jail. Instead their petty crimes get ignored and they pass through the system like ghosts, using up hundreds of hours of police and fire department time in the process. It’s not fair to anyone that these people get treated differently than the people who are expected to tolerate their misbehavior and pay for their care.

Here’s the KGW 8 report.

And finally, here’s the KOIN 6 report about Demetryus Bright. Stick around to the end of this clip to hear what a police officer told Bright after his car got vandalized.

This is an easy problem to solve. The first step is realizing this in not OUR problem. Those people who live on the streets so that they can use drugs all day with impunity need to be compelled to deal with THEIR own problem. We can't do it for them. Sure it'll be hard at first but tell me......why should I give a shit? I didn't sell them drugs or screw up their lives so how is it that I'm expect to solve their problems for them. Hundreds of thousands of addicts recover from drug and alcohol addiction every year. But as long as we're willing to enable them they will never recover. Remember when you give a panhandler a dollar......you've just bought a dollars worth of their dignity.

The cities should institute a zero tolerance position on street camping and open air drug markets. Round up the homeless and drop them off at the city limits and tell them not to come back. The mentally ill should be placed in facilities designed to deal with their problem. Criminals among them should go to jail. That's what we used to do and it worked surprisingly well. Using government money to suspend these people just off bottom prevents them from ever taking action in their own lives. It also allows the problem to expand ever larger as is totally obvious to anyone except a progressive.

As it is now, society is loving these people to death. I call it the "tyranny of good intentions." And in the process they are making the lives of citizens a living hell. The positive result of allowing people to hit bottom is that leaves them nowhere to go but up. If you ask any recovered addict or alcoholic they will tell you that their bottom was what finally produce that moment of clarity that forced them to seek freedom from their addiction, to fight for their lives. Pain is not necessarily a bad thing. Especially pain that leads to reform.

YKUB

[lokilickedme]

The Queen of Springtown

I’m going to tell you a story.  It’s a true story.  There’s a bit of conjecture here and there to fill in empty spots, but not a lot.  It’s a story about my grandmother - my paternal grandmother, not my maternal grandmother - I feel the need to specify who exactly it is because mom’s mom has a bit of a story too, but that’s for later.

This one’s about the one I’m going to call Elizabeth.  Elizabeth was her middle name, it was a family name, it belonged to her mother and her grandmother I believe, though I didn’t know any of those people so I couldn’t swear by it.  The family records are long gone if they ever existed.

Elizabeth’s last name was one of those romantically ridiculous names that still clung to old families at the turn of the century.  It had a lot of extraneous letters at the end, a handful of unnecessary and partially silent sounds that looked beautiful in the flowery handwritten script of the time, a noble sounding -eaoux that did little more than tag a fancy sounding o onto the back end.  A lot of fuss for such a little piece of sound.  And when Elizabeth’s grandfather moved his family from France to Ireland and signed the manifests upon arrival in the new old land, he dropped the -eaoux and shortened the family’s name to four tiny letters and a single syllable.  They were Irish now.

Elizabeth’s father carried the new name and the new heritage, and when he was of age he went and married an Irish beauty named - yep, Elizabeth.  They say she was redheaded and blue eyed and fair skinned, though no pictures exist to prove it.  All that exists is my grandmother, who supposedly looked just like her mama.  She didn’t remember Ireland...she was too young when her daddy moved his family to a new land just like his own daddy had done, and she never really told anyone she was Irish.  No one actually knew, once her parents were gone.

But you could tell.  She looked it - flame red hair, china blue eyes, fair skin.  She had the bones of whatever French nobility had been in her lineage from way back, but her colors were the Emerald Isle all the way.  A beauty like you’d see in the movies, petite and ladylike and perfectly put together.

But my god that woman had a wild streak that dated right back to the Celts whose blood made up half of what she was.

(continued under the cut because long story)

So Elizabeth grew up in America, the daughter of an Irish mother and a French father.  She had brothers and sisters, quite a few, though I never knew any of them.  I believe I met two of them when I was too young to remember much about the encounter, but I’ve always found it hilarious that one of her sisters was named Bill.  Bill, like the man’s name.  I never found out why and I’m not entirely sure there was ever actually a reason.  It was just one of those things.

The newly American family settled in Texas.  And when Elizabeth was very young - probably not yet in her 20′s, though nobody knows for sure just how old she actually was because it’s likely she tended to fib a bit about her age to get into places she had no business being - she got herself involved with the Texas mafia.

Now let me tell you a thing or two about the Texas mafia.  It wasn’t an official operation - not like the Italian Mafioso or the Eastern Syndicates or whatever the hell was going on between Florida and Cuba at the time.  But it was every bit as dangerous and vicious and bloody and corrupt as any of those bigger organizations, and it was led for the most part by a man I’m going to call Big Joe.

This was the early 1940′s or thereabouts.  Elizabeth was a party girl - up for anything, always out and about, girl-gang at the swing club, the works.  And Big Joe saw her in the club one night, it may very well have been his club she was dancing at, and the proverbial first-sight thing kicked him hard in the gonads.  This girl was a looker, and she was dancing with everyone in the place, whooping it up, living life like tomorrow it was all going to take a header into the sea.  He had to have her.

And he did.

Big Joe was likely in his late 30′s, maybe early 40′s.  There’s not a lot of information on him other than a handful of facts mentioned once and only once by my grandmother to my aunt - that Big Joe was a handsome man, big and tough and a snazzy dresser, and he always had enough money in his pocket to take Elizabeth anywhere she wanted to go and buy her anything she wanted to buy.  And Elizabeth, party girl extraordinaire, was all up for that.

So Elizabeth and Big Joe become a thing.  Everybody knows she’s his squeeze - and suddenly not a male soul in Dallas or the surrounding metropolitan areas will dare to lay an eye on her, not even a quick glance, because she’s Big Joe’s girl.  And that means something.  Elizabeth doesn’t know quite what it means because she’s likely not even 20 yet, but Big Joe is fun and romantic and he takes her on trips and buys her nice clothes.  He buys her a ring, a blood red garnet, a ring that I inherit many decades later.  He’s going to marry her, he says.  She doesn’t care much one way or the other, she’s having too much fun dancing every night in his club, traveling with him, going shopping, rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous of the Southwest.  She’s all but a star, protected and adored.  Big Joe’s men follow her everywhere she goes when she’s not with him.  And Big Joe starts going out of town without her a lot, taking care of business that he never tells her the details of.

She’s cool with that.  He’s a businessman, that’s what he’s always told her.  Things to take care of out of town.  The Boss.  He has a lot of operations to oversee, operations that make all that money he spends on her.

She has no idea what he actually does.

All she knows - or cares to know - is that when he comes back to town he ushers her around town in his big fancy black car, buying her furs and expensive dinners, showing her off to society.  When he isn’t slapping her around...but hey, that’s part of the deal isn’t it?  It’s the 1940′s, and Big Joe is very much a man of the era.  Women grew up knowing they’d have to take the back of a man’s hand from time to time, and Elizabeth knew which side her bread was buttered on.  She kept Big Joe happy, put a smile on his face, did the old grin-and-bear-it on the rest of it.

And then one night Big Joe comes banging on her door.  He’s frantic.  He pushes a set of keys into her hand - keys to the fancy black car that takes her everywhere - and tells her to keep it there, at her house.  Don’t drive it anywhere, just keep it there.  He’ll contact her soon and tell her what to do.

He leaves in another car with one of his men, and that’s the last time Elizabeth ever sees him.

A few weeks later she gets a letter from Big Joe telling her to drive the car into Grapevine Lake, on the far side by the shoals.  Don’t open the trunk, he says.  Put a brick on the gas pedal and put it in drive.  Do it at night and make sure nobody sees you.

That night Elizabeth picks up her best friend and they drive the car to Grapevine to do as Big Joe said, sinking it in the murky green water on the far side of the lake.  The two girls - just girls, barely even women yet - stand on the shore watching it disappear into the deep dark.

A week later Big Joe is shot to death.  A deal gone bad maybe, or a competitor moving into the territory.  Nobody really knows - grandmother never said.  Don’t think I haven’t done my research...I know what I know, and according to a nearly nonexistent little trove of newspaper articles microfiched in a tiny little library in Azle Texas that isn’t even there anymore, odds are very likely that Big Joe went down in a shootout with the Dallas Police Department.

Elizabeth never opened the trunk of that car.  At least she said she didn’t...it’s one of the many things that nobody ever knew or will ever know, because once she shut the door on that part of her life and moved on, it might as well have never happened.  Getting this much out of her was outrageously difficult.  Thanks to my very tenacious and very persevering aunt, what I’ve just told you managed to survive.  It’s very likely my aunt was the only person she ever told, and it’s very likely I in turn am the only person my aunt ever told.  And now my aunt is in her 70′s and in poor health, and this little unknown family story has started poking around at the back of my skull.  I don’t want it to be lost.  I don’t like the idea of soon being the only person alive who knows it.  It’s not a spectacular story, but it’s testament to the fact that extraordinary things happen to ordinary people, probably more often than you’d think - and that those ordinary people sometimes take it all to the grave with them.

Elizabeth - my dad’s mom, my grandmother, the one I look like and act like and laugh like, the one whose cheekbones and eyes and hair and size I was born with, passed away twenty-something years ago.  She lived through some extraordinary things.  After the demise of Big Joe she married an oil roughneck, one of the semi-transient oilfield workers that were prevalent in the Texas Panhandle at the time, and had two children with him - one of whom was my father.  The roughneck was the epitome of the James Dean romantic brooding bad boy type, handsome and manly, but unfortunately also a scoundrel who had a second family in another city that he went to every other month when he traveled to another rig for work.  She left him when she found out.  It was almost unheard of at the time, a young mother taking her two little kids and leaving her husband to be on her own, but she did it.  And when my father was 12 she met and married a very tall, very handsome, very Cary Grant-esque railroad worker who loved life every bit as much as she did.

They were together for the rest of her life.  I’ve never to this day seen two people more in love than Elizabeth and Jesse.  I spent many summers in Texas with them and not a night went by that I couldn’t hear them giggling in the next room after lights-out, talking and laughing quietly until granddad’s wallshaking snores echoed through the house.  It just about killed him when her heart gave out.  But she was old, and she’d lived a life worth living.  There was nothing in her face in those final moments that could ever convince anyone she wasn’t ready and willing to go when the time came.

I’d been married for a couple of years when she died, and my husband and I traveled to Texas for the funeral.  The first night there, as my aunt brought out grandmother’s jewelry box and told me to take whatever I wanted, the story was passed from her to me.  And when it was all told I opened a little drawer in the bottom of the jewelry box and pulled out an old garnet ring that I’d seen before, when I was a small child snooping in grandma’s stuff.  I’d always been fascinated with it...it just looked like it had a story to tell.  That’s it, my aunt said.  That’s the ring he gave her.  That’s all she ended up with.

It was the only thing I took.

The church was so full the next morning you’d have thought it was the final sendoff for some local celebrity.  Everybody loved my grandmother, everybody, but this was sort of astounding.  Some of them I knew from my childhood, from many many summers spent in the Panhandle, but people came from all over to say goodbye and nobody in the family knew who a lot of them were.  They just showed up, some of them cried, some just stood in the back of the church all stoic in black suits.  Some were very old.  And when it was over and I turned around to watch a group of distinctly important-looking old gentlemen quickly and quietly leave the building, I looked over at my aunt and pointed at them.  She arched her eyebrows in that way she always did, that way, the way that said What did I tell you?? - and I wondered if maybe all those years ago some of Big Joe’s men hadn’t pulled that car out of Lake Grapevine and found the trunk empty.

I mean...this is Elizabeth we’re talking about.

[seriousbusinessforhumans]

25. Tax Fraud, probably Bank Fraud, Lying about his businesses, Shady tax schemes he picked up from his father

24. Attacking protesters and media for a photo-op at a church he doesn’t go to

23. Demonizing immigrants

22. Awful conditions at detention centers, large scale immigration raids, forced hysterectomies 

21. Firing Attorney General Sally Yates for being ‘disloyal’

20. Firing 5 independent watch-dogs (Inspectors General) from 5 different departments

19. Diverting money from Pentagon to pay for the Wall

18. Abandoning Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, possibly didn’t know Puerto Rico was part of the US - “Big Water”

17. Encouraging Uyghur concentration camps in China “exactly the right thing to do”

16. Cozying up to dictators - Kim Jong-un, Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan

15. Lying about voter fraud, trying to undermine the entire election process

14. Slacking off on the golf course

13. “Our media is the enemy of the people”

12. Undermining Judges

11. Washington Post reports he has made over 20,000 false or misleading claims as president

10. Routinely skips reading intel briefings

9. Attacking mail-in voting

8. Encouraged Russian meddling in the election

7. Obstruction of justice in Mueller investigation

6. Protecting Jamal Khashoggi’s killers (Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman)

5. At least 9 women with sexual assault allegations

4. Separating families at the border

3. Ukraine debacle - impeachment

2. Everything to do with Covid-19 (Firing the Pandemic Team to begin with, attacking Anthony Fauci, racist statements, denying problem, Diamond Princess ship, saying he doesn’t want to do testing, lack of PPE, disinfectant...by injection, refusing to practice social distancing, holding super spreader rallies, promoting drugs not supported by scientists, promoting woman who preaches about demon sex)

“You’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people slow the testing down”

Admits in interviews with Bob Woodward that he knew how deadly the Covid-19 virus was “I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down.”

1. He’s somehow still president...and he’s not done with us yet

There’s a lot they missed....

101. In 2019 US airstrikes killed more civilians in Afghanistan than any other year since 2002. There was a 330% increase from 2016 to 2019. Attributed to a decision by the Trump administration to loosen the Rules of Engagement for airstrikes. More bombs were dropped in Afghanistan in 2018-2019 than at the height of the US troop presence in 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbwGo27v9QQ&t=263s

102. Anti-Environmentalist agenda: His administration filled agencies with climate deniers, unraveled and watered down numerous environmental regulations, pulled the US out of the Paris climate accord, buried climate studies, and opened up swaths of public land for oil and gas drilling.

