The shooting of James King political murder disguised as a justifiable response to a personal insult inflamed the city of San Francisco immediately. King, shot in the chest but still clinging to life was taken to his house. Meanwhile, an enormous mob gathered at the police station, and the police realized almost at once that the accused James Casey could not be kept secure. He was removed under guard to the county jail. The indignant mob was not appeased, not even when the mayor of San Francisco attempted to address the crowd, pleading for them to disperse and assuring them that the law would run its proper course and justice would be done. The crowd jeered, “What about Richardson? Where is the law in Cora’s case?” The mayor hastily retreated, as the square already guarded by armed marshals, soon filled with armed soldiers. The angry mob dispersed, still frustrated and furious. No doubt everyone in authority in the city breathed a sigh of relief, confident that this matter would blow over. After all, they controlled the political apparatus of the city, at least one newspaper, as well as the adjudicators and enforcers of the law … little comprehending that this shooting represented the last, the very last straw.
Law Enforcement
Committee of Vigilance – 1856
When gold was discovered in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in 1848, it seemed as if most of the world rushed in to California which, until then had been a sparsely-settled outpost of Mexico, dreaming the decades away. The climate was enchantingly mild, Mediterranean warm enough for groves of olive trees and citrus to thrive, and the old missions crumbled away as if nothing had or would ever change. The old, proud Californio families with names like Verdugo, Vasquez, Pico and Vallejo kept vast cattle herds and lived in extensive but rather Spartan-plain estates. There were a few handfuls of American settlers who had come overland, or by sea; they tended to what little trade there was, and an energetic and slightly shady Swiss entrepreneur named Johann Sutter had a vast agricultural and establishment centered around a fortified holding in present-day Sacramento. It was on his property, and in the course of building a saw-mill that gold was discovered. And change came upon the enchanted land and the place called Yerba Buena turned almost overnight from a hamlet of eight hundred souls on the shore of San Francisco Bay into a ramshackle metropolis of 25,000 and more in the space of two years.
WBEZ: Chicago-area firms looking to veterans to help with NATO, G-8 security
Some private security firms around Chicago are looking to beef up their ranks with Iraq and Afghanistan war vets ahead of two world summits that are expected to bring multitudes of protesters to the city this spring.
The article states that the security firms are interested in hiring veterans because they are likely to show “better restraint” if the protests turn violent. Interesting.
And I really hope any protests don’t turn violent.
Update: Thanks to Carl Prine’s Line of Departure for highlighting the above article/ad and mentioning this blog-within-a-blog. Second City Cop has a post on the topic and lots on the upcoming summit, too. Just keep scrolling.
With a Crowbar
That is the sarcastic answer to an ancient question lately revised in the matter of the Penn State University athletic department having enabled a coach to serially molest young boys for decades the question being, ‘How you separate the men from the boys at ____?’ Understandably, a large portion of the public is upset to furious about this, and those who are Penn grads and/or college football fans, and/or Joe Paterno fans are particularly distressed and/or seriously disillusioned.
The very saddest outcome from this appalling state of matters is something that I had meditated upon five years ago, when it was the matter of the Capitol Hill pages and a one Representative Mark Foley, who was forced to resign once his apparent inability to keep his hands, metaphorically speaking, off the junior staff became public knowledge outside Washington.
Blame Shifting Indicates Incompetent Mayors
With violent crime in New York on the rise, nanny mayor Bloomberg has involved himself in Virginia’s internal legislative process in an attempt to restrict the Second Amendment rights of the people of Virginia. His rationale for doing so is that New York criminals buy guns in Virginia, and since Bloomberg can’t control those criminals in New York itself, the law abiding citizens of Virginia have to give up some of their rights.
In reality, Bloomberg is just another impotent and incompetent big city mayor with a expensive, bloated, unionized, dysfunctional and often corrupt police force who cannot provide basic civil order to many parts of the city they notionally “serve and protect.” Rather than admit that he can’t actually perform the most basic duty of his office, Bloomberg desperately tries to shift the blame to some group outside his jurisdiction over which he can plausibly claim he has no control.
Bloomberg’s message boils down to: “Hey, you can’t blame for me runaway crime in New York because it’s all the fault of those ignorant rednecks in Virginia over whom I have no control!”
Blaming outsiders for internal woes is the oldest political trick in the book.