Go read this account of this news story you may have seen. Basically, three brown people in a row together is enough to send folks into hysterics and result in innocent American citizens being roughed up, arrested, detained, and humiliated. To say nothing of the costs of scrambling F-16s to shadow the flight. Jesus Fuck.
The Atlantic has more.
It sounds like these passengers were significantly inconvenienced by cops doing their job. That sucks. Whaddya say we disparage the cops and sling around some phony claims of racism to feed and legitimize our sanctimony? That ought to help. That’s just what we need right now. More of that please, and right away.
What should the cops/FBI/whoever do when some mysterious person reports what they perceive as “suspicious activity”? Should they do nothing because they might discover after all the hassle that the report was in error? Should they do nothing because they might offend somebody? Should they do nothing because there exists the possibility that the person who reported the “suspicious activity” might be batshit crazy or a malicious bigot entertaining him or herself?
If we can give the knee jerk cop hate and automatic claims of racism/bigotry in the absence of any supporting evidence just a moment’s rest to think about this reasonably, I’d like to know exactly how else this pain in the ass situation could or should have been handled to the offended party’s perfect satisfaction. How shall we perfectly vet anonymously (I suppose) reported “suspicious activity” without investigating or inconveniencing anybody?
Somebody reported “suspicious activity” (whatever the fuck that happened to mean to that particular person on that particular plane on the 10th anniversary of 9/11) and somebody had to check it out. We pay cops to do that. It’s a shitty job for more reasons that I have time to list here. Chief among them is that when they get sent on a wild goose chase as in this instance, time and money is wasted, people get understandably pissed off, and hey, since there isn’t anybody else standing around, let’s implicitly lay 100% of the blame for this at the feet of the cops and throw in a few underhanded, unfounded accusations of racism/bigotry/profiling in just for the sake of demonstrating how thoroughly enlightened we are.
I understand why this fiasco upset certain folks. I don’t hear them articulating an alternative scenario that wouldn’t have made them indignant, and I suspect that may be because there is awful precious little that does not make them indignant. It is this uniquely noxious personality type that is the broccoli fart in the elevator of my life.
Yeah, you miss the point here so much it makes me think it’s willful.
Executive authority, and knee-jerk arrests for people clearly NOT doing anything out of the ordinary, are fucking ridiculous and show, once again, that our country is completely fucking batshit loony.
Some hysterical jackoff notices some brown people and calls the cops, and here come a squad of mouthbreathing goatfuckers all to happy to terrify innocent people to pacify the obviously racist fears. And you think we’re being hard on the cops.
Jesus. It’s possible to “check things out” without flying completely off the fucking handle. I don’t blame the cops completely, but they MUST own part of the blame for getting so carried away by their own bullshit, and for so often acting with impunity because misbehavior by LEOs is typically met with little in the way of actual sanction.