103. Climate change denial, and general disregard for science, while claiming he inherited a “a scientific mind” from his uncle 

104. Fired James Comey as Director of the FBI. A memo was later leaked to the press where Trump had asked him to end the FBI's investigation into Michael Flynn, the former national security advisor.

105. Wanting to be a dictator: Says “When somebody’s the president of the United States, the authority is total” at a press briefing about the novel coronavirus

106. Comments on Xi Jinping: “He’s now president for life, president for life. And he’s great.” “And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday.”

107. Kavanaugh

108. Everything in John Bolton’s book

109. Iran bullshit

110. Saying Biden will “Hurt God. Hurt the bible”

111. Supporting asbestos

112. Anti-Choice situation

113.”I just wish her well” about Ghislaine Maxwell (Epstein’s right hand woman)

114. Threatens to shut down Twitter for fact checking him

115. Federal Police sent to snatch up protesters in certain cities

116. “When they start looting, we start shooting.”

117. At a rally when a supporter shouts “Shoot Them!” in reference to illegal immigrants, Trump laughs and says “Only in the panhandle can you get away with that statement.”

118. Praising Congressman Greg Gianforte for assaulting a member of the press

119. Removes language on Freedom of the Press from Justice Department handbook

120. Tweets calling for followers to “LIBERATE” Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia, in response to Covid lockdowns.

121. Seems to suggest a wave of anti-Semitic threats in 2017 could have come from Jewish people themselves to “make others look bad.”

122. Claims there was some sort of terrorist attack “happening last night in Sweden” that never happened, because they took in “large numbers“ of immigrants. 

123. Pulls US out of the WHO.

124. Tries to ban news outlets he doesn’t like from press briefings in 2017 (including BBC, CNN, NYT).

125. Claims at debate that the Portland, Oregon sheriff supports him “As the Multnomah County Sheriff I have never supported Donald Trump and will never support him.”

126. Supporting discrimination of LGBTQ people in many ways. Removes mentions of LGBT people from anti-discrimination guidelines for a number of federal departments. In March 2018, lesbian and bisexual resources disappeared from the website of the Department of Health and Human Services. Doesn’t interpret Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to prohibit employment discrimination based on sexual orientation. Proposed Rule allowing federal contractors to discriminate against LGBTQ Workers. Expanding the ‘conscience rule’ that would allow health care workers to discriminate against LGBTQ people.

127. Opposed the Equality Act, which would have protected against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity,

128. Trans military ban

129. Strips workplace protections from civil servants, in an executive order that also makes it easier to hire new employees outside of the competitive process which can be used to hire employees without appropriate experience.

130. Steve Bannon

131. Comments on electoral college

132. Breaking diplomatic protocol by handing out his cellphone number to world leaders and urging them to call him directly, which raises concerns about national security. Jared Kushner’s meeting with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. to discuss securing a secret line of communication with Moscow. https://apnews.com/article/11a48fde81634789b1cc361696693b68

133. Pardoning soldiers implicated in war crimes

[the-firebird69]

They open huge chasms today all along Florida and all along Georgia and Alabama they're trying they're like 40 to 50 miles long and about 500 miles deep all of them are open fully in their intelligent huge crowds of people and down here along the shoreline we have holes all around every single one of them is feeding a massive massive inlet into the mouths or into Hodges or into just a general area the outside of the Cajun does it absorbs it is a massive massive program now we're doing everything we can to get them out to get this idiots to shut up it is huge they are migrating here by the millions and millions of millions I can't give the real number out I probably could because they can estimate that's about 1 million NN an hour per location of entry meaning one Miami to is the West Coast Naples and three is Sarasota four would be Tampa 5 is Tallahassee in the panhandle six would be the northern Porter with Georgia seven would be Jacksonville it would be Miami itself and nine would be West Palm area and 10 would be the place and each one has a hole and there's a few more too and they all go around there saying that the awesomeness in the balls and it's a huge number of people going huge and it's depressing though so grossband dumb. We have just about 500 million people a minute requesting assistance from us on our websites so directing them to emergency services of Satanist and they're saying that they're not doing anything any direct them to their fire departments and their ambulances and their police they say they're not doing a damn thing and so with weather complaining about her chasms and whirlwinds and things like that and they're always say if there's a danger you do not proceed towards it we are not recommending that it's like let your own people who are trained to do that and proceed to do that and say that I can't trust them so you're not in the agency we are providing products for people and they start getting mad so blocking your calls and they find other ones so they finally it's mostly people here so good after him to stop them from calling that's it

The difference with these Black ships is that they have shields that work meaning you can fire a missile that's 5 mi long it's the 4000 mi shipping and it won't do anything even a 20 mi s*** it's not going to do much The shield actually absorbs the energy that's released by blowing up. Another about 300 million 20 mi Black ships there are 400 million 10 mile and 780 million five mile at 650,000 trillion 1 MI

There are 20 5000 mi

80 6,000 MI and one 10,000 mi ship no restricted to space because they were close to which damage if they land so they probably won't last that long just to get a radiator but not with the shield on it

The weapon systems are gigantic and cutting edge in our class b monthly for us but class a across the board with Satanist other fleets were very quickly destroyed

Thor Freya

[wwwnewunificationchurchcom]

MIAMI — A little-known GOP candidate in one of Florida’s most competitive congressional seats was secretly recorded threatening to send “a Russian and Ukrainian hit squad” to a fellow Republican opponent to make her “disappear.”

During a 30-minute call with a conservative activist that was recorded before he became a candidate, William Braddock repeatedly warned the activist to not support GOP candidate Anna Paulina Luna in the Republican primary for a Tampa Bay-area congressional seat because he had access to assassins. The seat is being vacated by Rep. Charlie Crist (D-Fla.), who is running for governor.

“I really don't want to have to end anybody's life for the good of the people of the United States of America,” Braddock said at one point in the conversation last week, according to the recording exclusively obtained by POLITICO. 

“That will break my heart. But if it needs to be done, it needs to be done. Luna is a f---ing speed bump in the road. She's a dead squirrel you run over every day when you leave the neighborhood.”

Reached by text message, Braddock refused to say whether he made any threats about Luna to the person who recorded him, Erin Olszewski.

This is a modal window. This modal can be closed by pressing the Escape key or activating the close button. Share: Secret recording: Florida Republican threatens Russian-Ukranian ‘hit squad’ after rival FacebookGoogle+LinkedInPinterestTumblrTwitter Direct Link https://www.politico.com/news/2021/06/17/secret-recording-florida-republican-threat-hit-squad-494976 Start From hh:mm:ss Embed Code <iframe src='//players.brightcove.net/1155968404/r1WF6V0Pl_default/index.html?videoId=6259286704001' allowfullscreen frameborder=0></iframe> Close Modal Dialog Asked repeatedly via text if he mentioned Russian-Ukrainian hit squads, Braddock wouldn’t give a yes or no answer, saying he had not heard the recording and that it’s “allegedly me … there is no proof of that.” He also suggested the recording “may even be altered and edited.”

“This is a dirty political tactic that has caused a lot of people a lot of stress and is completely unnecessary,” he said.

Olszewski denied editing or altering the recording. She said she made it because she was concerned about Braddock’s “unhinged” dislike of Luna that he had previously expressed. After she made the recording just after midnight last Wednesday, she promptly turned it over to St. Petersburg, Fla., police and gave a heads-up to her friend Luna, who filed a petition for an injunction against Braddock. Luna and Olszewski each received a temporary restraining order against him last week. Braddock filed to run Monday.

In the recording, Braddock early in the call brought up the alleged assassins. He also made rambling statements about getting financial help from fellow Freemasons or by somehow importing millions of dollars from Malta and Gibraltar.

“I have access to a hit squad, too, Ukrainians and Russians,” he said about three minutes into the call, adding “don't get caught out in public supporting Luna. … Luna’s gonna go down and I hope it's by herself.”

Braddock went on to explain that he didn’t think Luna could win in the general election. Luna, an Air Force veteran and former model who went on to become a conservative activist, won a crowded GOP primary in the state’s 13th Congressional District last year but lost the general election to Crist.

It's unclear exactly why Braddock has such dislike toward Luna. The two do not appear to have any previous connection to one another, and Braddock is a lower-tier candidate in an increasingly crowded race for Crist’s seat. Already, two state lawmakers and a former Obama administration official have entered the race, with others expected to jump in.

The threats, claims of assassins and political backstabbing put an only-in-Florida stamp on what was already shaping up to be a wild midterm of congressional races. Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz in the Panhandle is still batting back accusations in an ongoing federal sex trafficking probe. Democratic Rep. Val Demings is leaving her Orlando seat to run for Senate, causing a mad scramble to replace her. And the state is getting an additional congressional seat that is certain to lead to another crush of candidates after redistricting before next year’s elections.

MOST READ Anna Paulina Luna stands on a podium at a rally for then-President Donald Trump. In secret recording, Florida Republican threatens to send Russian-Ukrainian ‘hit squad’ after rival Manchin moves shake up Dem strategy for massive elections bill Trump rails against Covid vaccines for ‘very young people’ GOP hands Dems a new line of attack: They're for 'Trump over the cops' New York’s mayoral race remains a tossup after final Democratic debate

Olszewski, who initiated and recorded the call just after midnight on June 9, said she phoned Braddock at his insistence because he kept trying to get her to appear on a health care panel for an event he was organizing.

Olszewski, a nurse by training, became a conservative figure last year after penning a book called “Undercover Epicenter Nurse: How Fraud, Negligence, and Greed Led to Unnecessary Deaths at Elmhurst Hospital,” which some in the health care industry have called disinformation.

After having a few conversations with Braddock, however, Olszewski said she became concerned that he wanted to use her to advance his candidacy and that he left her “threatening” messages about Luna that sounded “unhinged.”

With such a closely divided Congress currently in Democratic control, Braddock said on the recorded call that the “pivotal” St. Petersburg-based district will take on outsized importance in 2022 to keep America from devolving into a “communist-socialist s---hole.” When Olszewski asked him why he had Russians at the ready, Braddock indicated they were to stop Luna.

“My polling people are going to charge me $20,000 to do a poll right before the primary. And if the poll says Luna’s gonna win, she’s gonna be gone. She's gonna disappear,” Braddock said in the recorded call, pledging Olszewski to secrecy. “For the good of our country, we have to sacrifice the few. … For the better or the good of the majority of the people, we've got to sacrifice the few.”

Later in the call, Olszewski asked what would happen if “Luna is gonna win” and Braddock assured her that wouldn’t happen.

“She’s gonna be gone. Period. That's the end of the discussion. Luna is not an issue,” he said.

Olszewski pushed him, asking “how do we make her go, though? I just don’t understand that.”

“I call up my Russian and Ukrainian hit squad, and within 24 hours, they're sending me pictures of her disappearing,” he replied. “No, I'm not joking. Like, this is beyond my control this point.”

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Asked if the killers were snipers, Braddock described them as, “Russian mafia. Close-battle combat, TEC-9s, MAC-10s, silencers kind of thing. No snipers. Up close and personal. So they know that the target has gone.” Olszewski said that threats like the ones Braddock made “you can’t take lightly. Normal people don’t say these things.” Olszewski called Braddock on one smartphone and recorded video of the call with another, occasionally displaying his name and number on the video to show it was him on the call. POLITICO also obtained a separate recording, a voicemail message, Braddock left with a consultant in which his phone number was identical and voice seemed to match the information Olszewski shot in her video.

In Florida, it’s a third-degree felony to record another person without their knowledge. But Olszewski said that St. Petersburg police told her she had nothing to worry about in recording the conversation and turning it over to authorities. A spokesperson for the St. Petersburg police declined to comment on the recording or whether it was legally recorded.

Braddock, though, indicated he was ready to sue Olszewski.

“The folks in possession of whatever recording they think they have of myself or someone else (which may even be altered and edited) will be facing civil damages suit(s) when the paperwork is file [sic] with the county and felony charges after I file with the local police department,” Braddock said in his text message to POLITICO. “I strongly advise not to get involved because the civil suits will continue to be filed until people stop sharing them because whomever is on the recording did not consent to be recorded in my humble opinion.”

In her filing for an injunction, Luna also mentioned how Braddock claimed in the call with Olszewski that two other potential Republican candidates in the race, Amanda Makki and Matt Tito, had formed an alliance with him to stop Luna. Braddock briefly posted the petition for the injunction on his Facebook page Friday but then took them down.

Both Makki and Tito denied the claims of an alliance with Braddock and each of them criticized Luna for mentioning their names in the injunction she filed against Braddock.

“The fact she dragged me through the mud, after not seeing or talking to me after 11 months, it really calls into question her judgment,” said Makki, who ran unsuccessfully in the GOP primary against Luna in 2020, despite earning the endorsement of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.

Tito, also, was displeased with the fact that he was named in the injunction.

“This is a total political hit job. I wasn’t served. I’m not in legal trouble,” he said. “Luna doesn’t want me to get in the Republican race because she knows I’ll beat her. I’m a better candidate. She’s trying to wipe me out of the race, trying to embarrass me, intimidate me, smear my name so she has a wider path to the nomination.”

In the call, Braddock mentioned that he offered Tito a job on his campaign to keep him on the sidelines, but Tito said he had no intention to work for Braddock.

James Blair, a spokesperson for Luna, said she wouldn’t comment on the ongoing investigation. But he suggested Makki had “sour grapes” for losing the primary last year to Luna. And he faulted Tito because he “immediately blamed the woman” by accusing Luna of a political hit job. “The content of the protective order filed is based upon Mr. Braddock’s own threats, actions, and statements,” Blair said. “I understand that Mr. Braddock is the one who stated he is working with Mr. Tito and Ms. Makki, so perhaps they should take it up with him instead of attacking the person he said he was going to kill if that’s what it took to keep her from winning.” In her petition for the restraining order, Luna made it clear that she took Braddock’s threats seriously. “I do not feel safe and am currently in fear for my life,” Luna wrote, according to a copy of it. Olszewski, too, said Braddock sounded dangerous. At one point, Braddock even said he was scared himself. “Don’t be on the f---ing wrong side of supporting Luna because if you're near her when the time comes, I just don't want that to happen to you because you've got kids,” Braddock said on the call. “So don't be associated with Luna under any circumstances. Please. And do not repeat this anybody because both of us will be in jeopardy if you do. I'm not just blowing smoke here. I'm f---ing being dead ass serious and it scares the s--- out of me, too.”

