Foo - Just pissed (rant, of course).

Yesterday was the last day of finals for the school year. (Yay!) It was a tough year, so I really wanted little more than go to a party, have some drinks, and have some fun. I go to one friend's house to get started and we agree to head on to a bigger party down the street. We get there and everybody is inside, being low key, because there's cops out and not everyone was of age. So we move on to another house where some friends live. We get there in time to see 2 cop cars and a bunch of our school's public safety offices pull up to bust everyone. Great. We stop at another house down the street to ask about other stuff going on, because it's the last freaking day of the year, stuff has to be happening. Patrol car pulls up while we're standing in the yard and starts grilling us.

"Who's house is this?" Not even any music playing, just a few people standing outside talking

"I dont' know them, friend of a friend."

"If you don't know them, why are you in their yard?"

"Friend of a friend, we're waiting on them." ...and go away B17ch!

"Have you been drinking?"

"Umm, no." ...you guys are ruining every possibility of fun inebriation, innocent or otherwise, and I'm over 21 anyways.

We try to move on to another party, but it's broken up before we get there, so we just go back to my friend's house. We hadn't been there very long, when a few more people from the house come back because the party they were at had been broken up by the cops! Someone even saw a freaking SWAT truck patrolling. I don't think I can really convey how little and non-disruptive these parties were. Most of them you can't even tell there was anything going on unless spying on them, which seems to be one of the biggest problems with the neighbors of our university. They'll call the cops for anything that might be a party. They don't even bother asking people to keep the noise down, they just dial 911. Plus I know Portland PD was targeting the neighborhood last night to begin with. It pisses me off. If they really want to to curb underage drinking, maybe they should start with PSU downtown. There was probably a lot more of that going on over there, and it was just an ordinary Thursday for them.

I just needed (really needed) to blow off some steam. If you wasted your time reading this, no you can't have the five minutes of your back that I stole. Call it my revenge on the world. And if you want this post to be bike related. I was probably at the 3rd or 4th house before I noticed the grease marks all over my calf from my riding earlier in the day. I just walked around like that most of the night without knowing.

You're pissed?

http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2002/05/05/loc_clifton_parties_turn.html

This is happening tonight, and I live RIGHT on the corner of Stratford. Yeah, last year, I had to chase people out of my yard with a baseball bat. So far I've seen approximately 20 police cars cruise the street and there's policemen on horseback here as well.

I feel like I'm in the middle of a coup-de-tat.

That sucks more, i must admit. I hope things have quieted down. Our school has never had anything remotely close to that level, EVER. That's part of what makes me so mad. The way they watched us made everybody reluctant to do anything, even when we knew we were fully within the limits of the law.

Please tell me the enquirer isn't the best source of new around there.

cincinati enquirer is not the same thing as the national enquirer.


Reflecting on what they had just done, one student was heard saying:

?The worst part of it is: None of the beer was even Mexican.?

that's pure genius right there.

Sorry dude-

I know how it can be. I hate having to worry about them ruining your fun, especially if it's perfectly legal for you to be drinking and just looking to celebrate finals. It seems like in most college areas it's just a chance for the cops to easily fill their quota (and don't anyone tell me the quota thing is false, I know for a fact that it is reality). I've been in many situations like that after I was 21 where they harrassed me just because I was somewhere having a good time, not even disturbing anyone.

One summer when I was living in Boulder, Colorado (college town), a cop was driving by and saw my friend drinking a beer in her apartment through her window, all by herself. He stopped and pretty much forced his way into her place and told her he was going to write her a ticket for underage drinking. She then politely told him she was 23, and he should leave her alone.

Another true story:
One time visiting friends in Eugene (another college town), I was hanging out with about 8-9 friends (all of us over 21). We didn't have the music blasing or anything, just hanging out on the porch talking and drinking wine. A cop pulls up, walks up to the porch, WALKS IN to the house, and starts yelling at everyone that he's going to arrest us if they don't leave the "party". So, we had another friend down the street and all decided to head down to his house. I put the corks in the few bottles of wine we had, put them in a small box, and started walking down the road to our friend's house. A few minutes later the same cop drives up next to me with his lights on, and over the intercom tells me to stop right there. I do, and he gets out and proceeds to write me a ticket for "open containers". He makes me pour both bottles of wine out on the side of the street, and gives me the ticket. When I went to court to contest it, the judge was actually the one that got me out of it: he asked the cop, "would you give this same ticket to a middle aged couple walking out of a restaurant with a corked, half-finished bottle of wine to put it in their car?" The officer un-truthfully replied, "Yes, I would."

Good 'ole U.S.A., home of the free?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

And the cretins in blue are here to "serve and protect?"
And people don't understand why young people don't trust them and why we hold them in such low regard?

I'm done. Just needed to rant with you, Iamlucky13.
By the way, I had a soccer game tonight (indoor). Was a good game.

Well There is no "quota"..my brother is a police officer and my neighbor is a police officer and I am in the process of becoming a police officer and here in Austin, TX there isnt an quota. Both of yall said that the police officers broke into or came into the house. iamlucky13-"We hadn't been there very long, when a few more people from the house come back because the party they were at had been broken up by the cops!" and gonesh9-"A cop pulls up, walks up to the porch, WALKS IN to the house,"...a police officer can NOT just walk into a house. Either yall have your stories mixed up or something is fishy. if the police officer just walked into the house without any kinda of warrant or just cause it should have been handled in court. Yes a police officer can come into the house if he has just cause. An example of that would be seeing someone drinking OUTSIDE the house and him stopping and questioning that. You cant have open container. So if he saw someone with an open container AND that person was underage and they were on the property that would give him justification to enter the house and do what he did. And yes i understand the some police officers can be dicks but most are pretty ok guys. I think the "cretins" are here to serve and protect and they do a fine job of it. Of course our experiences shape how we precieve things and i have always had a good experience with police officers in general. Dont let one ruin your perception of the whole system.

