She told a police officer she was in labor. The Louisville Metro Police Department lieutenant cited her for unlawful camping as the ambulance arrived. She had a baby later that day.
Her water had broken, she said. âIâm leaking out,â she told him. She grabbed a blanket and a few personal effects as a bright orange city dump truck pulled up to remove the makeshift bed.
âAm I being detained?â she asked.
âYes, youâre being detained,â he shouted. âYouâre being detained because youâre unlawfully camping.â
Stewart walked back to his car to write the citation as city workers finished loading the mattress into the garbage truck.
Once in the police vehicle, Stewart narrated to himself as his body camera recorded his comments.
âSo I donât for a second believe that this woman is going into labor,â he said.
He returned to find the woman sitting on the ground, with legs askew and labored breathing, waiting for the ambulance. Stewart hands her a citation, and she balls it up and tosses it aside as the ambulance arrives to take her to the hospital.
This sounds like I am reading some dystopian book, not news.
A friend who quit law enforcement (he was a sheriff's deputy, not police) explained that while the sheriff's office is publicly funded, most police agencies are funded by the general fund of a city, which is where the revenue of their tickets go, so it invariably evolves into rent seeking behavior as law enforcement.
Letâs make sure to undermine any growing solidarity by taking shots at each other over race/culture war BS at every opportunity. Itâd be a shame if we were all on the same side.
Last time I checked it was white ppl who have stopped in its tracks any class based solidarity because as LBJ put it
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
But I guess the rest of us are just suppose to forget getting fucked over in the past and hope it doesn't happen again
Dude, Iâm agreeing with you. Getting hung up on past wrongs that one groupâs parents did to another groupâs parents is totally more important than mending rifts in our society and working together for a better future for ourselves and our children. After all, itâs totally the other groupâs fault anyway.
Yeah because we all know everything that happened to black/brown ppls parents suddenly stopped after MLK and their kids aren't getting pipelined into prison or killed by police anymore.
And we should all definitely trust WASPs even though they were the largest voting block responsible for voting in a facist whos campaign ran on making everything harder for lgbtq, black and brown groups very existence. But hey they're happy a CEO got killed so let's just stick our heads in the sand