“The content of the protective order filed is based upon Mr. Braddock’s own threats, actions, and statements,” Blair said. “I understand that Mr. Braddock is the one who stated he is working with Mr. Tito and Ms. Makki, so perhaps they should take it up with him instead of attacking the person he said he was going to kill if that’s what it took to keep her from winning.” In her petition for the restraining order, Luna made it clear that she took Braddock’s threats seriously. “I do not feel safe and am currently in fear for my life,” Luna wrote, according to a copy of it. Olszewski, too, said Braddock sounded dangerous. At one point, Braddock even said he was scared himself. “Don’t be on the f---ing wrong side of supporting Luna because if you're near her when the time comes, I just don't want that to happen to you because you've got kids,” Braddock said on the call. “So don't be associated with Luna under any circumstances. Please. And do not repeat this anybody because both of us will be in jeopardy if you do. I'm not just blowing smoke here. I'm f---ing being dead ass serious and it scares the s--- out of me, too.”

FILED UNDER: CHARLIE CRIST, TAMPA, LEGAL

[allmyleftistsliveintexas]

Austin, Texas: Vote No on Prop B

Election Day: Saturday, May 1

Early Voting: Friday, April 19 - Saturday, April 27

Last Day to Register to Vote: Thursday, April 1

Check Your Voter Info & Register at votetravis.com

What is Prop B?

In May 2021, Austin voters will decide on whether or not to reinstate The Camping Ban, which would make it illegal to camp in public spaces, to sit/lie down in some outdoor spaces, and to panhandle at night.

The language is:

“Shall an ordinance be adopted that would create a criminal offense and a penalty for sitting or lying down on a public sidewalk or sleeping outdoors in and near the Downtown area and the area around the University of Texas campus; create a criminal offense and penalty for solicitation, defined as requesting money or another thing of value, at specific hours and locations or for solicitation in a public area that is deemed aggressive in manner; create a criminal offense and penalty for camping in any public area not designated by the Parks and Recreation Department?”

This essentially means it would be a criminal offense to camp, sleep/lie down, and/or panhandle in certain places and times in Austin.

For many of our unhoused neighbors, there are simply no options for shelter or income in the city and many are forced to live on the street.

With nowhere else to go and no hopes of other income, Prop B would make it illegal to be a person experiencing homelessness in large parts of the city.

Affected Areas

Prop B would make it a criminal offense to camp in public, sit/lie in public, and panhandle at night in the areas within the red square. 

Via KUT

This area runs from 38th street south to Cesar Chavez and from N. Lamar east to I-35. It also goes around Oakwood Cemetary, and to Chicon street from E. 7th Street to E. Cesar Chavez. 

History of the Camping Ban

note: it has been fairly difficult to dig up old articles to research and provide context. this history is a summary of what I could find but isn’t a full or complete telling of events. 

The Camping Ban was first instated on January 25th, 1996. This ordinance made it class C misdemeanor to sleep, store personal belongings, cook, or start fires in public areas. There were an estimated 6,000 houseless people on the streets in 1996 with a population of 548,000. (For context, there were an estimated 2,506 houseless people in Austin in 2020 with a population of 1,000,000.) Additionally, there was only one free houseless facility at this time, with just 128 beds and strict limitations on using the facility. ARCH didn’t open until 2004.

Mayor Bruce Todd first introduced the ordinance and it eventually passed with a 4-1 vote, with one council member abstaining and one council member absent. The council member who voted against the measure was Jackie Goodman, who stayed firm in this position throughout all her years on council. As were the rules, council had to pass this ordinance three times before it became law, January 25th, 1995 being the third time. 

In talks about whether or not to pass the measure, council member Gus Garcia stated in 1995 that “This ordinance is probably not the answer. This ordinance is not going to fix the problem. But we have to begin somewhere.” 

When it was officially passed in 1996, it was met with a 200 person protest. The loudest people in opposition of the ban were the houseless, the police, and local activists. Many people stated it was unconstitutional, a violation of houseless people’s rights, and unethical to displace people without somewhere for them to go.

Originally, the Austin Police opposed the ban because they didn't have the resources to enforce it and didn’t see it as a solution to the fundamental issue of houselessness. Lieutenant Michael Urubeck who was in charge of enforcing the ban stated “it’s not going to work in the long run.”  

Additionally, The Downtown Austin Alliance, who represented downtown businesses and supported the ordinance, boldly acknowledged in 1997 that "The purpose of the ordinance was to protect our public properties and as a preventative measure against public disorder, not the separate issue of the homeless." - Downtown Austin Alliance 1997

When it was first passed, city council also called for a review on it’s effectiveness. In 1997, they found that the camping ban "provided a tool for immediate relief of unwanted situations, but has failed to provide an effective deterrent or any permanent solution to the transient issue." (they called people experiencing homelessness “transients” back then.)

In 1997, there’s a couple articles showing that city council had plans to rescind the camping ban that year, however I was unable to find what actually happened after their plans. I skimmed through the July & August council meeting minutes but have not been able to find anything about repealing the ban. I think it’s safe to say that while talks were promising, the city elected to keep the ban. Additionally, there was lots of talks of building “homeless campuses” at this time but I have been unable to find whether or not they were actually built. Also I want to note that these campuses were often seen as separative and ways to push the houseless community somewhere else, aka not solutions. 

Anyways...

Since then, talks of repealing the camping ban have arisen time and time again, each time following very similar arguments: 

1. The camping ban doesn’t work in medicating the issue of houselessness in Austin 

2. The camping ban is morally bankrupt and borderline unconstitutional without giving people a place to go

3. The camping ban seeks to protect property, not people

Among advocates for rescinding the camping ban is Richard Troxell, who has been fiercely and loudly against the camping ban since the beginning in 1995. He regularly attended council meetings for years on end to speak up about it and has continued advocating against it to this day.

Why are we talking about this 27 years later?

Despite wish-washy support for the ban in it's inception in the 90s, the ban remained in place from 1996-2019. In July 2019, City Council voted 9-2 to repeal the camping ban with council members Alison Alter (D10) and Kathie Tovo (D9) voting against. Basically, this allowed unhoused people to legally sleep in public again.

Three months later in October 2019, city council voted to partially reinstate the camping ban. This measure further defined where camping would not be allowed, like within 15 feet of a residence or business or near ARCH/other shelters. With this partial ban, camping is still allowed outside of those areas.

In August 2020, an organization called Save Austin Now led by Travis County GOP chair Matt Mackowiak, submitted a petition to allow the public to vote to reinstate the camping ban. Initially, it was thrown out by the city clerk because it lacked the necessary number of signatures to be put on the ballot. 20,000 signatures are needed. They submitted 24,598 signatures (the lowest number of any recently filed citizen-led petition), but only 19,122 could be verified so the petition was thrown out.

However, in February 2021, Save Austin Now tried again and received the required 20,000 signatures to put the ban on the ballot. It has been widely stated that canvassers for Save Austin Now collected signatures using purposefully vague language, stating that their petition was one to "help the homeless" without providing signers the truthful information that the petition sought to reinstate the camping ban. Hundreds of signers were able to have their signatures removed after hearing about the manipulative cavassing, but not enough to keep the ban from the ballot.

Public Safety

Supporters of the camping ban say the ban is needed to protect public safety. How are the camping ban and public safety related?

People who argue the camping ban is needed for public safety seem to forget that unhoused people are part of the public. When you deny people shelter, even if that shelter is just a tent, you immediately endanger those people. They are more susceptible to theft, violence, and danger in general. Providing a safe environment for the unhoused is public safety.

Despite the repeal of the camping ban in 2019, the rate of violent crimes where the perpetrator was unhoused and the victim was housed decreased by 1% in 2019.

In fact, the rate of violent crimes where the perpetrator was housed and the victim was unhoused rose 7% in 2019, suggesting that it would be more likely for a housed citizen of Austin to commit violence against an unhoused person of Austin, and not the other way around.

There is no available data that shows that banning camping in public keeps the public safer.

“It looks like the least likely thing to happen with any violent crime involving a homeless individual is that it would be involving someone who is not homeless.” - Greg McCormack, Executive Director of Front Steps

Prop B Creates Criminal Records

Between 2016 and 2018, APD issued more than 10,000 citations to unhoused people who violated the camping ban. Most of these citations were issued for sitting or lying on a public sidewalk or outdoors. These citations cost up to $500. The average cost was about $160.

As can be expected, many unhoused people were unable to pay these fines. About 6 in every 10 citations issued resulted in arrest warrants after people failed to pay their fines in court.

With an arrest warrant on your record, it is measurably more difficult to qualify for essential services like housing and employment. Prop B would make the homelessness problem in Austin worse.

"Having tickets, arrests and warrants associated with these ordinances, sets people back from the goal of escaping homelessness; it prevents them from getting jobs and housing, and the vast majority of folks are trying to get out of homelessness. They are trying to get services, housing and employment so that they can get a roof over their head and restart their lives." - Chris Harris, Just Liberty

Why You Should Vote No on Prop B

1. Prop B criminalizes poverty.

Sitting, panhandling, and camping in public are often an unavoidable realities for those experiencing extreme poverty. To be criminalized for  not having a house to sleep in is morally bankrupt. No one should be forced to carry a criminal record just because they're poor. 

2. Prop B does not offer solutions to homelessness.

By making it illegal to camp in certain areas, the camping ban seeks to push the unhoused population out of main city areas without providing anywhere for them to go, or any actionable solution for the homelessness problem as a whole. The broader issues of inequality and poverty are not addressed in Prop B, and voting yes would only further endanger people experiencing homelessness.

3. Prop B would make it more difficult to escape poverty.

It is much more difficult to qualify for housing and employment opportunities when one has a criminal record. By criminalizing homelessness, unhoused people are more likely to get criminal records that would prevent them from accessing essential resources that are vital to transition from homelessness thus feeding the cycle that seeks to keep poor people poor.

Shelter beds in Austin: 812 Unhoused people in Austin: 2,500

The Housing Authority of The City of Austin waitlist for public housing has been closed since 2018. When it's open, the wait is 5-10 years.

The Housing Authority of The City of Austin waitlists for public housing at two other sites have also been closed since 2019 and 2020 and also have excessively long wait times.

The average wait time for housing through the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs is more than 3 years.

experiencing homelessness is not a crime. vote no on prop b.

research is work! buy me a coffee?

Sources:

votetravis.com

What is Prop B? Source

https://www.austintexas.gov/news/council-orders-elections-eight-propositions-may-1-2021

Affected Areas Sources

https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/1459657/?utm_source=showcase&utm_campaign=visualisation/1459657

https://www.kut.org/austin/2021-02-04/the-city-clerk-has-okd-save-austin-nows-petition-to-reinstate-homelessness-bans-teeing-up-a-may-referendum

History of the Camping Ban Sources

https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/1996-02-16/530585/

https://www.austintexas.gov/sites/default/files/files/Planning/Demographics/population_history_pub.pdf

https://www.austinmonitor.com/stories/2020/05/austin-sees-10-year-high-in-the-number-of-people-experiencing-homelessness/#:~:text=The%20number%20of%20people%20experiencing%20homelessness%20in%20Austin%20hit%20a,25.

https://austin.culturemap.com/news/city-life/01-15-20-austin-population-explode-past-1-million-by-summer-2020/

https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/1997-07-04/529209/

https://www.newspapers.com/image/?clipping_id=59736855&fcfToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJmcmVlLXZpZXctaWQiOjM1NzAyNDMwMCwiaWF0IjoxNjEzMDg2NTk4LCJleHAiOjE2MTMxNzI5OTh9.kR_Q35oymBXM41oMWIs2zRUjL-V0i6E0NY98ubRiWnw

https://www.bizjournals.com/austin/stories/1997/06/16/story1.html

https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/1997-07-04/529210/

http://www.austintexas.gov/content/archive-council-meetings-held-1997

Why are we talking about this 27 years later? Sources

https://www.statesman.com/news/20190621/city-council-rescinds-measures-that-critics-say-criminalize-homelessness

https://www.kut.org/austin/2019-10-29/as-austin-rolls-out-its-revised-camping-and-resting-bans-the-future-is-uncertain

https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/news/2020-08-05/save-austin-now-petition-to-reinstate-camping-ban-fails/

https://www.kut.org/austin/2021-02-04/the-city-clerk-has-okd-save-austin-nows-petition-to-reinstate-homelessness-bans-teeing-up-a-may-referendum

https://www.kxan.com/news/local/austin/where-the-push-for-a-new-austin-homeless-shelter-stands-now/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CHowever%2C%20Austin%20currently%20only%20has,related%20to%20homelessness%20over%202019.

https://affordablehousingonline.com/housing-authority/Texas/Housing-Authority-of-the-City-of-Austin/TX001#wl108037

https://affordablehousingonline.com/housing-authority/Texas/Texas-Department-of-Housing-and-Community-Affairs/TX901

Public Safety Source

https://www.statesman.com/news/20200209/violent-crimes-with-homeless-suspects-victims-went-up-in-2019-data-show

Prop B Creates Criminal Records Sources

https://www.kut.org/austin/2019-06-20/most-tickets-for-homelessness-result-in-arrest-warrants-that-can-make-finding-housing-hard

https://www.kut.org/austin/2015-10-05/no-sit-no-lie-citations-handed-out-by-the-thousands-and-most-go-unpaid

Vote No Sources

https://www.kxan.com/news/local/austin/where-the-push-for-a-new-austin-homeless-shelter-stands-now/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CHowever%2C%20Austin%20currently%20only%20has,related%20to%20homelessness%20over%202019.

https://affordablehousingonline.com/housing-authority/Texas/Housing-Authority-of-the-City-of-Austin/TX001#wl108037

https://affordablehousingonline.com/housing-authority/Texas/Texas-Department-of-Housing-and-Community-Affairs/TX901

Additional Reading:

Mapping Out a Solution: Austin’s Homeless Task Force 

This Ain’t No KOA: Don’t Let the Tent Flap Hit You on Your Way Out...

