Tuesday little bits

-- Hey, that last entry was really long wasn’t it? Sorry, next time I’ll use an LJ cut. I don’t really like them, but that was kind of excessive. How do you all feel about the use of LJ cuts?

-- Ok, many of you have linked this, but if you haven’t seen the captions on terrorist attack instructions you should check this out. Remember, terrorists hate our freedom, and OCD

-- And anti-war protesters across America, aren’t you jealous of us? "President" Bush is attacking us directly. I love that stigmatizing protests as a Northern California thing is his strategy to discourage the anti-war movement. "Of course, I care what they believe. . .", Uh huh.

The Police Beat

I don’t know if any of you besides voiceandsalt are following the police news coming out of SF right now, but it’s pretty fascinating. Basically, 3 rank and file cops and 7 higher-ups, including the City’s first African-American police chief have been indicted (not convicted) by a grand jury. It all stems from an incident a few months ago 3 rank-and-file off-duty cops beat up a couple of civilians because they wouldn’t surrender their bag of, this is not a joke, steak fajitas.

The SFPD bosses tried to cover it up. One of the violently-hungry cops is the son of the Assistant Chief so you can see how the police would be tempted to lose all the evidence. Of course, the now-indicted Assistant Chief and the head of the Mission Station have their own violent pasts so they probably felt, you know, boys would be boys.

The Chief didn’t come off looking to good when he compared the thug officers to Jesus.* I never heard of Jesus beating up people who wouldn’t render their steak fajitas unto him, but I’ve never read the Bible so it might be in their somewhere.

But indictments reaching the upper levels of the police is big news. The Police Commission Hearing was televised live yesterday. I didn’t even mind that it pre-empted "Blind Date". It’s great to see all those people on TV: political flunkies, graft appointments, SFPD union spokespeople and Copwatch members. I would, in fact, love to watch this every day.

As with any city agency, behind the scenes political infighting is being pursued and blamed at the same time. The supporters of the Police Chief say that his reorganization of the department and racism are really the reasons that he is being indicted. While at a church service organized in support of the Chief, one person was quoted in the Chron saying, "I heard Emmitt Till's mother speak in this church when I was about 10, and this is a lynching."

Of course this person, Noah Griffin, the press secretary for the most right-wing Mayor SF has had in recent memory (at least until my classmate Gavin gets elected in November), ignores the fact that Emmitt Till didn’t make well over $100,000 a year and be assured of full city retirement benefits no matter what the outcome of his "lynching".

It seems to me that Griffin is looking for racism in the wrong place. The real question is whether we would even know about any of this if the cops hadn’t beaten up a couple of white people with the resources to get press and District Attorney attention. Don’t they cover that at the Academy anymore?

And San Francisco does love firing its Police Chiefs. My favorite incident involved the "Liberal" Richard Hongisto. He had run as the most left mayoral candidate and when he lost the election, he somehow managed to be named Police Chief. Then, oops, the Rodney King Riots happened. Many of you may not know that Martial Law was declared in the poor neighborhoods of San Francisco that week and no one was allowed on the streets in those neighborhoods after dark.

In reaction, The Bay Times** put a photo-shopped picture of Hongisto’s head over the body of a "hot" cop holding his baton on his crotch like a big penis. The caption read, "Check out Dick’s cool new tool . . . Martial Law" Hongisto ordered all the issues confiscated, got caught, and was fired.

With full city benefits, of course.

(After I finished this, I went and read the paper and saw that Jon Carroll’s column today is pretty much saying the same thing as I am, albeit much better. Oh well. It’s not like I’m going to delete this now.)



*(from sfbg.com) Who would Jesus punch?

After three off-duty San Francisco cops got into a fight with two other men outside a Union Street bar, badly injuring one of the men, Police Chief Earl Sanders compared critics of his investigation to those who attacked Jesus Christ. "There are always critics," he said. "We are going into one of our major holiday seasons, to celebrate the birth of a leader of the religious world. And I do recall in my readings that he was criticized."

**Back when it was a readable queer bi-weekly, not the pathetic waste of trees that it is now.