F350 tires are expensive.

That's why I can never forget.

There are lots of different brands and the prices are good. If the alarm is triggered the police are notified. They really work. As for the tires, that type of stuff happens everywhere. Big cities, rural communities, suburbs, etc.

Last edited Mon Apr 23, 2012, 06:26 PM - Edit history (1)

Just remembered! Thought it was humorous at the time since the tires were worn anyway.

I was high up a sidewalk tree loping it when somebody complained from below that i was blocking the sidewalk with the fallen limbs. I stated i left the legally allowed clearance of 4 feet and I i would finish cleaning up AFTER i was done trimming trimming..

Not satisfied he said he would talk to my boss and started taking down the phone number embossed on my truck.

"I am the boss." I stated

"Oh yea? well here ya go BOSSMAN!!!"

POP! SSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!

Guy took off running.

Right in the sidewall where it couldn't get fixed.

Good thing i didn't see his race/face.

Might get me in trouble here one way or the other.

Yea, I have vehicle alarms.

The one you said could climb so well, because of well... you know?

What another interesting story.

you shouldhave been on the phone, giving the description to police of a suspicious male then hang up and stay on your stoop protecting what is yours.

Let police do what they are paid to do.

but not from slashing your tires.

Nobody to see him. Best time for mere mayhem. A few seconds and you're done. Heck, when was a kid(12) i tried to steal a stop sign at one o'clock in the morning. tried for 30 minutes and never succeeded. But nobody ever saw me.

On the other hand best time for a burglary is(contrary to popular opinion) in the day. When the working stiff is out.

You know, I never will know if i actually deterred him from a burglary. I just thought I did at the time. Probably just from my block alone.

Unless you witness them doing so, Impossible to prove.

The young man has a long criminal record, and had moved in next door not long before this incident. I'm guessing the neighbor had put up a trail cam after having found his gas tank mysteriously empty once or twice - or maybe he took that precaution before anything had yet been stolen.

Then you saw him try the same thing someplace else and you STILL didn't call the cops?

Your story doesn't make any sense, and you managed to make your mystery kid the same age, race and gender as Trayvon Martin AND work a hoodie in for good measure. I call bullshit.

Remember, i didn't see him break the law. Looking in a window is not illegal. I merely suspected.

your story is all bullshitty and everything, but next time, just in case this ever really happens, call the fucking police. That is really what they are there for, and it will give them something useful to do other than arrest pot smokers and people trading sex for money.

Lots of conservatives post to this site for a laugh.

Instant cred!

jeez
He saw what he saw.

the one on the bottom is fucking hot!!

who've had refrigerated brains.

I find the other one pretty cute too, whoever he is.

Can we turn this in to a cute baseball player thread, pretty please??

as the fellow I saw.

The second one is about my color.

I am hispanic(central american).

since both pictures are of Dominicans.

One of my fellow workers was a Panamanian and blacker than
any African American I ever saw. Great tree climber.

from India perhaps?

Channeling Bing Crosby.

Everybody sing along!

I have a tree trimming and removal business AND a computer services shop from my basement.


I must say though the Panamanian's skills at writing Linux device drivers are SORELY lacking..

Anyone who knows how racists talk knows they call Blacks "monkeys," "apes," etc. And, what do monkeys do (and, apparently Black Panamanians)? Climb trees.

I do give him props for not mentioning watermelons.

SUPPOSED TO MEAN? Reads suspiciously like you're implying that he's a monkey, what are you really trying to say?

dude runs a tree-service. See how well everything fits?

a read like it was right at home.

Well known racist rhetoric for those who rise above "garden-variety racists."

When I read that post, I really did gasp.

like this and get away with it? REALLY?

What was this "black kid" in light of the OP attempting to make an analogy to the Zimmerman stalks Martin case?

If the "black kid" was from Cuba who is hispanic, like this top pitcher that the Reds managed to snag-



would the same sort of issue have occurred and would he have been called a "black kid" or a "hispanic kid"?

if you're describing someone to the cops their physical characteristics are more useful than their assumed cultural identity. Hispanic is more of a culture. Which is useful in some instances. However when describing an appearance, not so much.

For instance, there are a few Americans who defected to North Korea. They've gone on to have kids with some white women who were also there. Culturally their children are Korean. However they are also lily white and until they open their mouths they look like any white kid you could find back in the states or Europe.

If you were describing such a person to the police would you say it's a korean kid or a white kid?