[orbemnews]

‘I didn’t do nothing wrong:’ Video shows Naked Cowboy’s guitar being broken during Bike Week arrest DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – Two hours of newly released body camera footage shows the chaos and commotion that surrounded the Naked Cowboy’s arrest in Daytona Beach during Bike Week. Robert Burck, 50, who’s better known for wearing nothing but underwear, cowboy boots and a hat as he plays his guitar at Times Square in New York City, was taken into custody Saturday on a panhandling charge during the popular motorcycle event. [TRENDING: ‘Naked Cowboy’ arrested at Bike Week | ‘I think we’re in the Black section’ of the restaurant | Holy Hail: Crazy weather hits Daytona Beach] Ad The footage from the Daytona Beach Police Department starts with an officer motioning for Burck to get away from a crowd that had formed on the sidewalk on Main Street near Fern Lane. “As we walked by earlier we said, ‘Stop panhandling,’ we told you to stop panhandling,” an officer said. “But you said that you don’t panhandle,” another chimed in. “Well, people give me tips,” Burck replied. He later said that he didn’t need money because he’s “already successful” and would stop accepting the cash if that was against the law. He added that he’s been performing at Bike Week for 20 years and he wasn’t aware that the rules had changed. Warning: Video contains graphic content. Viewer discretion is advised. His wife, who was dressed in similar American flag attire, tried to approach and that’s when Burck was placed in handcuffs. Initially, officers told him he was detained and would receive a notice to appear in court. Ad Burck spent a few minutes trying to plead his case but after some time, the officers told him he was now under arrest and not free to go. He continued to insist that what he was doing wasn’t about the money. “I have an 800 credit score. I don’t (expletive) around. What’s wrong with you? I didn’t do nothing wrong,” Burck said. At times, he used graphic and insensitive language. “Naked Cowboy” Robert Burck and his guitar. (Images: Daytona Beach Police Department/Volusia County Sheriff’s Office) (WKMG 2021) “So the Blacks can walk around and take tips all day long but I don’t want anything about that,” Burck said in the video. “Excuse me? Excuse me?” the officer asked. “I don’t care. You heard me, yeah, you heard me. I don’t want money from them. I’m already rich. I don’t give a (expletive) about the money. You can break the guitar and give it to all the (inaudible),” Burck replied. Crowds soon started to gather to film the encounter at times chanting, “boo,” “free the Naked Cowboy,” and “let him go.” Things escalated when Burck told his wife to grab his cellphone out of his boot after an officer had already told him that she needed to stay on the sidewalk. Ad Moments after a handcuffed Burck walked toward his wife, yelling at her to “take my (expletive) phone out of my (expletive) boot,” a female officer told him, “you need to be quiet” and pushed him against the patrol car, rotating him several times across the vehicle while his guitar was still strapped across his chest. Burck told the officer he wasn’t resisting. “I don’t want to fight you. Come on, my (expletive), you (expletive) broke my guitar strings. Oh my God, you broke my (expletive) guitar now,” Burck said. Naked in Daytona! Bikeweek.com BikeweekNews.blog Daytona Bike Week Bernie and Sid in the Morning MainStreet #mainstreet #lifeisgood #DaytonaBikeWeek2021 Posted by The Naked Cowboy on Saturday, March 6, 2021 The video shows that Burck began hurling insults at the female officer once he realized his instrument was snapped at the neck. “(Expletive) you, (expletive) (homophobic slur), (expletive) (homophobic slur),” he told her. That same officer counted the cash that was stuffed inside the guitar’s sound hole, totaling $231. About 10 minutes after the instrument was damaged, Burck offered an apology to the female officer for calling her names. Ad “I was mad, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. You can call me a (homophobic slur),” he said. “I don’t talk to people like that,” the officer replied. “I was scared, I was scared. You know when you get scared you say stupid things,” Burck said. One hourlong body camera video ends with Burck in the back of a patrol car while the other ends with Burck joking about breaking off his handcuffs. “This is funny, the whole thing is funny,” he said. Burck was arrested on charges of panhandling and resisting arrest without violence. In court, the panhandling charge was tossed out and Burck entered a plea of no contest on the resisting arrest charge. He was sentenced to time served and ordered to pay court costs. He has since been released from the Volusia County Jail. Use the form below to sign up for the ClickOrlando.com Strange Florida newsletter, sent every Friday. Ad Copyright 2021 by WKMG ClickOrlando – All rights reserved. window.Fusion=window.Fusion||;Fusion.arcSite="wkmg";Fusion.contextPath="/pf";Fusion.deployment="266";Fusion.globalContent={"_id":"BBZRCFSKTFHLZFLW2NQN4NLFGI","additional_properties":,"amp_promo_image":"height":360,"url":"https://www.clickorlando.com/resizer/Qg2uIiitBnoAlFRL-f578CK8eVg=/fit-in/640x360/smart/filters:format(jpeg):strip_exif(true):strip_icc(true):no_upscale(true):quality(65):fill(FFF)/d1vhqlrjc8h82r.cloudfront.net/03-08-2021/t_a7a6d5a3567a456fb2566aafa3d278ed_name_image.jpg","width":640,"canonical_website":"wkmg","content_elements":["_id":"7M7RS64XAVGQVH2VINDS4UUAEY","additional_properties":,"content":"Two hours of newly released body camera footage shows the chaos and commotion that surrounded the Naked Cowboy’s arrest in Daytona Beach during Bike Week.","type":"text","_id":"MJGHUDRO7RCAXLJBTQKQQ6WMCA","additional_properties":,"content":"Robert Burck, 50, who’s better known for wearing nothing but underwear, cowboy boots and a hat as he plays his guitar at Times Square in New York City, was taken into custody Saturday on a panhandling charge during the popular motorcycle event.","type":"text","_id":"XS4SOSASABAJZMPCIQURO7M54Y","additional_properties":,"content":"[TRENDING: ‘Naked Cowboy’ arrested at Bike Week ,"_id":"NL23T7E77BBXHLAO2KDZY5YALU","additional_properties":,"content":"The footage from the Daytona Beach Police Department starts with an officer motioning for Burck to get away from a crowd that had formed on the sidewalk on Main Street near Fern Lane.","type":"text","_id":"6EHWVEQVLNFOJIR6UQ3FLTV7Z4","additional_properties":,"content":"“As we walked by earlier we said, ‘Stop panhandling,’ we told you to stop panhandling,” an officer said.","type":"text","_id":"37DPFNEK6JBZLKMYUCOBCFXU4Q","additional_properties":,"content":"“But you said that you don’t panhandle,” another chimed in.","type":"text","_id":"7DUB53V3HRCIVKC27H57356BO4","additional_properties":,"content":"“Well, people give me tips,” Burck replied.","type":"text","_id":"O5NTBKY3M5A3TEUVYRIQDE5HOM","additional_properties":,"content":"He later said that he didn’t need money because he’s “already successful” and would stop accepting the cash if that was against the law. He added that he’s been performing at Bike Week for 20 years and he wasn’t aware that the rules had changed.","type":"text","_id":"TZ7LZOCLHJBLHC4J6KFYORN7HM","additional_properties":,"content":"Warning: Video contains graphic content. Viewer discretion is advised.","type":"text","_id":"3a6d529f-8b86-45b1-88cc-47cd29a11005","additional_properties":,"credits":,"description":"basic":"Two hours of newly released body camera footage shows the chaos and commotion that surrounded the Naked Cowboy’s arrest in Daytona Beach during Bike Week.","display_date":"2021-03-09T01:46:34Z","headlines":"basic":"Video shows Naked Cowboy’s guitar being broken during Bike Week arrest","promo_items":"basic":"type":"image","url":"https://d1vhqlrjc8h82r.cloudfront.net/03-09-2021/t_d21d05e44ccc43c7a5b12aeaaf58bf8e_name_image.jpg","publish_date":"2021-03-09T01:46:37Z","type":"video","_id":"L46GFW72CRB5ZMUFNVXG3C24A4","additional_properties":,"content":"His wife, who was dressed in similar American flag attire, tried to approach and that’s when Burck was placed in handcuffs.","type":"text","_id":"MI26JQVBWZCJ5H5WJETSH4QS3E","additional_properties":,"content":"Initially, officers told him he was detained and would receive a notice to appear in court.","type":"text","_id":"QV6OJSR7WBDAXHWB5AWS3QQHA4","additional_properties":,"content":"Burck spent a few minutes trying to plead his case but after some time, the officers told him he was now under arrest and not free to go.","type":"text","_id":"CP7OLOSAHZEOLPWE7URMSXPOTM","additional_properties":,"content":"He continued to insist that what he was doing wasn’t about the money.","type":"text","_id":"PHD56RFKARBXLN5J4SJTSPF6N4","additional_properties":,"content":"“I have an 800 credit score. I don’t (expletive) around. What’s wrong with you? I didn’t do nothing wrong,” Burck said.","type":"text","_id":"LGVUKIEXQZAVHLNGIRULJJ3ONM","additional_properties":,"content":"At times, he used graphic and insensitive language.","type":"text","_id":"YWGOWZCFR5E5HGX2FN7ESN7Z5A","additional_properties":,"caption":""Naked Cowboy" Robert Burck and his guitar. (Images: Daytona Beach Police Department/Volusia County Sheriff's Office)","copyright":"WKMG 2021","credits":"affiliation":[],"height":720,"resizedUrls":["height":213,"url":"https://www.clickorlando.com/resizer/TF12z9X47NQKOr0tzzhSleFpumA=/380x213/smart/filters:format(jpeg):strip_exif(true):strip_icc(true):no_upscale(true):quality(65)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/gmg/YWGOWZCFR5E5HGX2FN7ESN7Z5A.jpg","width":380,"height":239,"url":"https://www.clickorlando.com/resizer/w7wWihfToG37cvMnHwHn7vXeCzs=/425x239/smart/filters:format(jpeg):strip_exif(true):strip_icc(true):no_upscale(true):quality(65)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/gmg/YWGOWZCFR5E5HGX2FN7ESN7Z5A.jpg","width":425,"height":720,"url":"https://www.clickorlando.com/resizer/L0wUbzeipJ1XbESz6lXhNRvelbs=/1280x720/smart/filters:format(jpeg):strip_exif(true):strip_icc(true):no_upscale(true):quality(65)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/gmg/YWGOWZCFR5E5HGX2FN7ESN7Z5A.jpg","width":1280],"type":"image","url":"https://cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/gmg/YWGOWZCFR5E5HGX2FN7ESN7Z5A.jpg","width":1280,"_id":"3CLMZOVGSZCN3N7NL6KJLZTH3E","additional_properties":,"content":"“So the Blacks can walk around and take tips all day long but I don’t want anything about that,” Burck said in the video.","type":"text","_id":"FVE7JVGAJZHRPINW2UYTXO5I3M","additional_properties":,"content":"“Excuse me? Excuse me?” the officer asked.","type":"text","_id":"YSLDOC5YJZAZ7IH3ZKCRB2RJCQ","additional_properties":,"content":"“I don’t care. You heard me, yeah, you heard me. I don’t want money from them. I’m already rich. I don’t give a (expletive) about the money. You can break the guitar and give it to all the (inaudible),” Burck replied.","type":"text","_id":"FNRJMAVNPBDSRO32WFH2YZXDLY","additional_properties":,"content":"Crowds soon started to gather to film the encounter at times chanting, “boo,” “free the Naked Cowboy,” and “let him go.”","type":"text","_id":"NV2WY5FX5FC2FGMPAHA66BGDY4","additional_properties":,"content":"Things escalated when Burck told his wife to grab his cellphone out of his boot after an officer had already told him that she needed to stay on the sidewalk.","type":"text","_id":"JGAQLQDV7JCYHJ2WZC7QQFNFS4","additional_properties":,"content":"Moments after a handcuffed Burck walked toward his wife, yelling at her to “take my (expletive) phone out of my (expletive) boot,” a female officer told him, “you need to be quiet” and pushed him against the patrol car, rotating him several times across the vehicle while his guitar was still strapped across his chest.","type":"text","_id":"5XG26V5TPNDT7ATHCBWCTI5SGY","additional_properties":,"content":"Burck told the officer he wasn’t resisting.","type":"text","_id":"OOLUOCOOKVGUZNFDZVXG62KPGU","additional_properties":,"content":"“I don’t want to fight you. Come on, my (expletive), you (expletive) broke my guitar strings. Oh my God, you broke my (expletive) guitar now,” Burck said.","type":"text","_id":"GXFIRSFV65CHPNS5J6YEAOWWR4","raw_oembed":"_id":"https://www.facebook.com/115607436290/videos/425668752050642&locale=en_US","height":277,"html":" n Naked in Daytona! Bikeweek.com BikeweekNews.blog Daytona Bike Week Bernie and Sid in the Morning MainStreet #mainstreet #lifeisgood #DaytonaBikeWeek2021 Posted by The Naked Cowboy on Saturday, March 6, 2021 ","width":500,"subtype":"facebook-video","type":"oembed_response","_id":"VXDZ6O36QNHTHLUVO2BUQIARQE","additional_properties":,"content":"The video shows that Burck began hurling insults at the female officer once he realized his instrument was snapped at the neck.","type":"text","_id":"KVX3MQZELFHDFOQS7K3JGXXP6A","additional_properties":,"content":"“(Expletive) you, (expletive) (homophobic slur), (expletive) (homophobic slur),” he told her.","type":"text","_id":"U3SGUP6RFJBKLGU2ARHZFPOXHY","additional_properties":,"content":"That same officer counted the cash that was stuffed inside the guitar’s sound hole, totaling $231.","type":"text","_id":"KW6J6LFIAZGAFGQVSJ6Z6ZBRRU","additional_properties":,"content":"About 10 minutes after the instrument was damaged, Burck offered an apology to the female officer for calling her names.","type":"text","_id":"DJAKRYAMTBGFZO3DQ5VI4M5HQU","additional_properties":,"content":"“I was mad, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. You can call me a (homophobic slur),” he said.","type":"text","_id":"XOVVFN7YEZFWVMJWTKF3NBSMZU","additional_properties":,"content":"“I don’t talk to people like that,” the officer replied.","type":"text","_id":"KWV3B4QF2RGJLE4PFMMGZXZI6Q","additional_properties":,"content":"“I was scared, I was scared. You know when you get scared you say stupid things,” Burck said.","type":"text","_id":"HZZ7QCKTE5FABLBBFAVZLSZJYA","additional_properties":,"content":"One hourlong body camera video ends with Burck in the back of a patrol car while the other ends with Burck joking about breaking off his handcuffs.","type":"text","_id":"NMYDODJMVZC2BCLRWBAS7U2HLA","additional_properties":,"content":"“This is funny, the whole thing is funny,” he said.","type":"text","_id":"QRDB4GDA45HPTLZHUL5LXD6PR4","additional_properties":,"content":"Burck was arrested on charges of panhandling and resisting arrest without violence. In court, the panhandling charge was tossed out and Burck entered a plea of no contest on the resisting arrest charge. He was sentenced to time served and ordered to pay court costs.","type":"text","_id":"N45DIXQ4XRCH3DA5MHXP4SRSCE","additional_properties":,"content":"He has since been released from the Volusia County Jail.","type":"text","_id":"BLCOXLLFIJFODNL2RW6UQVBRL4","additional_properties":,"type":"divider","_id":"2DPM42IFXNCYPBRGUYBOYJBDY4","additional_properties":,"content":"Use the form below to sign up for the ClickOrlando.com Strange Florida newsletter, sent every Friday.","type":"text","_id":"GIUHZUABKZDD7DQ5CYSRBDWQFE","additional_properties":,"content":" Sorry, you are using an unsupported browser. This page will not display correctly. Please click here to upgrade to a newer browser. /**/ ","type":"raw_html"],"copyright":"Copyright 2021 by WKMG ClickOrlando - All rights reserved.","credits":"by":["_id":"MYDI6VCXPFD7VJYVGMEZ6CDTAM","additional_properties":"original":"role":"Web Editor","status":true,"description":"Adrienne joined News 6's digital team in October 2016 to cover breaking news, crime and community interest stories. 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Moderately large breaking wavesncan knock you down and make you even more susceptible tonbecoming caught in the seaward pull of a rip current.nnPRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...nnRip currents are powerful channels of water flowing quickly awaynfrom shore, which occur most often at low spots or breaks in thensandbar and in the vicinity of structures such as jetties andnpiers. Heed the advice of lifeguards, beach patrol flags andnsigns.nnSwim near a lifeguard. If caught in a rip current, relax andnfloat. Don't swim against the current. If able, swim in andirection following the shoreline. 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For the Beach Hazards Statement, roughnsurf with breaking waves as high as 4 to 6 feet will remain anhazard in the surf zone.nn* WHERE...Southern Brevard, Indian River, St. Lucie, Martin,nCoastal Volusia and Northern Brevard Counties.nn* WHEN...Through 7 PM AST this evening.nn* IMPACTS...Rip currents can sweep even the best swimmers awaynfrom shore into deeper water. Moderately large breaking wavesncan knock you down and make you even more susceptible tonbecoming caught in the seaward pull of a rip current.nnPRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...nnRip currents are powerful channels of water flowing quickly awaynfrom shore, which occur most often at low spots or breaks in thensandbar and in the vicinity of structures such as jetties andnpiers. Heed the advice of lifeguards, beach patrol flags andnsigns.nnSwim near a lifeguard. If caught in a rip current, relax andnfloat. Don't swim against the current. If able, swim in andirection following the shoreline. 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Moderately large breaking wavesncan knock you down and make you even more susceptible tonbecoming caught in the seaward pull of a rip current.nnPRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...nnRip currents are powerful channels of water flowing quickly awaynfrom shore, which occur most often at low spots or breaks in thensandbar and in the vicinity of structures such as jetties andnpiers. Heed the advice of lifeguards, beach patrol flags andnsigns.nnSwim near a lifeguard. If caught in a rip current, relax andnfloat. Don't swim against the current. If able, swim in andirection following the shoreline. If unable to escape, face thenshore and call or wave for help.nn&&nn","Id":"ab37697071d49a2ff89557065ddea3b9"],"text":"A beach hazard statement in effect for 3 counties in the area","time":1615333378.1954572,"_id":"871f137bb6039adea909af214329b37637cbb64a910f543b74c5e52ad736fc09","expires":1615333728744,"lastModified":1615333379000}},"articles_by_id":{""ids":"TPBUJWXQMZF2TC7PIX27UPRRBI,KOARMISM7RCY5BQFMDG5CAIQPA,UEU7YHC4O5GCZMQVZ627TVPGUM"":{"data":{"content_elements":["_id":"TPBUJWXQMZF2TC7PIX27UPRRBI","canonical_url":"http://rss.cnn.com/news/local/2021/03/07/new-york-citys-naked-cowboy-arrested-during-bike-week-in-daytona-beach/","description":"basic":"The man best known for his role as New York’s “Naked Cowboy” was arrested over the weekend in Daytona Beach, where the annual Bike Week festival is currently underway.","display_date":"2021-03-08T15:42:30.656Z","headlines":"basic":"New York City’s ‘Naked Cowboy’ arrested during Bike Week in Daytona Beach","meta_title":"","owner":"sponsored":false,"promo_image":"caption":""Naked Cowboy" Robert Burck and his guitar. 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Source link Orbem News #arrest #Bike #BikeWeek #broken #Cowboys #Crime #Didnt #Guitar #NAKED #Shows #StrangeFlorida #video #VolusiaCounty #Week #WRONG

