News from within the empire - From a leftist perspective
These are the kind of things that literally will only ever happen in the US. Imagine sending a tank to enforce HOA lawn rules, what a country.
“If I knew that he was having difficulty maintaining his yard then I know that any one of us would’ve pitched in and done it for him,” said Heather Blackwelder.
Fuck off, you literally didn't even know your neighbor and no one even cared until this happened.
The grass in the thumbnail is ankle high, justified use of force
won't somebody please think of the property values!?
the inspector said they got reports about his lawn - that would have been from those neighbors. the fact that his lawn bothered them so much that they reported him pretty much says they wanted him punished for not maintaining his lawn. clearly, nobody went and talked to the dude.
and now that they got him killed, they want to act like it’s such a shame that they had no way of knowing he may actually have been “deserving” of neighborly assistance due to “difficulties.” why is that never the first assumption? that someone might need help? it never is. the first assumption is always some kind of moral failing deserving of punishment.
The penalty for long grass is death.
All of this could have been avoided if the city inspector just hired a contractor to cut the grass and billed the person for the cost plus fines.
I'm so glad I moved out of the US.
Or de-escalation.
Good ol' USA, not only do people with severe mental illness have no way to address it adequately, they are also armed, and the common response is to treat them like they are domestic terrorists.
A little while back I was coming home from work and got a text from my partner that the cops had blocked off the adjacent road to ours.
When I got home I saw a helicopter flying overhead, the cross street was taped off with yellow tape, and there were at least 12 if not more police vehicles all the way up and down that road with cops in body armor and rifles/shotguns standing all over the place.
We ventured over to see what the hell was going on. We found out from a neighbor that the lady down the road, who is very well known to everyone in the area to have mental issues but is harmless, was "barricaded" in her apartment. Then we found that another neighbor had called the cops because the lady had pulled a knife on her kids. I found that really hard to believe and having only recently met the lady who called the cops I was more inclined to believe she was making that up than it being actually true. The cops apparently had sent a robot with a phone to the apartment. They had armored vehicles and swat guys hanging out on the street. They had unmarked vehicles with cops up and down the side streets. It was absolutely bonkers.
I thought there was a good chance this mentally ill woman was not going to live another day. They took another statement from the neighbor who called them and then just like that, they packed up their shit and cleared out. The unmarked cop cars hung around all over the place but all the other cops left and took all their murder toys.
I never found out what actually happened but I'm happy to report the cops did not actually kill that woman amazingly enough. However, had she been mentally ill and not white I highly doubt that would have been the outcome.
The speed at which a lot of white suburbanites will call the police is staggering. When my family used to live in our previous home, we would often make fun of the fact that our Boomer neighbor would stress out about a car parked on their area which they couldn't recognize, asking us if they should call the authorities.
We sort of just laughed it off. Like why would you engage in such a paranoid overreaction? Who cares about some random car parked for longer then is polite?
I really can't understand that level of suspicion for an entirely innocuous phenomena.
I bought a drone during the beginning of the pandemic and flew it around my neighborhood for all of about 30 minutes before the cops were at my door.
Also some woman down the street called the cops on a contractor, who was out working on her next door neighbor's home, for taking a nap in his truck during his lunch break because she "didn't know who this strange (read: brown) man was who was hanging around her neighborhood".
The Yukkubian mind is truly an enigma of fragility and fear, that I'd never wish for, even for every privilege it could possibly gain me. I do feel a little bad for people living in what must be a constant state of pointless paranoia.