And that is the crux of the problem that this nation - as one of the, if not the most diverse in the world - faces when it comes to the pseudo-classification of race, ethnicity, and gender. Previous societal "rules" by a "majority" (European-descended) mix of ethnic groups, defined, reinforced, and indoctrinated the society as a whole by assigning certain odd "traits" to others via various means (at home, in school, via books and other print media, via audio/visual means, via games and toys, and via advertisements for products or services, etc.), and the "traits" have persistently perpetuated negative stereotypes about the defined group, some more egregious to certain groups than others.

This is the heart and soul of profiling. Once one has "tagged" a person via some phenotypical description, then a subset of predefined, internalized cultural assumptions are called up in the psyche to apply to that individual. Problem is, what if the one "tagging" gets it "wrong"?

As an example of how convoluted this system is - when geographers defined the continents based on land mass and included a continent of "Africa", then it was insane when many historians refused to include the country of Egypt, the home of so many famous antiquities, as being on the continent of Africa. I.e., Africans were not allowed to claim Egypt as a source of their civilizations whereas Europe could claim Greece as the source of theirs. This wasn't something relegated to hundreds of years ago, it was a major battle during the past 20 years during the debates about multiculturalism. In fact the whole designation of "sub-Saharan Africa" reinforces the nonsense.

It is a sick system with a dysfunctional set of rules that many posting here have had to leearn from birth in order to survive and it will take another century to purge, and fix the damage.

And I guess they also shouldn't describe a person as "male" since there are many cultural assumptions that go along with that (you can't pretend men and women have always been treated exactly the same right?) . Also there are some men who would identify as women and vice-versa and it's not always possible to tell them apart by just looking at them.

Also being tall carries societal weight as well (we treat tall people differently) so height as a descriptor is out.

So when someone assaults you tell the police it was "a person of indiscriminate race (since it's all a social construct anyway), of some height (I AM NOT A HEIGHTIST!) and a gender of sher own choosing (really it's a spectrum so I don't even see male or female anymore)".

That will definitely be useful.

/and as an aside culturally north Africa is quite different from the south. We separate continents why? Because they're separated by geological features that don't make them entirely inaccessible to other continents necessarily but do limit cultural and physical interactions. The same can be said of north and south Africa. And given the ease of access offered by the Mediterranean including north Africa with southern Europe would make more sense (Greeks had far more interactions with North Africa than they did with Northern Europe; North Africans had far more interactions with Southern Europeans than they did with Southern Africa).

It may even take more than a century to fix!

your argument was silly. The kind of stuff a freshman who just took his first sociology class could churn out by the gigabytes.

I get it, yes you are the first person ever to discover that race has a social component and a ton of historical baggage. None of us ever realized that before. Totally.

College was done 30 years ago. And you have lost sight of the false analogy of the OP based on your own outdated view of reality. And you managed to dig yourself into that same hole!

Certainly getting crowded in there, don't you think?

overly excited by his Sociology 101 course.

As someone in their 50s or so you really ought to know better.

I really don't know how to classify since Black nicaraguans(from the coast) spoke english primarily.

I probably use the term rather sloppily. But then again, I am allowed!

Because i *AM* hispanic.

So what is considered "black" (and keep in mind that in the U.S., there is that "1 drop" rule)?

such a rule. If me having a great great black grandma make me black in your eyes, so be it. But I must say I am melanin challenged.

Personally I consider myself hispanic though my spanish is guttural at best. I would fit in well as an extra in any mariachi movie. As long as I don't speak fast.

and is very much alive and well here in the good old U.S.A. And the profiling continues and is even picked up very quickly be recent immigrants, until and unless the profiled individual "opens their mouth" and utters words with an accent.... If not, the well-worn stereotypes kick in and all common sense is tossed aside.

They may be hispanic, too. Black is a race. Hispanic is an ethnicity.

If a person looks black, then that is enough for the police to spot the person, since he would black then, too.

GZ is a hispanic white, I think.

And what is "part black" if you are only going by visual queues?

Do you see how this whole issue of profiling in the U.S., a country burdened down with a sick and convoluted race/ethnic/appearance definition issue, causes people to jump through all sorts of hoops to justify actions? The problem being that multi-generational descendants from countries in Africa brought here centuries ago, have now become "blah" people according to the psychopath Rick Santorum, with no ethnicity worthy of recognition, and are therefore undervalued, underestimated, marginalized, AND profiled. And anyone who "looks like" such a non-entity, is assumed to be one unless they speak with an accent or are established to have been born in another country. Then suddenly the rules change.