[creeping-shadow-heralds-storms]

Nearly three years before Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd as he cried out that he couldn’t breathe last May, Zoya Code found herself in a similar position: handcuffed facedown on the ground, with Chauvin’s knee on her.

The officer had answered a call of a domestic dispute at her home, and Code said he forced her down when she tried to pull away.

“He just stayed on my neck,” Code said, ignoring her desperate pleas to get off. Frustrated and upset, she challenged him to press harder. “Then he did. Just to shut me up,” she said.

Last week, a judge in Minnesota ruled that prosecutors could present the details of her 2017 arrest in their case against the former officer, who was charged with second-degree unintentional murder in Floyd’s death.

Code’s case was one of six arrests as far back as 2015 that the Minnesota attorney general’s office sought to introduce, arguing that they showed how Chauvin was using excessive force when he restrained people — by their necks or by kneeling on top of them — just as he did in arresting Floyd. Police records show that Chauvin was never formally reprimanded for any of these incidents, even though at least two of those arrested said they had filed formal complaints.

Of the six people arrested, two were Black, one was Latino and one was Native American. The race of two others was not included in the arrest reports that reporters examined.

Discussing the encounters publicly for the first time in interviews with The Marshall Project, three people who were arrested by Chauvin and a witness in a fourth incident described him as an unusually rough officer who was quick to use force and callous about their pain.

The interviews provide new insight into the history of a police officer whose handling of Floyd’s arrest, captured on video, was seen around the world and sparked months of protests in dozens of cities.

Chauvin, who was fired, has said through his attorney that his handling of Floyd’s arrest was a reasonable use of authorized force. But he was the subject of at least 22 complaints or internal investigations during his more than 19 years at the department, only one of which resulted in discipline. These new interviews show not only that he may have used excessive force in the past, but that he had used startlingly similar techniques.

All four people who told of their encounters with Chauvin had a history of run-ins with law enforcement, mostly for traffic and nonviolent offenses.

Code’s arrest occurred June 25, 2017. In a court filing, Chauvin’s lawyer, Eric J. Nelson, said the officer acted properly in the case, responding to “a violent crime in a volatile situation.” He said that “there was nothing unreasonable or unauthorized about Mr. Chauvin’s actions.”

Code’s mother had accused her of trying to choke her with an extension cord, according to the arrest report. Code said in an interview that her mother was swinging the cord around, and that she merely grabbed hold of it.

She said she had left the house to cool off after the fight and when she returned, Chauvin and his partner had arrived. In the prosecutors’ description, based on Chauvin’s report and body-camera video, Chauvin told Code she was under arrest and grabbed her arm. When she pulled away, he pulled her to the ground face first and knelt on her. The two officers then picked her up and carried her outside the house, facedown.

There, prosecutors said, Chauvin knelt on the back of the handcuffed woman “even though she was offering no physical resistance at all.”

Code, in an interview, said she began pleading: “Don’t kill me.”

At that point, according to the prosecutors’ account, Chauvin told his partner to restrain Code’s ankles as well, though she “was not being physically aggressive.”

As he tied her, she said, she told the other officer, “You’re learning from an animal. That man — that’s evilness right there.”

Misdemeanor domestic assault and disorderly conduct charges filed against Code were ultimately dropped.

‘You’re Choking Me’

The earliest incident in which prosecutors said Chauvin used excessive force took place Feb. 15, 2015, when he arrested Julian Hernandez — a carpenter who was on a road trip to Minneapolis to see a band at the El Nuevo Rodeo nightclub. Chauvin worked as an off-duty security officer there for almost 17 years.

The arrest report filed by Chauvin said Hernandez tried to leave the club through the wrong door, and Chauvin stopped him and escorted him down a stairwell. Hernandez said in an interview that he had been drinking, but felt like Chauvin was pushing him down the stairs.

Outside, Hernandez said, “things escalated.”

Chauvin’s report said that Hernandez tried to turn around as he was preparing to handcuff him, so he pushed him away “by applying pressure toward his lingual artery” at the top of the neck.

Hernandez said the officer told him “you just need to leave,” and he remembered thinking that he was trying to leave but was not being allowed to do so. As Chauvin pushed him into a wall and grabbed him by the throat, Hernandez recalled thinking, “You’re choking me.”

Hernandez said he tried to sue the department, but no lawyer would take his case. He was charged with disorderly conduct, but under a court agreement he avoided punishment by staying out of trouble for a year, records show.

Nelson, the officer’s lawyer, said in a court filing that there was no evidence that Chauvin acted improperly in “dealing with a resistant, aggressive arrestee by himself.”

Under the judge’s order, only Code’s arrest, among the six cases showing what may have been excessive force, can be used at Chauvin’s trial. Prosecutors also sought to include two additional cases they said showed just the opposite — that Chauvin knew how to use reasonable force to properly restrain a person.

The judge’s order will allow them to use one of those cases: an incident in which the police department commended Chauvin and other officers for taking lifesaving steps in placing a restrained, suicidal man on his side so he could breathe. Chauvin even rode with the man to the hospital, according to prosecutors.

According to the attorney general’s office, the arrest showed that he knew how important it was to avoid breathing problems in detainees. When he did not put Floyd in a similar side position, prosecutors contend, he understood that it could jeopardize his life.

. . .

The Minneapolis Police Department did not respond to queries about past complaints against Chauvin. Critics say the department has a long history of accusations of abuse, but never fully put in place federal recommendations to implement a better system of tracking complaints and punishing officers. Only a handful over the years have faced firing or serious punishment.

‘I Can’t Breathe,’ the Man Said

In another case prosecutors highlighted to try to establish a pattern of excessive force, a man said he landed in the hospital overnight after an encounter with Chauvin. The man, Jimmy Bostic, had made a purchase at the Midtown Global Market in April 2016 and was waiting for a ride when private security guards asked him to leave. A different shop owner had accused him of panhandling, the arrest report said. Bostic argued, and Chauvin was called in.

Chauvin escorted Bostic outside, writing in the arrest report that Bostic had threatened to spit on the owner.

“I closed distance with” Bostic, Chauvin wrote, “and secured his neck/head area with my hands.”

Bostic said in an interview that as Chauvin and the private security guards attempted to put him in cuffs, he yanked his arm back.

“The next thing I felt was arms just wrapped around my neck,” he said. “I started telling him, ‘Let go, I’m having trouble breathing. I have asthma. I can’t breathe.’”

Chauvin’s lawyer, in a court filing, said the officer “acted reasonably” and followed police policy in restraining Bostic, who he said was refusing orders and making threats.

After he was released from police custody at the scene, Bostic said, emergency medical workers took him to a hospital. Suffering from an asthma attack, he said, he stayed for over a day. A disorderly conduct charge against him was ultimately dropped.

“Looking back on Mr. Floyd, that could have been me,” said Bostic, who is now in state prison on an unrelated burglary conviction. “And I would no longer be alive right now to even tell my story.”

Monroe Skinaway, a 74-year-old Minneapolis resident, was a chance witness to another incident prosecutors cited that occurred in March 2019. He said in an interview that he had called the police after he spotted his grandson’s stolen car parked at a South Minneapolis gas station.

As he answered police questions about the car, Skinaway said, he saw a young man wandering nearby, asking officers to give him a ride. Skinaway said the man seemed “off.”

The man, named in the arrest report as Sir Rilee Peet, 26, followed one officer to his squad car. After Peet refused to take his hands out of his pockets, the officer tried to grab him, and they scuffled, the police report said.

That is when the other officer, identified in the report as Chauvin, sprayed Peet with Mace. Chauvin restrained him by the neck and pinned him facedown on the ground by kneeling on his lower back, according to the prosecutors’ description of body-camera video.

Skinaway said he remembers seeing the officer on top of Peet, but also something not mentioned in Chauvin’s account in the arrest report. Skinaway said the officer put Peet’s head, facedown, in a rain puddle. Other officers were present as well, he said.

“He said, ‘I can’t breathe — can I just put my head up?’” Skinaway said. “And they just held his face in the water, and I couldn’t see a purpose for that.”

Skinaway said he was about 7 feet away as he watched Peet struggle for air, bubbles surfacing as he tried to breathe. He estimated that the officer kept Peet in the puddle for two to three minutes. Whenever Peet managed to turn his head for air, Skinaway said, the officer grabbed him by his long hair and put his head back in the water.

When he spoke by phone with a reporter, Skinaway said he did not know the officer’s name or that there was a connection with the Floyd case, but the details he described match those noted in the police report and prosecutors’ account.

. . .

Peet was charged with misdemeanor obstruction of the legal process and disorderly conduct, but it is unclear from court records what happened to the charges. The records show Peet has a history of court-ordered treatment for mental illness. In a phone call, Peet told a reporter that he did not recall the encounter.

Some of those whom Chauvin arrested said that learning the same officer had been involved in Floyd’s death made them regret they had not pushed harder to hold the officer and the department accountable.

