Hmm. Well, maybe you could drop the charges? What a novel concept.
I feel much better. Thank goodness the arresting officers were only following orders.
Mindless jackbooted thugs are MUCH better.
Nah, if it was me they were after on a Saturday night they’d have targeted the bars on Richmond.
Or anywhere selling aspirin on a Sunday morning. The local breweries have a lot to answer for.
Uh huh. Let’s ask the Doper parents then. Anyone ever take 10 yr old Sally or Billy to a fast food hamburger joint (which IIRC Sonic is) at 12:30 in the freakin’ morning? If that’s common practice nowadays, so be it, but I’m not seeing it.
What was this father thinking? Let’s see, at that hour, you have your drunks driving to and fro, armed robbers hitting fast food joints (less people there, more cash at the end of the day), and, oh yeah, 400+ people milling about in the adjacent parking lot!
I know Kmart, and their parking lots, are large, and everything is bigger in Texas, but 400+ is just about a mob. After all, they weren’t having a quilting bee.
I’m just saying that particular father showed poor judgement in putting his 10 yr old daughter in that situation.
Has anyone from Kmart stood up and said anything like “we’re not pressing charges” or maybe “we didn’t ask the police to arrest anyone that night”?
Perhaps I am mistaken and the arrests for for violation of a city ordinance? Or is Kmart the ones who should be on the PR hook, and not the cops?
Um. Yeah.
Heaven forbid a father feed his hungry kid. Put 'em in the situation of having a meal in what may be the only restaurant open in the area.
Especially since {crime} only happens at that hour. A nice busy parking lot is the last place I’d expect to be bothered by members of the criminal element, personally.
AmbushBug
[sub]member, quilting society for the conservation of the rolleyes smiley[/sub]
Yes, in the second article linked to.
That’s absolutely ridiculous.
Anyways, from the article:
“… because we would actually fire into a crowd of people gathered peacefully in a parking lot if we had orders. We can’t resist. He’s a captain.”
So, people doing nothing particularly wrong get charged with bullshit crimes and then have to pay to have their cars returned to them, and that’s just the way life is? When the system fucks you, you have to seek redress at your own expense and inconvenience?
And he’ll probably get a written reprimand for this stunt as well. That’ll show him. Justice will be done.
For the record, according to people who were there, or who had friends that were caught up in the sweep, several cars were damaged by the police when they were towed as well.
I am so tired of the police “cracking down” on people who are into Import Tuning. I really really hope that this one ends up costing someone his job. Maybe then the police will actually think about what they’re doing instead of just jumping on someone with both feet because their car is “too low” or somesuch.
Slightly off topic, I had my own little run-in with Houston’s finest today. In the interests of enhancing public safety and the city’s budget H. P. D.'s traffic division was performing a speed trap operation in one of the six school zones I must traverse on the way to work and I and a whole bunch of other people got stung. Now I admit I was guilty but I think it’s kind of funny that of the six school zones along that particular stretch of road five have warning lights and of that five, four have signs stating that the school zones are in effect when the lights are flashing with no fixed times listed and only one has signs posted with and without fixed times. I will let you guess which one’s lights were not flashing and Houston’s finest were running their little sting at. Need a hint? Pick a number between four and six. It seems to me that they were really serious about raising people’s awareness about school zones that turning off the warning lights and hiding their patrol cars behind hedges in the school parking lot and running out into the street with handheld radar guns to ambush oncoming traffic is not the way to go about it. Things to keep in mind are, 1 yesterday was the first day of the school year for some but not all school districts in the Houston area, 2 in none of the school zones with warning lights along that particular road were the warning lights flashing. 3 the school zone where the radar trap was held is located where the road curves and normally the crossing guards place orange traffic cones at each end of the school zone to alert traffic, today that was not done and the traffic cones were commandeered by the police to place behind the cars that they could not fit in the school parking lot to ticket.
I could have found better uses for the $200 they are going to take out of my pocket because of this.
Peace
LIONsob
milroyj you are an idiot who obviously doesn’t have children. I remember quite fondly the times my mom took me out to Dairy Queen right before they closed shop at midnight. If, in 9 years and 9 months, I want to take my 10 yr old daughter out for something to eat late at night, then I will. Your paranoia doesn’t play out, especially when in this case the only thing he had to worry about was the police.
400+ people in a large, well-lit area at midnight? OH MY GOD!!! THEY MUST BE SATANISTS! They are obviously there to harm any unsuspecting person that happens to wander by.
