Your remarks hit home, which for me used to be Philadelphia, where we once lived and encountered situations indistinguishable from what you're describing. Day after day, more directly threatening the longer they went on.
On one occasion the police actually did show up and take away the son of a bitch's gun, but they almost missed it because he had shoved it in the back of his pants--which I was able to see from my bedroom window and urgently call the cops about as they were detaining him.
But then he knew that I had called them. And because the gun belonged to his friend (the drug dealer who lived next door to us, who would blast gangster rap while getting a conspicuous blowjob in the front seat of his car outside our dining room window, and whose girlfriend would, when she had had just about enough of his shit, take after him with her own pistol and lodge bullets in our trees), pants boy was released within about 3 hours.
Our entire middle-class, thoroughly integrated community of teachers, veterans, social workers and public employees had been decimated over the previous decade by crack, weed and alcohol. The successful kids of successful black parents had moved away; the unsuccessful, mentally crippled and drug-addled kids of successful parents had stayed home and taken up preying on their own families and everyone else. There was also, in the mid '90s, essentially an undisclosed race war underway in Philly, which meant that efforts to control crime and help those inclined to commit it were both pilloried as illegitimate because they emerged from an external, fundamentally white, power structure. The police were understaffed, constrained by facilities overcrowding and regulations that made arresting and holding people impossible, and no doubt impeded by inadequate training and the usual tendency of cops to default to hyper authoritarianism.
Probably federal underfunding, too, but I guess that's what you get when you lie to the FBI about your crime statistics.
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Your remarks hit home, which for me used to be Philadelphia, where we once lived and encountered situations indistinguishable from what you're describing. Day after day, more directly threatening the longer they went on.
On one occasion the police actually did show up and take away the son of a bitch's gun, but they almost missed it because he had shoved it in the back of his pants--which I was able to see from my bedroom window and urgently call the cops about as they were detaining him.
But then he knew that I had called them. And because the gun belonged to his friend (the drug dealer who lived next door to us, who would blast gangster rap while getting a conspicuous blowjob in the front seat of his car outside our dining room window, and whose girlfriend would, when she had had just about enough of his shit, take after him with her own pistol and lodge bullets in our trees), pants boy was released within about 3 hours.
Our entire middle-class, thoroughly integrated community of teachers, veterans, social workers and public employees had been decimated over the previous decade by crack, weed and alcohol. The successful kids of successful black parents had moved away; the unsuccessful, mentally crippled and drug-addled kids of successful parents had stayed home and taken up preying on their own families and everyone else. There was also, in the mid '90s, essentially an undisclosed race war underway in Philly, which meant that efforts to control crime and help those inclined to commit it were both pilloried as illegitimate because they emerged from an external, fundamentally white, power structure. The police were understaffed, constrained by facilities overcrowding and regulations that made arresting and holding people impossible, and no doubt impeded by inadequate training and the usual tendency of cops to default to hyper authoritarianism.
Probably federal underfunding, too, but I guess that's what you get when you lie to the FBI about your crime statistics.
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