Michael Mechanic
Friday, Jul. 24, 2009
Oakland, Calif. — From Friday's Globe and Mail Last updated on Friday, Jul. 24, 2009 03:16AM EDT
The scene was Emeryville, Calif. It was 1993, and I'd just entered an unlocked upstairs window to gain entry to the residence where my companion was house-sitting. We'd accidentally locked the keys inside. The neighbours didn't know that, though. They just saw an unfamiliar white man trying to get in. Eventually, I was released, humiliated to be treated like a criminal, but I knew better than to get righteous on a police officer. As I'd learned the hard way four years earlier, that's a losing game.
Flashback to a Sunday in the summer of 1989, when police had reported to the West Oakland Bay Area Rapid Transit station parking lot in response to noise complaints about an afternoon party across the street. Juke, my old punk-rock band, was playing at a run-down rental house along with Green Day (in its pre-stadium days) and a couple of others. After we finished our set, I wandered across the street with a friend. That's when an altercation of other partygoers broke out in the BART lot, not 100 feet from several Oakland police cruisers.
The cops did nothing to stop the fight, but we helped separate the brawling parties, and the cops detained them. Shortly after, with observers crowding around the lot, one officer walked a full circle around my friend, then told him to take a hike or get arrested. At the first word of protest out of his mouth, the officer grabbed and cuffed him.
This struck me as completely unjust, so I spoke up. “Why are you arresting him? He didn't do anything”
“Shut the f--- up,” said a couple other officers.
I wasn't finished. “I have a right to know why you're arresting my friend.”
They tackled me from behind, and twisted my arm painfully behind my back. Somebody kicked my head into the pavement, leaving a large welt on my forehead. I was cuffed - so tightly it hurt for weeks - and thrown in the back seat of a cruiser piloted by one Officer Jim Burns.
“Name?” he demanded. I had no wallet or ID on me.
“Michael Mechanic.”
“NAME” he repeated.
“Michael Mechanic.”
“I'll just put John Doe, then,” he said.
“It's my f------ name” I responded.
I proceeded, through tears, to taunt Officer Burns, equate him to a Nazi, question his education, upbringing and patriotism. In retrospect, I was lucky he didn't take me to some vacant lot and beat me to a pulp. Because he could have.
Long story short, I was transferred to a stinking police van and driven around the city for hours, with no bathroom breaks, until it was packed with crackheads. I then spent the night in the city jail and was charged with interfering with the police - a felony - and resisting arrest and public intoxication, which was entirely fabricated. Because they can. In the end, it cost $1,500 to hire a lawyer to convince the DA none of it was worth pursuing.
I was shell-shocked by the whole experience. It took me a long time to get over it, but it taught me an important lesson, one that many a poor black kid in Oakland learns from an early age: You don't talk back to the police. You don't question them. And you certainly don't call them racist, even if you think they're profiling you. (And they most likely are.)
Because you will lose. It doesn't matter whether you're a prominent black Harvard prof, a white kid on his way to attend graduate school or a Hispanic high-school dropout. I understand the indignation of Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard prof arrested last week on disorderly conduct charges, which were dropped after an officer established that Mr. Gates had not broken into his own Cambridge, Mass., home. Mr. Gates, however, has clout in the Cambridge community, and he could have brought his complaints straight to the brass or to local politicians. (And speaking of clout, even Barack Obama weighed in on the Gates case during a White House news conference on Wednesday – he accused the police of acting “stupidly.”)
But get righteous on a street cop and you will lose every single time. Henry Gates should have known as much.
Michael Mechanic is a senior editor at Mother Jones magazine.
Commentary by the Ottawa mens Centre
On my first arrest in Ontario, on a trumped up charge that never reached
trial, the cells were full of men either abused by their wives and a diabetic
who looked and acted drunk but was not.
If you happen to be unlucky enough to visit any remand cell, on any given day,
most of the prisoners are male, arrested without a shred of evidence and which
have an extraordinary low rate of conviction.
The charges are used to give women custody of children by abusing the criminal
justice system.
Society supposedly has a low tolerance towards domestic violence but it fails to
add up the prejudice to society by the fact that the process is abused more than
it is used out of any real need based on real evidence.
Our police have guidelines that amount to an official instruction to abuse men.
If men complain of domestic abuse, its generally HE gets arrested and so the
conditions are made that destroy children's relationships with fathers.
The injustice in Ontario towards men in increasing and getting worse, thanks
primarily to the underbelly of the Ontario Superior court Judiciary who lack any
compassion , any ethics and as judges , set out very deliberately, to obstruct
justice, fabricate evidence, and to destroy lives out of protection towards "the
legal Cartel" and in the name of political correctness.
Its a cancer that is destroying Canada economically and an insidious problem
that the vast majority of Canadians cannot and will not ever understand, until
of course, it happens to them.
It takes a Dead Beat Judge "To Create" a dead beat dad and, Real Crime Starts in
Family Court.
Check out the research by Peter Roscoe, over thousands of hours of research show
the incredible level of bias and hatred by the Ontario Courts towards men.
www.OttawaMensCentre.com
There are good guys and bad guys, good cops and bad cops. Good prosecutors
and good judges and unfortunately, some very corrupt bad cops and the some of
the very worst dangers to society become Judges of the Ontario Superior Court of
Ontario.
There is nothing, nothing more revolting than being in front of that underbelly
of society that commit more child abuse, more real crime than those warehoused
in jails.
These criminals have "jobs for life", they are unaccountable, and have total
immunity against criminal and or civil complaints and their own authority, the
Judicial Council, is set up by them operated by them, as their own police which
of course is well known to do next to nothing besides sanitize complaints about
Judges.
It takes a rare breed of public officer to investigate and prosecute complaints
against those with absolute power, and unfortunately, they as a group of the
worst criminal in society, have set themselves up, to be investigated by
themselves with a mandate of sanitizing complaints and ensuring that complaints
are never held.
That is folks, the dirtiest most corrupt mandate in the legal world, the mandate
of the Judicial council, who, protect the interests of those with the most power
and of course the most likely to flagrantly abuse that power.
Ontario Superior Court Judges are an Insult to Justice.
To quote Stacy Rob,
"it takes a dead beat judge to create a dead beat dad
and
Real Crime Starts in Family Court.
Spare a thought for all those fathers who have their pleadings struck, have
restraining orders that banish them from entire cities for ever and who are
effectively sentenced to a life time of indefinite incarceration without the
right of any variation or appeal, thanks to "Power Orders" and "Sheffield
Orders" that are the judiciaries "hit men" to get rid of male self represented
litigants and who, act like concentration camp guards, without compassion or
empathy able to destroy lives.
www.OttawaMensCentre.com
.