“I don’t have nothing against cops, I got relatives that are cops,” said Hernandez, the carpenter arrested at the nightclub. “But he should have never been on the force that long.”

[ledenews]

Daylight Hours Deemed Safe on Trails

Despite recent razings of homeless encampments near Wheeling’s Heritage Trail in East Wheeling, Ohio County Sheriff Tom Howard said Wednesday on The Watchdog (98.1 FM WKKX and 97.7 FM WVLY) that local residents utilizing the paths during daylight hours should not encounter issues involving occupants of tents along the routes. Wheeling City Manager Bob Herron ordered the encampment removals after more than 200 criminal complaints were received and confirmed by officers of the Wheeling Police Department. The transient residents were offered more than a week’s notice prior to the clearings, and during the process one of the encampments was found to be boobytrapped. Wheeling Council member Dave Palmer has referred to the closed camps as “criminal camps.”

Ohio County Sheriff Tom Howard was impressed with the ingenuity along Big Wheeling Creek. “During the day, there haven’t been too many issues, but I would stay off them after dark,” said the sheriff, who has patrolled the trail areas while keeping tabs on the construction of the Interstate 70 bridges.. “The trails are closed at dusk anyway so there shouldn’t be anyone on there anyway. I know there are and there have been some reports filed, but not all have them have involved the people who are living in the tents. There are others who live around here who have been along the paths who have caused problems, too. “I know some of the camps have been removed because of the criminal issues, and those situations have been handled by the city because the majority of the issues that have taken place have been within city limits,” Howard explained. “I know when I was with the police department we responded to the trails for all kinds of reasons, but the majority of those calls were during the daytime.”

Some of the camps near Tunnel Green are complete with fire places and protected tents.

Down on Their Luck

The city of Wheeling’s homeless population has grown during the last five years and has been prevalent at exit ramps with panhandlers and homeless encampments along the banks of Big Wheeling Creek. Sometimes, however, those living in the encampments are doing so to remain anonymous from law enforcement because of outstanding warrants, and because criminal activity is the objective. “I just don’t want too many people to immediately judge all of those folks because a lot of them are in a tough spot in their lives right now,” Howard said. “That was the case when I was with the city, and that’s the case in a lot of situations nowadays, too. But yes, some of those folks are hiding, but they know how many great organizations we have here who will feed them, give them the clothes they need, and even the tents and sleeping bag. Some take advantage, that’s for sure. “From my experiences, I know most of those folks are just trying to figure things out while they are just getting by, but there are others out there who are there for a purpose and not a good one,” the sheriff explained. “It’s the same as it is with everything else. You have good people trying to make it and other who just want to take advantage of everything.”

The path along Big Wheeling Creek where train tracks once were is directly below Wheeling's Heritage Trail.

Out in the County?

Non-profits such as the Greater Wheeling Homeless Coalition, Catholic Charities’ 18th Street Neighborhood Center, the Greater Wheeling Soup Kitchen, and Youth Services Systems are located in East Wheeling, and Northwood Health Systems are nearby in Center Wheeling. For that reason, Ohio County’s sheriff said he and his deputies only respond to calls pertaining to the homeless when requested by the city’s officers. “I know a lot of people don’t realize it, but Ohio County is mostly a rural county with a lot of space out there, but our deputies don’t see encampments anywhere because that’s not where the services are. The people who need to the meals and the clothes and things, they stay as close to those non-profits as they can, especially during the winter months,” he explained. “It’s not a whole lot different during the summer season either, and for the same reasons, but we do see more camp fires along the ridge where Suicide Hill used to be near OVMC. “If we do find someone out in the county who says they’re homeless, those folks are always living in their cars for whatever reasons,” he explained. “Most of them have lost their job and their homes, whether they were renting a house or an apartment, so they don’t have any options while they are trying to pull things together and find a new job so they can start over.” Howard reported that he and his deputies have found such individuals along the county’s back roads and at The Highlands from time to time. “If our deputies see something that’s different, they will go to the area and ask the necessary questions,” he said. “We’ve had calls about people camping near the development and our guys have checked those areas out and taken care of things. But there have been some who just try to find a spot to park their cars where it’s not too bright from all the lights up there.” Read the full article

[yasbxxgie]

Criminalizing the hustle: Policing poor people’s survival strategies from Eric Garner to Alton Sterling Garner sold loose cigarettes; Alton Sterling hawked CDs — and they both died at the hands of police

Early Tuesday morning, two Baton Rouge police officers pinned a 37-year old black man named Alton Sterling to the ground and shot him to death outside a convenience store. They were responding to a person’s complaint that a man selling CDs had threatened him with a gun, according to the police department.

It’s still unclear whether Sterling had a gun; in the chilling videos released so far he cannot be seen reaching for one. Whatever the case, Sterling appears to be one of an extraordinary number of black men exiled from the formal economy and working on the street, vulnerable to arrest and police violence.

Eric Garner sold loose cigarettes. Alton Sterling hawked CDs. Both died at the hands of police while seemingly on the job.

“Over the past few decades cities have turned to policing to fulfill two functions: to surveil and discipline black populations hardest hit by economic shifts and to collect revenue in the form of fines,” emails Lester Spence, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University and the author of "Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics." “The black men most likely to be left out of the formal economy — who have to engage in various illegal hustles to make ends meet — are far more likely to suffer from police violence than other black men.”

Jobs are scarce. For those with a criminal record, like Sterling, they can simply be out of reach. With Sterling, things were worse. He had to register as a sex offender after being convicted of having had sex with a teenager when he was no older than 21, his name and face still publically recorded online more than 15 years after the incident.

Leroy Tackno, the manager of transitional housing center where Sterling paid $90 a week for a small bedroom, told The New York Times that he didn’t understand why a street hustle resulted in death.

“I’m just trying to figure out what did he do,” said Tackno. “All he did was sell CDs.”

The disappearance of jobs has sparked political anger, feeding opioid addiction, alcoholism and early death, and, among the commentariat, fomented bewildered discussion about the state of white working class people. But the disappearance of work hit black people first and hardest, decimating industries at the very moments when African-Americans, after centuries of marginalization, had only just got their foot in the door.

In the Baton Rouge area, says Spence, the minority male unemployment rate in 2014 was 2.7 times higher than for whites.

Informal workers win some freedoms and flexibility in communities otherwise dominated by precarious service sector jobs. But informal workers are not guaranteed a minimum wage, and earn no unemployment, Social Security or other benefits. They are also, by virtue of the illegality of their business, prima facie subject to aggressive policing. Just short of informal work is the fringe economy, including cash for gold, payday loans, and pawnshops.

The person selling loose cigarettes on the corner, or the one selling DVDs and incense on the subway, are just the tip of an enormous and perhaps immeasurable iceberg of informal work. A 2011 studyestimated that $2 trillion in underground income goes unreported. Immigrants from Latin America working day-labor construction. Mothers on public assistance braiding hair or cleaning houses on the side. Sex work. Selling drugs. Collecting cans and bottles. Homeless people making money by asking for it on the street. Laid-off workers doing odd jobs while collecting unemployment—and then, given the horrible state of things, never looking back.

“This unreported income is being earned, for the most part, not by drug dealers or Mob bosses but by tens of millions of people with run-of-the-mill jobs—nannies, barbers, Web-site designers, and construction workers—who are getting paid off the books,” James Surowiecki wrote in the New Yorker. “Ordinary Americans have gone underground, and, as the recovery continues to limp along, they seem to be doing it more and more.”

The contemporary era of policing and mass incarceration emerged precisely to confront black people with limited or no access to formal work. As the sociologist Loïc Wacquant puts it, “in the wake of the race riots of the 1960s, the police, courts, and prison have been deployed to contain the urban dislocations wrought by economic deregulation and the implosion of the ghetto as ethnoracial container, and to impose the discipline of insecure employment at the bottom of the polarizing class structure.”

In other words, prisons supplanted social aid and the criminal justice system became the state’s main tool to discipline the black poor, locked into segregated neighborhoods and locked out of good jobs.

In New York City, a model focused on so-called quality of life offenses took root, aimed in large part at the public face of informal work, from panhandling and squeegee men to drug dealers and loosie sellers as drugs and violence filled painfully long stretches of unrequested time off. The policing theory, known as broken windows, posits that cracking down on low-level offenses helps decrease crime across the board. That’s heavily debated, and it’s notable that recent decades’ widespread decline in crime includes cities that have employed variable policing methods. What’s certain is that it renders poor people’s survival strategies a crime.

Bernard Harcourt, a political theorist and policing expert at Columbia Law School, says that broken windows must be understood “at a macro-economic level,” where it emerged “at a particular juncture in American history where there is deindustrialization” and a large population of unemployed African Americans “on the street as a result.”

In the United States, black people have experienced systemic mass unemployment since the Great Migration brought them en masse to a deindustrializing north undergoing massive segregation by way of suburbanization. Now, a growing number of people might be turning to informal work as automation, outsourcing via globalization and the concentration of wealth amongst the super-rich makes yet more work disappear.

“Automation has now made it possible to eliminate human labor at a scale that is almost scary,” says Katherine Newman, an anthropologist and provost at University of Massachusetts Amherst. “It’s not clear what ordinary people are going to be able to do for a living if you don’t need clerks at CVS anymore because all that’s done by barcode.”

Newman says that government-created jobs and education programs could achieve crucial economic justice. The needs, from infrastructure to social services, are vast. The political will, however, is in short supply.

“Simply arguing that there is more inequality is not enough,” emails Saskia Sassen, a sociologist at Columbia University and the author of "Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy." “I think the economy we have right now is generating expulsions—you are simply out. This generates desperation—you become an outcast.”

Broken windows policing targets people who are treated like refuse by a broken economy. From police bullets and prison cells to underfunded segregated schools and the dead-end jobs that follow, the lives of poor people, and especially poor black people, don’t count for much in America.

Image:

Eric Garner; Alton Sterling

[kootenaygoon]

So,

I wondered if I was going to see a fight. 

It was the evening of the Nelson mayoral candidate forum at the Prestige Lakeside Resort, and there was tension in the air. This was the last campaign event before the election and people were getting ornery. I was covering the proceedings for the Nelson Star, circling the shadowy 200-person crowd with my camera, whipping out my phone to capture snippets of the audio. Onstage Deb Kozak, John Dooley and Pat Severyn were being interviewed by veteran broadcaster Glenn Hicks. In the front row sat Dooley’s wife Pat, and their son Sean, along with a row of ominous suited-up hockey players from the Nelson Leafs. Whenever Severyn said anything negative about Dooley they murmured and shouted out, rustling angrily. Kozak was flanked by the men, effectively acting as a buffer between them, while they took childish jabs at each other. Meanwhile she remained defiantly positive, keeping her answers constructive, showcasing an emotional maturity the other two couldn’t manage.

Hicks wasn’t letting her get away without a fight, though. Known as a bit of a provocateur, he’d warned the audience ahead of time that he was planning for things to get incendiary. He pressed Kozak on the timing of her announcement, how she’d waited until after Severyn’s entrance to throw her hat in the ring. It had been rumoured she had ambitions to run federally for “anyone but the Conservatives” before this, so why the change of heart? He asked about her endorsement from Sensible BC, calling her “marijuana chick”.

Deb smiled, bemused. “I think what Sensible BC saw in me is I have the ability to say `let’s have a conversation’. Our current laws don’t make sense and I know our police officers over the years have been very aware that our laws for simple possession don’t make sense,” she said.

“It’s pretty sad when our pot tourism is going south.”

That night I met Ed Thurman, standing at the back of the room, covering the event for an online publication called the Nelson Daily. He was in his 60s, but surprisingly spry, and peered out skeptically from behind a pair of round glasses that kind of made him look like a scowling owl. We’d written duelling profiles of all the council and mayoral candidates over the previous few weeks, and I was constantly checking to make sure my stories were successfully getting out before his, but we hadn’t yet connected in person. He was a strong writer, the manager of a local choir, and a well-respected figure in the community. I nodded in the direction of Dooley, who was stammering angrily about how Severyn had no experience, and asked if he’d ever seen him like that before. 

It was getting embarrassing. 

“Oh, anyone who’s been to a council meeting in the past few years has seen him like that at least once,” Ed said. “There was one meeting I was at where he was actually spitting with anger. He’s a hard-working mayor, but he definitely has a bit of a temper.”

“I think it might lose him the election,” I said.

Ed had an unreadable expression on his face, one I would come to know well. There was a bluntness, a directness to his observations. “You might be right about that.”

“You don’t think Severyn will win, though?”

He snorted. “Let’s hope not. I don’t want to think about what would happen if that idiot got into office. He’s embarrassing himself.”

Before heading down to the forum Calvin had given me careful, clear instructions: he wanted something around 1000 words, without a whiff of bias, that included an equal number of quotes for each candidate. He needed a photo for the front cover of the Star’s next issue, as well as some additional shots for Facebook and the website. Once it was over I was supposed to type it up and get it online within an hour. By this point I felt pretty confident that I understood the main concerns of the election, and I wanted to get beyond the personality game to the real issues at stake for the community: What were they planning to do about the affordable housing crisis? Who was the right person to shepherd the community towards a legal cannabis industry? Who was going to be proactive about providing services to the marginalized? Because Dooley had been in his role for over a decade it was clear he knew the right hands to shake, but it was also clear that he was disinterested in engaging with opposing views or divergent ideas. Glenn Hicks asked him to defend himself on charges that he didn’t allow for proper conversations during city council meetings, and his answer was telling.

“There are issues I’m very passionate about, and I won’t mask that. I think we’ve done an excellent job and I have the utmost respect for all the people at the table. But we have an agenda we have to move our way through, and that’s really important,” he said.

“I’m not going to let us get distracted every time someone disagrees with something.”

Severyn, however, claimed he’d been approached by one of the departing female councillors and that she’d told him her decision to leave was due to Dooley’s stubborn communication style. He made a big show of it, shaking his head like it pained him to unearth this inconvenient truth. Though he wouldn’t say who it was, there were only three real possibilities—the fourth was sitting onstage with him. Positioning himself as a benevolent saviour, he promised that he would encourage conversation and make sure everybody has a chance to speak.