Hammerthehill: I don't have my story mixed up. I was there, and know what happened. I realize a police officer can not legally walk IN to a house, which is why I pointed it out. I have personally experienced mulitple police officers breaking the law, which is why I have lost faith in them as a whole. I understand that there are good officers, but I have learned that the real difference usually lies in the city or county police policies. In my experience college towns are consistently worse than other places, and I dated a girl whos dad was the police chief in one who did infact set quotas. Even in the far off chance that was not the case, I did personally experience discrimination several times merely for the fact I was a 20 something enjoying an evening with some friends in a college town. I am not by any means saying cops are dicks, but in my experience in college towns in Oregon (Eugene and Corvallis), the police department's #1 goal was to harrass anyone below the age of 30 that looks like they are having any fun, period. It is severely wrong that you can be over 21 and still have to worry about some ego tripping guy threaten you for simply having a beer, especially when you are paying his wage. Please don't tell me this is not the case, because I have witnessed it first hand several times.

Hammerthehill: I don't have my story mixed up. I was there, and know what happened. I realize a police officer can not legally walk IN to a house, which is why I pointed it out. I have personally experienced mulitple police officers breaking the law, which is why I have lost faith in them as a whole. I understand that there are good officers, but I have learned that the real difference usually lies in the city or county police policies. In my experience college towns are consistently worse than other places, and I dated a girl whos dad was the police chief in one who did infact set quotas. Even in the far off chance that was not the case, I did personally experience discrimination several times merely for the fact I was a 20 something enjoying an evening with some friends in a college town. I am not by any means saying cops are dicks, but in my experience in college towns in Oregon (Eugene and Corvallis), the police department's #1 goal was to harrass anyone below the age of 30 that looks like they are having any fun, period. It is severely wrong that you can be over 21 and still have to worry about some ego tripping guy threaten you for simply having a beer, especially when you are paying his wage. Please don't tell me this is not the case, because I have witnessed it first hand several times.

Let him "harrass" you, then file a complaint against the harrassing officer. An officer can't give you grief for drinking a beer unless he has reason to believe you're under 21. So... if you're drinking a beer legally, and an officer approaches you - on your own property - you can simply tell him you're 21 and he then has no other reason to stay. If he has a reason to press the issue, he'll tell you. If not, and he presses the issue, that's grounds for a complaint. *****ing about it on a biking site gets nothing accomplished... filing a written complaint does.

99% of the cops are just doing their job to the best of their ability. The power drunk 1% are the ones that give us all the bad impression - and the ones that need the documentation of that to ultimately be relieved.

Please tell me the enquirer isn't the best source of new around there.

Well, let's just say that I spend all my quarters on the NY Times box up the street.

As I am an English/journalism major, I'm trying to get into the summer intern program at the Enquirer, but lord knows that I'd hate myself for doing so.

Didn't know about the Cincinatti Enquirer. Sounds a little more reputable than when the first word is "National."

Hammer, don't think that either of us are ripping on all cops. I think the ones I experienced were average. The situation didn't bring out the best of them, but they're not bad. The real problem, I'm sure, is between pressure from the neighbors and some dumb ass higher up who got there by being a moron at all the right times, the cops were on edge. The way they were acting, it really seemed like they had been led to expect trouble, and lots of it, when there was none. In our case, the cops stayed within the law, to the best of my knowledge, but it was like the Chris Rock line where he talks about walking down the street uptown: "Woman instinctively clutch their purses, and old ladies peak out of their closed curtains and pick up the phone. They've already dialed the 9 and the 1, and they're just waiting for me to do somethin' wrong."

I suppose there might be one other issue that could have been adding to the tension. About 3 weeks ago, a white officer shot an unarmed black driver who was refusing to cooperate about a mile from my school. The case is politically very messy. Apparently the man was reaching for something while the cop's partner was trying to pull him from the car. Still I would think that would make the department a little wary of sticking their nose into every little thing.

Gonesh, do you play in a league or pick-up, and where? I prefer outdoor, but I had a lot of fun last winter in a league at PDX Indoor. The outdoor summer season just started for the Greater Portland Soccer District. :beer:

I wanted to say pretty much the same thing, that I am by no means trying to portray cops in general this way, I was just adding to iamlucky13's rant about insances when police injustice has pissed me off.



Gonesh, do you play in a league or pick-up, and where? I prefer outdoor, but I had a lot of fun last winter in a league at PDX Indoor. The outdoor summer season just started for the Greater Portland Soccer District. :beer:

Yeah, I play indoor at PDX indoor, right now just on a non-competitive coed team from work. I've been looking for a mens outdoor team to play on for a while, but it just seems a lot harder to find one than an indoor team. If you have a good mens team that needs another dude just let me know, I'd love to play.

A lot of Cincinnati's problems with police can be summed up in the following quote:
Partiers threw beer on the fire to keep it going, police said

It's difficult for me to trust police in Little Rock, Arkansas (where I reside.) My husband and I are twenty somethings, and we're pretty boring.

However, our neighborhood cops are creepy. I've been hit on by one cop a couple of times at the grocery. They're also racist, and I don't trust racist people. While working in resturants, I've heard police use deragotory language when referring to African Americans and hispanics. My brother in law is a narcotics officer, and he admited to using racial profiling.

Once my car broke down at night in the ghetto, and I had 3 cops drive by while I was pushing it. None stopped. Another time, I ran out of gas on the interstate, and one drove by without stopping.