Get a clue. Be worried about the 3 or 4 people milling about in an un-lit area, not the large crowds of people out to have some fun. They are safe; they are the ones who would probably help stop a crime, not form mobs of blood-thirty cutthroats as you fear. No, they were not having a quilting bee, but no, they were not pulling out guns and trying to harm random strangers enroute for a quarter-pounder.
As for criminals pulling guns on fast-food joints…whatever. That happens, but not nearly as often as you would have us fear. As I recall from the FBI stats, most crimes still happen during the day.
And drunks at night- yes, a problem, but again, not nearly as bad as you paint it. And it is not as if no accidents happen during the day.
Just because you live in fear of the cold, cruel world and decide to lock your doors and close the curtains at a respectful 9pm, does not mean everyone else does. Especially on a Saturday night…during summer break…doing something lawful. YOU are the paranoid one, he was just doing something with his kid.
-Tcat
I can think of one reasonable scenario. Little girl awakes with bad cough. Father finds he has no childrens cough syrup. But hey, K-Mart is open, and it’s fairly close. Rather than have the child wait with the cough(and possibly, Mom is not around), he takes the kid with him to pick up the medicine. After they purchase said medicine, they see the fast-food joint. The kid says she wants a milkshake, if only to get the ass-nasty taste of the cough syrup out of her mouth. Dad obliges, and gets one for hisself, and the pair are arrested when they come out.
Possible?
A loosely related story of little interest (Hell, I’m not sure why I’m posting it - aside from knowing that some others here may be as hopelessly curious as I):
That’s INSANE??? So we don’t have a right to even go shopping when we want?
Or maybe little girl and dad were on their way home from vacation, or had to go somewhere, maybe she had to go to the doctor in the middle if the night for an injury and they stopped for something to eat on the way home?
Maybe they were at a friend’s home?
Sheesh, milroyj, I’d hate to be your kid.
Now I know why I’m so happy I left Houston in the first place.
Robin, who has been to that Kmart, and who wasn’t impressed.
Oh more than possible, since something similiar happened to me. When I was 5 or 6, my parents took me to the doctor, I had an ear infection, fairly high fever, and God knows what kind of medicine they gave me. My parents decided to stop at a greasy spoon on the south side of Chicago for dinner. Guess what happened? I puked all over the back of the car. Needless to say, sick kids were not taken to restaurants after that, in my family.
Anyway, I admit I overacted about the father, but I was kinda cheesed off by the hysterical thread title, as well as by some of the people quoted in the article.
What did they expect?
What possible legitimate reason does anyone have to be in the KMart parking lot at 12:35 AM? Unless you’re an employee, or a customer going into the store, or coming out of the store, or loading packages into the car, or returning the shopping cart, why are you there?
It’s private property after all. If 1 or 2 are “hangin’ out” I don’t see much of a problem, but if it’s 400! there’s a problem.
These people were arrested for criminal trespass, and now they’re whinging about it?
“these people” were customers of the store and restaurant apparently. So, yes, they’re whining about it.
Like I said, I was probably wrong to diss the father, as well as the rest of the Sonic patrons, but what about the 400 people in the Kmart parking lot??? They have 400 customers at 12:35 at night? Time to buy Kmart stock, then. Oh, but they’re bankrupt, aren’t they? Please.
please back at yourself.
From the linked article, the cops took everyone in the restaurant and in the parking lot. We don’t know how long they were there (although there was a reference to the particular officers having ‘worked all night’).
why wouldn’t it be possible for there to be 400 people who went to the KMart/restaurant during a several hour period of time? (remember, you don’t know how long they were there)
Cruising is illegal, and unsafe. So it’s fairly common for the folks that want to show off their cars to find a parking lot that is empty (or nearly so) and park. Locally, it used to be the In-n-Out here in Sacramento, until the cops did the exact sort of raid.
It is getting almost impossible to enjoy the hobby of cars, unless you work on old school muscle cars. the police, being gearheads themselves, like those cars, but hate the Imports and many of the newer cars.
As I’ve said, the odds are good that this sort of raid has happened in your own neighborhood, usually using illegal tactics on the part of the police, but because of bad media, Import tuners feel there is nothing we can do to defend ourselves.
In the interests of accuracy, the arrest figures were revised from “arrested about 425 people” to “Aguirre ordered the arrests of the 278 people gathered there.”
Plus, it’s come out that the Kmart bust was the second raid, preceded by a 25-arrest go at a hot-dog place (covering a period from 1:15am to 4:30am) with an evidently similar profile of unjust arrests.
AmbushBug