Ironically, CNN's RWer Ruben Navarette opined about the use of the term "White Hispanics" a couple weeks ago and insists the term should be eliminated:

http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/29/opinion/navarrette-white-hispanic/index.html

kind of shoes, whatever. It's not a verified statement of fact. It's a visual cue for the police to spot someone. A description.

How do you expect the cops to find someone if they don't know whether they're looking for a white woman or a black man or a white man or an Asian woman?

I might say someone has blonde hair, but you'd say light brown. It's a description to help the police spot who they're looking for.

So this woman would be described as a "black female with straight black hair"?*


*(this is a woman from India considered an "untouchable&quot

And this one would be a "Hispanic female with straight blonde hair"?*


*(this is Beyonce, who is AA)

M'kay.

And with that, I bid you and this thread adieu because it is bedtime...

Unless you don't WANT criminals to be caught.

I'm not sure what I'd identify the top young woman as. Depends on the light. I might tell cops she's dark skinned, possibly Af American, possibly Indian. But if it's dark, I might describe her as I think she's black.

That would be close enough for the cops to know who they're looking for. AND THAT'S THE POINT.

You lose this argument, my friend. If I call 911, I'm giving as full a description as I can, including race. We all should do that. If you're embarrassed that a particular race is identified, that's a separate issue.

And illustrated exactly what I'm talking about.

Despite her plight, she radiates beauty from the heart...

like so many others with "darker" hues, she is relegated to the bottom of society - much of this as a direct result of the rampant visciousness of colonialism.

we now call it The War On Terror.

Used to be called "Making the world safe for Democracy™".

not expected to attempt to identify a person out of fear of offending someone? That's ridiculous.

If someone is breaking into your house and he looks like a black male of around 30 or so, wearing a white t-shirt and dark sweatpants, then that's what you see, and that gives the cops a clue on what to look for.

It's not profiling. It's a description of what you have SEEN. But note that a 911 call is not about, "I see a black man in the street." The cops would say, "So?" But if you say I see a white man running down the street carrying a jewelry box, and an elderly woman shouting after him that she's been burglarized, and he's wearing a dark warmup suit.....that's a call to 911 based on behavior, with race as a description.

You call police, NOT ON 911, and report suspicious activity.
AFAIK, every police dep't. has a number you can call.

Since then i have called the right number to get a fixit ticket taken care of.

Ours and others in my area do not have a direct line to police after business hours and a recording instructs you to in future call 911 and the call is then automatically forwarded to 911 dispatch. During regular business hours they have both an emergency regular number that goes directly into the police station and a non-emergency number that does the same. If the emergency regular number is busy or is not answered after three rings the call gets automatically forwarded to 911 dispatch.

When 911 was first established in our area everyone got a notice about it in the mail, and at that time there weren't plans to have any regular emergency number that went into the police station at all whether during business hours or not, but as it turned out there weren't enough 911 operators when it was first started, so they had to revert to having the regular emergency number that went into the police station but only during regular business hours and rig the phone system to forward to 911 if the regular emergency police station number was busy or wasn't answered after three rings. They never got rid of the regular emergency number and the temporary system they had to establish has stayed the same for many years now. I guess they figured with our well-staffed police service and boring township where not a whole lot of crime happens it was more feasible to keep it this way than hire and train more 911 operators.

Our township police are well-paid and well-staffed especially since nothing much happens around here. For police stations that are understaffed and/or busy with a lot of crime that goes on in their area it's most likely that they have no emergency regular number that goes directly into the police stations and calls go directly to 911 to free up their officers from having to deal with emergency phone calls. After all, this is why 911 dispatch was invented and wanted in the first place.

I follow them every day

after all, black males are automatically suspect.

Pathetic! You need to deal with your internalized racism!

At Sun Apr 22, 2012, 07:39 PM an alert was sent on the following post:

I can't begin to express how fucked up your post is. Why the need to post on DU? For approval?

REASON FOR ALERT:

This post is disruptive, hurtful, rude, insensitive, over-the-top, or otherwise inappropriate. (See <a href="http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=aboutus#communitystandards" target="_blank">Community Standards</a>.)

ALERTER'S COMMENTS:

Hurtful. Directly called a poster a racist when the OP did not condemn any race. Merely related a story and facts thereof.

You served on a randomly-selected Jury of DU members which reviewed this post. The review was completed at Sun Apr 22, 2012, 07:52 PM, and the Jury voted 3-3 to LEAVE IT.

