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Here in Minneapolis, we have recently had a somewhat similar traffic situation become rather controversial.
A police woman in a patrol car was on a medical call, driving a disoriented person home. While going along on a medium-traffic thru street, she came upon a car stopped in the middle of the traffic lane, with the driver (a black woman) talking to a pedestrian who was standing in the middle of the street. After waiting a bit, the police woman got out, went up to the car and told the driver she was blocking traffic on the street, and that if she wanted to talk to this person, she should pull into the open parking lot just down at the end of the block.
The driver of the car got extremly angry, asked the police woman “do you know who I am?”, called her various names, told her to just pull into the other lane and drive around her, etc.
The officer said again that she was blocking traffic, and that it was not safe for other traffic to have to cross the center line into the oncoming traffic lane to get around her, and that she was breaking the law by blocking traffic.
The driver yelled that she was a City Councilmember, that she was talking to a constitutent, and that she wasn’t going to move. And she said “you just go ahead and write me a ticket. You do that. It’ll be your job on the line.” So the officer did just that, wrote her a traffic ticket, and then continued on her medical call.
Now this has become a controversy in town, with claims such as:
- the police woman was being overly aggressive in issuing a ticket for this, she should have just gone around the stopped car.
- the police woman was racist in issuing the ticket; she would not have done so it had been a white woman in the stopped car.
- that the police dept. is out to ‘get’ this councilmember, and that’s really why the officer wrote the ticket.
- that the local Democratic party is out to ‘get’ this council member, because she defeated the democratic candidate (by 70-some votes) back in 2001.
- that the newspaper is racist because it published a story about this incident on the front page of the B section.
- that the whole incident just shows how racist the whole state of Minnesota is.
Personally, it seems to me that this whole issue is a big deal being made over pretty much nothing at all. But I wonder what other people think of the whole thing. Comments, anyone?
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