QUIS CUSTODIET IPSOS CUSTODES
Means "Who Polices the Police?"

From AOL's Newsbloggers:

Lesson of the Day: Do Not Help people in Distress

The Palacioses, of Chicago, claim the woman approached their car, parked outside Manolo’s restaurant, leaned in to the passenger side where Rocio was sitting and asked Erasmo if he wanted oral sex for $20 or sex for $25.

The couple laughed, realizing this wasn’t a woman in distress after all.

But within seconds, Chicago police swarmed the family car, hauling Erasmo Palacios out in handcuffs. He was charged with solicitation of a prostitute ...

Click here for the rest.

And their kids were in the back seat. The Newsbloggers post goes on to point out that, even though charges were eventually dropped, they still had to pay four grand to get their car out of impound. Obviously, this sucks big time, and my bet is that this has something to do with the ethnicity of the family in the car. That is, they were busted for driving too near a prostitute while Hispanic.

In addition to the hyper-masculine, self-righteous, us-and-them aspects of the dangerous police culture about which I've written repeatedly here at Real Art, is racism. That is, cops usually want to bust people of color well before they consider busting white people. For whatever reasons, this is so embedded in cop culture that you find both black and Hispanic cops falling into it themselves.

We've really got to rethink the entire concept of policing.

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