“I want to change the leadership,” he said, to a smattering of applause. “I want to change the way the councillors are treated.”

Dooley emphasized the things he’d accomplished over the years, including introducing new revenue streams, investing in broadband infrastructure and moving forward with the Stores to Shores project. He told the audience there was $10 million in infrastructure funding just sitting there, waiting to grabbed, and he was the one best suited to do so. Kozak answered back that she was the one better suited to the task. She paused for a moment, gazing confidently out at the audience, and took a long breath.

“The next four years are going to be critical. We’ve been resting on our laurels and we’re considered quite smug. I think what we’ve been hearing is we’re ready for an evolution,” she said. 

“I’ve been working hard to make relationships for the last nine years regionally, provincially and federally. And if you elect me your mayor, I’m going to make sure those relationships pay off.”

Meanwhile, Severyn laughed off the idea he was unprepared for the role. “The mayor’s job has no real pre-requisites,” he said, noting that his 30 years of experience on the Nelson Police force had given him plenty of transferable skills, including a strength for building relationships. He vowed to be accessible to everyone in the community “from the bottom of the payroll scale all the way to the top.”

“I’m not a career politician and I don’t plan to be a career politician. But I’ll empower council to do what’s right for the citizens. I’m not new to Nelson. I’m not new to this city at all,” he said. 

“I walked the beat for thirty years and I talked to every single person from panhandlers all the way up the chain. I’m ready for this.”

As I sat down to write, ten minutes after the event ended, for a moment I felt daunted by the task ahead of me. I was in the Star office alone, with the lights off, stressing over how to approach the article. Each piece I put out about the election resulted in a flood of e-mails and social media interactions, sometimes with corrections or accusations of inaccuracies. People were engaged. It was exciting, but it was also emotionally exhausting. Roles were evolving in the newsroom, and I continued to grapple with imposter syndrome as my time got siphoned away from arts stories and toward hard news. Calvin was throwing me into radical environments that I didn’t understand, then I had to turn around and prove myself to be the expert. 

There were hundreds of people in that room at the Prestige, so how come my version of the event was the one that would be saved for posterity? Just because I happened to have this job, at this time? Did I really deserve that sort of power? I clacked away at the keys, transcribing quotes and placing them on top of each other like un-deployed Lego blocks, my mind whispering you’re going to fuck this up, you’re going to fuck this up. I tried to remember the answers that landed, the quips that earned the most applause. 

The moment that kept replaying in my mind was Dooley interrupting Hicks. “Let me finish,” Dooley said, visibly upset. “Let me just finish, let me finish.” I couldn’t believe it. Hicks had essentially accused Dooley of not allowing other people to speak, and in his response he was doing exactly that. This wasn’t me putting some lefty slant on the piece, this was just a fact. A fact I was going to lead with. 

But could I get away with it? Would Calvin go for it?

“When I read the first three paragraphs I was almost ready to strangle you,” Calvin said, upon reading my filed story. I’d called him on my cell during my drive home. 

“You started with all that bully stuff with Dooley and I thought it was going to be a total hit piece, but I think you nailed it. Great quotes, nice balance, that’s exactly what I wanted.”

“What’d you think of the stuff Severyn was saying?”

“Great stuff, great stuff. I mean, the guy’s a clown but he’s definitely quotable.”

“And Deb came off good, man. She was calm, collected, the audience was loving her.”

Calvin snorted. “Dooley’s still going to take it, though.”

“You think?”

The Kootenay Goon

[oselatra]

Loaves and fishes

A proposed ordinance would limit the ability of charities to feed the homeless in LR city parks. Opponents say it's about keeping the poor out of sight, out of mind.

From a purely civic standpoint — from a keeping-your-constituency-from-hating-your-guts standpoint — the issue of homelessness is so thorny for a politician it almost makes you pity them. Almost. There is no right answer to be had, no one-size-fits-all solution big enough to stretch over the issue, bristling as it is with handy petards ready to hoist both those deemed insufficiently business-oriented and those seen as insufficiently compassionate. No matter what decision a city official makes with regard to homelessness, somebody, somewhere, is going to think that person either a bleeding-heart dope or a heartless bastard for making it.

Still, there are insufficient answers, and then there are the willfully tone-deaf ones. That seems to be the case with Little Rock's recent attempt to regulate mass feedings of the homeless in city parks, via a surprise ordinance that seemed so punitive and downright mean that it gave even some reliable business-first folks around town pause for thought. Dropped on city directors at the tail end of a City Board agenda meeting May 9, the ordinance as originally written would have prohibited feeding meals to more than 25 people in a city park without securing a "Large Group Feeding Permit" from the city at least 30 days before the event, with groups not allowed to serve meals in the same park more than twice a year. Though certain restrictions in the ordinance have been softened after public outcry, the original draft required each group to put down a $500 refundable security deposit "to cover the cost of repairing any damage to the hardscape, furnishings and landscape" in the park where the feeding occurred, with the deposit potentially forfeited if the group failed to pick up trash following their event. If the group wanted police protection for the event, the draft ordinance stated, it had to hire off-duty police officers at its own cost. In addition, the ordinance gave the city manager's office the ability to summarily cancel a feeding event in a city park at any time, postponing it for up to 15 days if City Hall determined the event should not proceed because of "weather, public health conditions, public safety conditions, or because of an intervening event that was not foreseen at the time the large group feeding application was filed."

Attempts to reach City Manager Bruce Moore, who brought up the ordinance, were unsuccessful before press time.

Groups serving the homeless fed large groups under the Broadway Bridge on a monthly basis for over a decade until the bridge was closed for construction in September 2016. It appears the ordinance was tailored to preserve the aesthetics of Riverfront Park and has outraged those who work with the homeless. In the process, it has managed to shove one of Little Rock's most enduring elephants in the room back into the rotunda of City Hall.

At a May 16 City Board meeting — one packed with homeless people and their supporters, who streamed in directly from a protest picnic hosted by homeless advocacy groups at the front of City Hall — Vice Mayor Kathy Webb and City Director Dean Kumpuris moved to table the ordinance (by then somewhat defanged, with the required security deposit dropped from $500 to $100 and other concessions) for 45 days and empanel a commission of city employees, homeless advocates and business leaders to study the issue and look for solutions. Members of the committee include representatives from River Market district businesses, the Arkansas Homeless Coalition, the Little Rock Convention and Visitors Bureau, area faith leaders, the Little Rock Police Department, the Clinton Presidential Center, two representatives who are homeless and others. The move to table and study passed by a vote of 9-1, with Director Ken Richardson voting against.

While the talking cure hasn't managed to budge the issue of homelessness in Little Rock much in the past, as some on the City Board pointed out, at least people are discussing it again. Given that homelessness is so easy for city leaders and workaday folks to ignore, maybe that's progress.

oddest things about the draft feeding ordinance was that nobody, even city directors, who will vote to kill or pass an amended version in mid-July once the committee's recommendations are made, seems to have known that it was coming.

"I don't know of any director that knew that was coming down," Capi Peck, Ward 4 city director, said. "Bruce Moore passed that ordinance out to us at the very end of the agenda meeting. We normally get a packet of information with what's going to be in the agenda meeting. That was not included. It was passed out literally five minutes before we recessed. We were all taken aback. I did later find out that this was something that the city attorney had been working on and researching for a couple of years."

Peck said her initial reaction to the ordinance was that it was "awful," and not something she or any board member could get behind. While Peck said she believes the city does more for the homeless than it gets credit for — she points to the Jericho Way homeless day resource center at 33rd Street and Springer Boulevard, noting that Jericho served over 10,000 meals to the homeless and provided over 10,000 shuttle rides to the facility last year — she believes the attempt to float an ordinance restricting compassionate feeding of the poor gave the city an unneeded black eye.

While Peck said she was initially in favor of voting down the ordinance as it was originally presented, she said the establishment of a committee to study the issue was a step in the right direction.

"I was appalled, and I think most of us [on the City Board] were absolutely appalled," she said. "With that being said, we do have a lot of work to do in that respect. Maybe this wasn't a bad thing that it came out this way. It brings it out into the public arena. Let's not react, let's do something positive about it."

Ward 2 Director Richardson, the lone board member to vote against tabling the ordinance and forming a committee to discuss it, said he is still questioning why city leaders thought the ordinance was necessary. "Nobody has presented to me a rationale for us doing this," he said. "The notion of us trying to penalize or criminalize people trying to help the least of us doesn't make any sense at all. I don't think it's a good or fair representation of the city I represent and the city I grew up in. It's just not the image that we want to have."

Like Peck, Richardson said the ordinance seemed to have "dropped out of the blue" at the end of the May 9 agenda meeting. Also like Peck, Richardson was taken aback by the seeming mean-spiritedness of the proposed ordinance. He believes the city has bigger fish to fry than trying to curtail compassionate feedings. "I thought the ordinance and the idea — let's say this so I don't hurt anybody's feelings — I thought both of those didn't make sense," he said. "I won't say it was idiotic, but it was crazy to me in terms of the issues that are pressing before us right now. ... It just came out of the blue. It's crazy, at best, if I had to have a word to describe it. That's at best."

Webb, who represents Ward 3, said she was surprised when she saw the language of the ordinance, which she has heard came in response to "numerous complaints" about the downtown homeless, including reports of panhandling. She said she wished the city had handled the issue differently, including giving the board advance notice that an anti-feeding ordinance was being considered.

"I wish somebody would have said, 'Look, we're getting all these complaints. This is something we need to talk about.' " Webb said. "We could have gotten some folks together to talk about it so we could have done what we're doing now, rather than have this ordinance, which — I don't think people are really mean — but I think the ordinance sounds very mean-spirited, even though other cities have done this. I don't like surprises, and to a lot of people this was a surprise."

While Webb said she understands the call to have simply voted the original ordinance down, she believes forming the committee to study the problem, look at solutions found by other cities, and make suggestions is a better approach to an issue that isn't going away.

"We don't talk much anymore," she said. "We've got people who get their news from one source, and people who get their news from another, and whatever either one of them says is true. We don't discuss. ... I think we have to talk about hard issues and give folks a chance to say, 'I know this is what you think, but this is the reality.' "

Webb said that while the time for the committee to make recommendations is tight — it will present its report at the agenda meeting July 11, with a vote on the possibly amended ordinance on July 18 — she believes its members can move the ball on the issue. She said her ultimate goal is reaching voluntary agreements between advocates, business owners and the city so the board doesn't have to put in place an ordinance to regulate feedings. She would like to see the committee stay on for the foreseeable future, to try to find long-term solutions.

"One of the things that's exciting about [the committee] is that we have people at the table with differences of opinion," she said. "It gives us an opportunity. ... We've got a starting point here. ... In my mind, if we can work together and have more collaboration on this, we can talk about, 'OK, we can work together on tiny houses, we can work together on mental health services, we can work together on more effective job training.' When we talk about homelessness, there's not one solution for everything. But when we can provide these additional services that can get at the core of what's an underlying issue for many people, we can drastically reduce the number of people who are homeless, and help people."

asked by the Arkansas Homeless Coalition to serve as one of their representatives on the committee to study the ordinance and the issue, Aaron Reddin, founder of the mobile homeless outreach charity The Van, declined. He's got better things to do with his time than talk, he said, including — until the crankcase seal on his tractor blew a few days back — bush-hogging an overgrown, 5-acre plot he recently secured behind The Van's headquarters on Faulkner Lake Road in North Little Rock. When it's cleared and the stumps pulled, Reddin plans to plow the acreage into turn rows and plant the whole thing in vegetables — beans, potatoes, corn and tomatoes — which he said he will then give away to whomever the hell he pleases, preferably in a Little Rock city park.

Lean and bearded, a former Marine who carries a megaphone around in his cluttered and mud-splattered 4-wheel-drive truck, Reddin has been helping the homeless all over the state for 12 years now, working 80-hour weeks at times to fulfill a near-monastic calling to bring help, food, clothing and services directly to those who need it most. Like many local homeless advocates, Reddin was incensed by the anti-feeding ordinance, and incensed again when the City Board voted to table and study the issue instead of voting to kill it altogether. Reddin said he has yet to hear a rationale that justifies hindering the feeding of hungry people in city parks.

"These city parks are maintained by city sales tax dollars," he said. "Every homeless person in this town spends money in this town. They pay tax. They don't have the luxury of going on Amazon and ordering shit. Everything they buy, they pay taxes on. So they have just as much right to be there as anyone else. Food is life. To tell folks they can't share food one with another, it's just absurd."

Reddin said he sees the homeless feeding ordinance as the latest move in a longstanding effort by the city to push the homeless out of sight, out of mind — and away from the downtown areas where tourists and visitors congregate. He sees the location of Jericho Way — which is miles from the downtown core, closes at 4:30 p.m., and isn't open on weekends — as indicative of that effort, along with a series of recent evictions of homeless camps, which Reddin said have stepped up drastically since the first of the year.

Several city leaders have disagreed that the placement of Jericho Way was part of a calculated effort to draw the homeless out of downtown. But, Reddin said, "You take Jericho Way and you put it three miles from downtown? And then your argument against feeding in the parks is 'well, we've got Jericho Way'? They don't serve supper. That's not a bash on Jericho Way. They're doing a great job, and I'm glad that it's there. But we've got folks all over. Southwest, West Little Rock. You don't want them all in one place, why have one resource center? Do multiple small ones around town."

Reddin is skeptical that the committee studying the issue can find real solutions in only 45 days. He said if the ordinance is approved in any form, it will undoubtedly curtail the advocacy and outreach work by his group and others. "We try and make sure we have food in the van when we're out," he said. "We may have two or three people walk up when we pull up, or we may have 15 or 20. ... Say I pull into MacArthur Park to help one person who has called in distress, and the next thing I know, 26 people show up. You're going to write me a ticket for giving out some food?"

The ACLU of Arkansas has come out in opposition to the feeding ordinance, saying it would lead to litigation, and Reddin said he'll be meeting shortly with a lawyer who has offered to help Reddin's group fight the ordinance in court for free if need be. Whatever the case, he plans on pushing back against the idea that he can't distribute food to friends who happen to be homeless.

