More true crime on my street! Tonight, during the eighth inning of the World Series, I heard a police siren from the street below my apartment! I sprang from the couch to see what was the matter, just in time to see a uniformed police officer force a suspect to the ground, followed by an undercover officer delivering a kick to the guy's ribs. To be fair, he had not yet been cuffed, and it looked like the suspect swung at the undercover cop first. There was a subsequent shove from a late-arriving uniformed officer that seemed rather gratuitous.
It appears that there is a nearby crack den after all!
From what I could see from the window, it looked like an undercover officer or officers tried to make a drug buy, and pounced once the dealer produced the goods. The contraband was in a baggie, and I'm going to go ahead and call it crack, because that is the most exciting possibility. I saw four police cars, and unless there was another arrestee out of my field of vision, the SFPD had an impressive 9:1 cop-to-suspect ratio on the scene.
My intrepid roommate talked to a neighbor, who informed her that he saw the police sergeant involved "hugging some people" on a nearby street corner. He surmises that the sergeant "lives in the community", if not on our specific block, and has made a personal commitment to stopping the recent crime wave, i.e., taking the crack den down!
I must also note that while I questioned our neighborhood's potential racial profiling in my previous entry, this suspect appeared to be Caucasian. Why this makes me feel relieved is probably complicated, but I do indeed feel like less of a racist tonight.
Sean, you've suggested an exciting new method to stopping police brutality. Referees!
Imagine an episode of Cops. Officer Tendon has just arrested a perp for Possession with Intent. Once he gets him on the ground, he puts the boot in.
Flag down! Officer-Referee Stripes signals a Police Brutality. Loss of felony. Five years from the end of the sentence.
In the booth, Madden makes some weird comment that uses the word 'gotta' like, fifteen times.
isn't there also a "pot den" a few doors down from you?
Alas, I thought our new neighborhood would continue your upward mobility away from Ward St., and now I find we're living in the middle of a drug zone.
Did you get the email from the HOA head today? We're making a mighty stink about the dumpster left over by PG&E. Broken windows, people, broken windows. And with an upcoming election, you can bet all 150 votes from our street will count.
I would like to see more penalty flags used in all aspects of our culture. When I was a lifeguard, I used a set of soccer cards to discipline kids that ran on the deck or bounced too many times on the board. A yellow card was a caution, but a red card meant instant expulsion from the pool area. For five minutes.