Yesterday morning, at 8:33, 4/8/14, I was leaving Free Food For Fat F…s as a cop interviewed our boss and a cashier about two emaciated white dirt-bags who grabbed and got gone with some groceries.
It required one cop, for a half hour, just for the documentation. The creeps now need to be found and dealt with.
I walked down the road through the nice middleclass neighborhood where I typically see two motorists pulled over just before midnight by the cops from the overnight shift. I usually see two cruisers at the 7-11 this time of morning. They are absent, hopefully kicking the shit out of the dirt-bags.
At 8:54 I hit the parking lot of the Aldis box store to see customers lined up outside, and six cop cars parked around the sidewalk. An ambulance is pulling off with only one EMT driving. The sirens are not lit up and she takes her time. Is she the only one that responded, or is her partner in the back attending to someone?
I go over to the bus stop and observe. At 9:12 the cops emerge and the customers are allowed in. Two big muscular white cops are escorting a big muscular black dude who is limping, and has his hands cuffed in front of him. A towel is draped over his right arm. A backpack is brought out by another cop. All of the cops pull off. The cop that is hauling the innocent object of oppression pulls out five feet from me. I look down into the eyes of the man in custody, who is holding his right arm as if in great pain, and he looks up at me with eyes seemingly pleading for sympathy.
I didn’t have any extra sympathy in my backpack so stood stone-faced. Granted these same cops pick on me simply for walking unafraid through this area at night. But I am glad for the Aldis staff that they have a strong presence here. They were on the scene for at least 40 minutes, and it could have been no longer than 70 minutes, as the store opens at 8:00. I hope that ambulance was empty, and no Aldis employee was being hauled off injured.
These small box store operations sell food cheaply, largely because they are lightly staffed by low-paid female clerks, who never number more than 3 on the premises at one time. One girl is by herself at the register, one alone on the dock with the truck, and one straightening out the shelves center store. This morning’s activity is typical for the food stamp rush you get from criminals. The cowardly whites will go into an operation with a lot of male employees, and in the confusion, grab something and run. The violent black criminals will either strong arm an isolated employee, or boldly begin hauling goods out, and then fight if stopped, demanding loudly that the merchandise belongs to them. I dealt with hundreds of both types as a manager and could not imagine the stress on some 100 pound middle-aged woman that would come from dealing with this guy that looked like LL Cooljay—dude, if I misused a consonant I apologize.
The larger view I took from this situation was the number of cops that were tied down by two scampering petty thieves and one strong-arm man. Last week it required 60 cops to detain two kids hunting legally with a beebee gun near my son’s campus. What in the world is this Baltimore County precinct staff going to do—and they do seem to have quick response times, aggressive protocols, and efficient resolutions compared to the city cops—if let’s say, 20 dope-fiends start grabbing and running and 10 big dudes start grabbing people? What about 200 fiends and 100 thugs?
I realize that cops largely pile on the way they do for safety and liability purposes, with three being normal for a traffic stop. But if this is the way they are used to operating, imagine what kind of stress these police will be under if, for some reason, the thugs and dopefiends do not get their EBT money one month and come out in force. Let’s not even think about if the power grid goes down. When I ran a city supermarket I was usually outnumbered by criminals at any given time by about five-to-one. I stood up to them effectively because they knew I had a girl in the office behind plexiglass with a phone that would bring cops in five minutes. What if the cops are all busy up the street, and the thugs know it? What about three ladies alone in an unattached building? What if a significant slice of our criminals [hundreds in the area I walked through yesterday morning, and thousands in the similar-sized area where I live in the city] decide to grab and go? What if that day ever comes?