Juror #1 voted to HIDE IT and said: Personal attack.
Juror #2 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE and said: No explanation given
Juror #3 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE and said: The OP was atrocious, and this type of response should have been expected. It's like the old judicial concept of "fighting words." I think that while this post was harsh it was perfectly called for.
Juror #4 voted to HIDE IT and said: I agree with the alerter.
Juror #5 voted to HIDE IT and said: No explanation given
Juror #6 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE and said: The OP is spinning a yarn, and the poster alerted on is calling him on it. IMO, the OP is a complete "Cool Story Bro!" load of bullshit. Leave it. And the ladies posting in that thread need to take a cold shower.

Thank you very much for participating in our Jury system, and we hope you will be able to participate again in the future.








I was Juror #6.

LOLOLOLOLOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

racism of which most of us suffer from!

he brought it to everyone's attention? He did it because it's similar to the Martin case, would be my guess.

It's an interesting post. Good discussion.

reading bullshit. The story does not ring true at all. Seriously, who does that?

Not the OP but the sentiment *IS* racist. The OP and/or his girlfriend makes all kinds of assumptions about the marauder without any proof. What they do is bring the race of the person into the discussion and makes those assumptions. If you can't see the underlying problem with that, then I'm not sure what else to say or think.

I believe that the OP is baiting. Why start this thread in the first place? The Martin case is a very sensitive case. Why pour salt on an open wound? And again, why bring RACE into this?

I was not calling the OP a racist. I was suggesting that he/she deal with internalized racism, which does NOT amount to calling someone an inherent racist.

and there's someone standing there trying to act nonchalant. Now I know that's who was doing the whatever, and he knows, but there's no proof. This sort of thing happens a lot, I would think.

If the guy had been white or Asian, I wonder if you would have considered it racist if he mentioned the race of the guy.

We're all against racism, but it's kinda hard to give a physical description w/o giving the perceived race. I attended a racial sensitivity seminar at my workplace. The lady speaking said that she was watching the news when they were talking about a recent local crime. She said they didn't give the race of the perps, but they showed their pics on the news. She said that was racist...there was no reason to do that (they were Af. American). Now, that's just ridiculous. That is trying to hide the identity of criminals when they happen to be a particular race. Mug shots are frequently shown on tv, regardless of race of the perps.

Being a particular race is part of an identity and description. It seems to me that the focus should be on trying to stop crimes by young men (it's far and away young men) of a certain race, than trying to hide the fact that they were convicted of crimes.

I am white. I am female. That is the description that would be given to cops if someone called in for me to be checked out as a possible perp, as well as the color of my hair, the length, what I'm wearing, approximate age. That is not discrimination against whites and females.

in the first place? It is bringing up a very sensitive issue in the vein of the Martin case. Very few people here understand how this looks.

I am black and female. Every single day people make unfounded assumptions about me based on how I look and regardless of my talents or the way I am dressed.

The OP has to know the amount of damage his thread would cause. I'm sorry, but I see right through it. At the very least, it amounts to race baiting, knowing what kind of response the thread is likely to get. I don't see the innocence of the OP at all. Forgive me, but I think you're being just a little naive here.

The problem is that someone else has defined the "identity and description" of others and in most cases, the definer was not the definee. And that is where the breakdown occurred, and where the reality ends, and the stereotypes begin.

I.e., people have to spend decades trying to recover who they really are and not what someone else said they are. And worse, when people try to redefine themselves, it immediately throws the definers out of their comfort zones. At this point, the definers then go through all kinds of crazy shit to "right" their now-turned-upside-down-world, including attacking the individual for rejecting the definer's purported wisdom of all things in the world. We see that with the GOP and their dealing with the current President, and we see it right here in this thread.

Would you leave out the fact that it's a woman, for example? Or a young person? Or someone with blonde hair? Those are the kinds of descriptions that are more helpful than "the person who tried to break into my house is running down Burger Street...the person is wearing a red cap and jeans."

People have gotten to where they just don't want any race or ethnicity or other type of minority mentioned at all, as if it doesn't exist. It's NECESSARY to describe to the cops who to look for. If you want that person caught, that is. It's just ridiculous to try to argue that you shouldn't try to fully describe a possible perp to the cops.

You can spot responding to me now. I see where you're coming from.

not the first time they've made "questionable" comments.. NOT. AT. ALL!

She is still kinda paranoid. For all I know she merely saw his shadow on the window and freaked.

And I agree with the other posters. You are a complete fabrication. If someone was peaking into windows or trying to get into windows I would damn well call the police, not follow the person.

I call racist bullshit. Go take a nap.

PATHETIC!!

someone peeking in windows should be reported...end of story.

Did dfk come with you?

when the black boy stepped out of line...