"There's enough of us that we're going to keep sharing food," Reddin said. "They can write all the tickets they want, they can pass all the ordinances they want. It's unconstitutional and blatantly discriminatory. If that's the Little Rock they want to have, then they can have that at City Hall. The rest of us are going to fight for the people that really make this city what it is, which is a great city that cares about people."

Clark Gray, who said he has been homeless on the streets of Little Rock for over three years, agrees that many in Little Rock care about the homeless. Standing in front of City Hall, eating a dripping ice cream cone at the protest picnic the night the City Board voted to table the homeless feeding ordinance, Gray said there are numerous groups, including Reddin's The Van, that work hard to better the lives of homeless people. But, he said, there are other people who seem to see right through him.

"There's a lot of people who will shrug their shoulders at us, stick their noses up at us," he said. "All we're trying to do is survive. There's a lot of people out here with health problems, like me. I'll probably end up dying in these streets because I don't have a way to get to the shelters or the churches that have food. There's people who would starve to death if it wasn't for the kindness of the folks at the mission down here and The Van."

Usually confined to a wheelchair by painful blood clots in his legs, Gray said he believes the city's recent efforts to evict people from homeless camps and the proposed ordinance to limit group feeding in the city parks are part of a conscious effort to push the homeless away from the River Market area where tourists congregate.

"The old saying is, 'out of sight, out of mind,' " Gray said. "They just don't want to have to look at us. I don't think that's right. I'm trying to figure out a way to get the public to realize we're human, too. Ya'll got your fancy houses and cars and all this. But we just want to survive. There's a lot of times that people aren't able to go way across town to these homeless shelters or to a place where we can eat."

to study the homeless feeding ordinance held its first meeting at 7:30 a.m. May 23 at the Willie L. Hinton Neighborhood Resource Center on 12th Street. Fifteen coffee-stoked and fresh-scrubbed people met in a sparse, high-ceilinged room, untouched boxes of bagels and pastries growing stale on a nearby table. Though it was mostly a getting-to-know-you session with introductions all around, the conversation did eventually plunge into the red meat of the issue, with crosstalk often veering away from feeding to adjacent concerns about homelessness, from panhandling to mental illness to addiction. At one point, assistant City Manager James Jones, who serves as the facilitator of the committee, spoke up to say that the city Parks and Recreation Department has employees who sweep through Riverfront Park every morning before dawn, "collecting numerous syringes [and] needles," including from the playground area. At that, committee member Father Fred Ball, the pastor of San Damiano Ecumenical Catholic Church, asked the obvious. "That's important, safety," Ball said. "But I wonder how syringes found in the wee hours of the night tie to the feedings?"

Jim Garrett, an advocate for the homeless from St. James United Methodist Church who leads one of the groups that used to feed under the Broadway Bridge and serves dinner to the homeless and working poor twice a month at churches near Little Rock's Union Station and in Southwest Little Rock, asked much the same thing: Why was the connection being made between feeding people and drug abuse?

"Well," Jones said, "there's the perception. Real or not, the perception is there, whether it's true or not."

"We're there one hour, two times a month," Garrett said. "We're being considerate. We don't allow drug dealers or drug users. I'm insulted by that. We're not responsible for those parks the other 23 hours a day. If you're going to take that kind of stance, I don't see where we can possibly go with this."

While all present agreed they wanted to find a solution so that feeding the needy could continue, the meeting often spun away from the topic of filling hungry bellies and toward the negative effects of homelessness. One issue that came up was the urge to move the homeless away from tourist-heavy areas around Riverfront Park and the Broadway Bridge.

"A basic human need is survival and food," said Alan Sims, Little Rock Convention and Visitors Bureau vice president for sales and services. "So if you're feeding, it's an attractant. They're going to be attracted there. Why can't we balance? Why can't we attract them? It doesn't have to be in a park. It doesn't have to be where our children are. It doesn't have to be where there are safety issues and visitor issues. Why can't we attract them someplace else? I hope this group can find that. We want to feed and we want a great city. We can have both."

Parks and Recreation Director Truman Tolefree said the ordinance is about providing structure so that feeding in city parks doesn't become what he termed a "free-for-all."

"We have employees who are out there in cars at all times of the day," Tolefree said. "They work structured hours. If we don't know when groups are showing up, if we don't know when they're feeding or where they're feeding, or that kind of thing, we may have another activity planned. So we need to be able to have some kind of structure when people are coming to feed in the park."

After the meeting, Garrett, whose church has been holding large group feedings of the homeless in Little Rock for almost 10 years, said he felt a little more hopeful that the committee might be able to provide some solutions to the issue. He saw room for compromise, he said.

"In talking to [Vice Mayor] Webb," Garrett said, "I think there's some light at the end of the tunnel. I don't have the answer, but I feel that somewhere there's room to compromise. But it's got to be a pretty limited compromise. If we're talking about feeding, it's going to have to be in the downtown area somewhere. That's where the homeless people are. They're on foot. They can't come to us. They can traverse maybe a mile or so, but that's their area."

Father Ball and Garrett said they fail to see a direct correlation between problems like panhandling and drug abuse downtown and feedings in city parks. Both said they see it as their duty to continue to help find ways to get food to Little Rock's homeless.

"We weren't asked to do this. We were told to do this," Garrett said. "It's not one of the Ten Commandments, but maybe it's No. 11: to take care of the least and the widows and the poor."

Reached after the meeting, Jones said the committee is off to a productive start and will work toward consensus and a recommendation that everyone on the committee can support. "Working together, we can come to some kind of consensus and agree that there is a solution that everybody can be a part of and accept," he said. Asked whether he believes there is a direct correlation between feeding in Riverfront Park and needles found in the park, Jones repeated that the perception of a link is there.

"Are there facts to support that? I don't know. There's a perception that there is," he said. "There are a lot of homeless people who do sleep in the park. ... There are some people who think that when the feedings take place, they're going to stay where they're fed, and they'll stay there until the next day. That is a perception of citizens that call us all the time. They believe that. Is it a fact? I can't say that I have actual documentation to back that up."

The LRCVB's Sims said he is also optimistic that the committee can reach a solution. He said everybody on the committee agrees the feedings are a good thing, but a balance must be struck between what's good for the homeless and what's good for the city. Visitors to Little Rock, he said, serve as temporary taxpayers, spending money in local businesses. Because of that, he said, visitor perception of the city is a big concern.

"We want visitors to leave here and talk about how clean and great our city is and what wonderful generous and friendly people we have here," he said. "The old cliché 'perception is reality' very much applies. It goes back to what we started with: There's got to be a way that we can all do what we need to."

Sims said he's heard the arguments that every city has an issue with the homeless, but "that doesn't justify having an issue. We've got to be able to provide services for the homeless, be compassionate to the homeless, but also do that in consideration of the experience that our visitors have coming to the city. We need to balance all those."

Sims said he and the LRCVB are convinced that feeding the homeless needs to continue (his comments at the committee meeting about food possibly being used as an "attractant," he said, were misunderstood), and he added that the area near Riverfront Park is "very much part of a visitor zone for Little Rock" and probably shouldn't be used for mass feedings for that reason.

"Our convention center is right downtown, our primary hotels are right downtown, and they're all adjacent to the park," he said. "To be a guest in the hotel and look out the window and there's a large mass feeding going on right outside your hotel room, I'm questioning whether that's the image or the perception that we want. Would there not be a better place that might be more conducive to the feeding?"

Loaves and fishes

[ahnsael]

Had some [suspected] drug dealers in the casino last night. Several times. On their third visit, we decided to call the county sheriffs and request a “courtesy walk through” of the casino.

I made it clear when I called that we had not witnessed any illegal activity, but...let’s just say we have a little inside information.

As much as I don’t personally have a good history with the police, I’ve managed to get along well with cops in this area. Maybe it’s because usually they’re looking for crime, and often looking at the wrong people...but here, we’re [mostly] on the same side in not wanting bad things to happen at our establishment. And let’s face it -- my work hours are the most likely time for stuff to happen.

So the cops show up. My fellow graveyard manager sees them/talks to them before I do, but he sends them my way after filling them in with more detail on why they were called (when we called, I just said “it’s not a high priority, we just have some people in here who are acting suspiciously, and would like a police presence to be felt -- if you have more pressing issues, we can wait; these people are here all the time so if we don’t get you right away, odds are they’ll still be here later”).

But when I met with one of the officers by our bar, one of the people in the group we called about was sitting at the bar, maybe 20 feet away from us. And as I learned that he had already gotten the back story from my other manager, I mentioned that she was sitting about 20 feet behind him.

He asked if we had names, and I was able to provide three names out of the five people. The officer asked me to do a floor scan and see if I could get the others, but the other two weren’t playing with their player’s cards so I couldn’t get their info. But as I continued talking to the officers, the other manager came with a list of the other two peoples’ names.

But...it was kind of fun to watch these people freak out over cops being in the building. They didn’t bolt for the door or anything (one of them was smart enough to tell the person who wanted to bolt that it would look suspicious). But one suddenly pulled out her cell phone and started calling the other people in the casino to let them know what was going on (I saw her placing calls; the other manager saw the others picking up their phones after each time she dialed), then they all separated into smaller groups.

The cops checked the names and found no active warrants, but told us that the people in the group were “on the radar” and thanked us for calling, and said that after they left, a couple of undercover cops would still be around.

Now, I know, normally I’d be hesitant to call the cops over hunches/suspicious behaviors. But a couple of these people were in yesterday, and we had a semi-regular (and very nice) player win a big jackpot. We paid her, then she kept playing...and while they didn’t hit another jackpot, they did very well. And a few of these people kept helicoptering around her, watching to see how many credits she had, and both of us who were managing got the feeling that we really needed to walk her out to her car when the time came that she decided to go home.

And when we walked her out, a couple of them started to come out another door (then quickly ducked back in when they saw that she wasn’t alone). A car started to pull up, but seemed to quickly decide to park about a half a block away after seeing that she wasn’t alone.

So I left the other manager and a security guard to make sure she got into her car okay, and I went towards the car that had decided to park, and I wasn’t at ALL secretive about the fact that I was taking down a license plate number and the make/model of the car. I wanted to be able to report those things if they pulled in behind her, but I also wanted to act as a very visible deterrent to them doing so.

She made it out without anyone tailing her.

Then she came in again tonight, and the two of this group that had done so last night hovered around her again, more than is comfortable. We let her know that we had noticed, and that we had her back (seriously...for the past couple of months I’ve felt more like a “Security Department Manager” than I have since I gained the title maybe five months ago as I’ve learned more about what kinds of things are happening, and more ways to try and prevent those things from happening).

One of them bummed a cigarette off of the player. As soon as I saw this, I told the cigarette-leech that if I saw her do it again, I’d ban her from the casino for 72 hours (that’s the longest I can personally 86 someone for -- but in Nevada, asking to bum a smoke in a casino is considered panhandling, and panhandling in a casino is a HUGE no-no). When I told the player that I had made that comment to the person who she gave a cigarette to, she breathed a sigh of relief.

This player doesn’t come here all the time. Not even weekly, as far as I know (we see these shady characters more than we see this player). But when this player comes, she GAMBLES. And I’m happy to say (since she is a very nice person) that she often wins. And I want to make sure that she feels comfortable that we’re looking out for her, not wanting these people to bother her/hover around her any more than she wants them to be hanging around her while she plays.

I’m off for the next two nights. But I’m thinking about going in tonight (it won’t be paid time, since OT hasn’t been approved by my boss for such a thing) and just keeping an eye out; I can’t do anything “official,” but I can be an extra set of eyes. And if something goes down, and the boss decides to approve paying me for it, then fantastic; and if nothing goes down (or if something does and the boss decides not to approve paying me), at least I’ll know I’m helping keep the casino safe.

Speaking of working-when-you’re-not-working, I’m now only one of two managers who haven’t been shifted to a salary position. Which I’m totally okay with -- if I work overtime, I get paid for it. But...one of the managers who is newer than I am was recently shifted to salary. And I’m wondering why he was moved, but I haven’t been offered.

Maybe it’s just that they feel that graveyard managers are less likely to be needed on days/hours that they aren’t scheduled (which, granted, it’s odd if I pull more than an hour and a half of overtime per week). So maybe they’ve just decided that keeping me hourly would be cheaper than moving me to a salary.

Plus, if I take a salary, I’m gonna want more than I’m making now (which they would probably have predicted) to make up for the fact that I’d basically be on-call 24/7.

Overall, I’m cool. I’m 7½ months in, and I still really like what I do. It’s still no Disneyland, but...it definitely keeps me on my toes, and I still feel like a valuable contributor to the casino’s success. I haven’t seen the lady in quite a while who was trying to convince me to move to her casino -- which is all well and good, because I’m not anxious to leave a job that I actually like (jobs I’ve had and not liked outnumber jobs I’ve had and have liked, so that counts for a LOT, even in the face of the promise of more money). But I do have guests that like me, employees that like me (also some guests and employees who don’t like me, but I’m okay with someone not liking me because I won’t break the rules or violate state gaming regulations for them), I enjoy doing the paperwork, I enjoy the math (the swing shift bartender always gives me his total sales and asks me to figure out his 8% tip total that he has to report, then verifies it by calculator -- he says I’ve been wrong only once, but I remember a second time that he doesn’t; still, out of hundreds of “8% quizzes” so far, that’s not bad).

Oh, for those who are interested, it doesn’t look like Disneyland is going to happen any time soon. I can’t get more than my regular weekend (Tuesday morning at 7:00am to Thursday night at 11:00pm), but...

my mom told me yesterday that they’re planning a Disneyland trip with my sis and her family in October (at least they’re telling me about this one, not keeping it secret like last year’s WDW trip).

An if I can get the time off, I can go with them.

But it’s really close to Halloween, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to join them.

But if I can, at least I know they will have a room I can stay in for a night or two while I’m there.

And by then, the Rivers of America should be open again, so I can check out the new shape of Tom Sawyer’s Island and the new-and-not-necessarily-improved shorter version of the Mark Twain.

We’ll see what the future holds. I’m not holding my breath. But dang it, I miss the heck out of Disneyland and would absolutely love to see it again relatively soon.