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Fightdirecto -> Vigilante Madness - Not Just In Sanford, Florida (4/12/2012 7:31:45 AM)
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CNN
quote:
It was just another Tuesday evening in a normally quiet neighborhood in Pearland, Texas, where kids are often found playing with one another and driving go-carts.
A family had just returned from Galveston on a spring break excursion, when upon their return, all of a sudden the unthinkable happened.
“You don’t belong in this neighborhood!”
These are the words that Jules Moor, a 13-year old black child, says that Deanna Johnson, a middle-aged white female, said to him after Johnson slammed her 2011 Jeep Wrangler into his go-cart on Tuesday, March 13, 2012.
According to court documents obtained from Jules’ attorney, Sylvester Anderson, Jules went for a ride in his go-cart in his neighborhood with another 13-year old boy who had been spending spring break with the Moor family. A third minor boy, another friend of Jules’, rode a small bicycle behind the go-cart.
Jules saw two cars behind him while driving back home, so he decided to drive his go-cart completely off the road to his right onto the grassy edge of the neighborhood park to avoid being in the way of traffic.
It is then that Jules states that Johnson swung her vehicle across the south-bound lane of the road, ran over the curb onto the grass and deliberately and intentionally rammed her vehicle head-on into the go-cart.
According to Jules, Johnson got out of her vehicle and confronted the boys in a hostile and threatening manner yelling “Where do you live? Who are your parents?” while shaking her finger at the kids. Jules goes on to say, “With all due respect, Ma’am, I live down the street,” to which Johnson allegedly tells him that she didn’t care and that she was calling the police.
Jules called his mother and told her that Johnson had hit his go-cart and didn’t know why.
“He thought he was going to die,” said Theresa Moor, mother of Jules. “All I could do was stop what I was doing, grab my keys and make my way to my child.”
As Theresa arrived, she saw that the go-cart had been damaged severely and learned from Jules that Johnson had accused the boys of not living in the neighborhood. As Theresa approached Johnson to find out what happened, Johnson put her palm up to her face in a dismissive manner, refused to talk, went back to her truck and rolled up the windows.
Frustrated at the way things were transpiring, Theresa contacted the police and several Brazoria County Sheriff’s deputies arrived.
According to Theresa, she overheard Johnson claim that she was trying to “detain” the boys because they looked like some kids that they had seen earlier riding bicycles onto the driveways of houses in the neighborhood...
It is still unclear why Johnson decided to do what she did. Johnson never apologized for ramming her truck into the go-cart and jeopardizing the lives of the three children and according to witnesses, was seen laughing as she spoke with the Sheriff’s deputies.
Johnson was not arrested or drug-tested upon the admission of her actions. The Sheriff’s department Captain that came on the scene decided not to arrest Johnson upon consulting with the District Attorney.
Even assuming that the two 13-year-olds did not live in the neighborhood - does that justify running your truck off the road to jam their go-kart in order to "detain" him?
The gated community mentality
quote:
The perverse, pervasive real-estate speak I heard in these communities champions a bunker mentality. Residents often expressed a fear of crime that was exaggerated beyond the actual criminal threat, as documented by their police department’s statistics. Since you can say “gated community” only so many times, developers hatched an array of Orwellian euphemisms to appease residents’ anxieties: “master-planned community,” “landscaped resort community,” “secluded intimate neighborhood.”
No matter the label, the product is the same: self-contained, conservative and overzealous in its demands for “safety.” Gated communities churn a vicious cycle by attracting like-minded residents who seek shelter from outsiders and whose physical seclusion then worsens paranoid group-think against outsiders. These bunker communities remind me of those Matryoshka wooden dolls. A similar-object-within-a-similar-object serves as shelter; from community to subdivision to house, each unit relies on staggered forms of security and comfort, including town authorities, zoning practices, private security systems and personal firearms.
Residents’ palpable satisfaction with their communities’ virtue and their evident readiness to trumpet alarm at any given “threat” create a peculiar atmosphere — an unholy alliance of smugness and insecurity. In this us-versus-them mental landscape, them refers to new immigrants, blacks, young people, renters, non-property-owners and people perceived to be poor.
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