"Little techie brats"
by Tom Sullivan
Up Next: Staten Island.
Protests continued across the country (and on the floor of the House) over a St. Louis County, MO grand jury's decision not to indict former officer Darren Wilson for the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson. But in Staten Island, police are bracing this week for a local grand jury's decision in another case involving a police officer and the death of an unarmed black man:
With a grand jury expected to come to a decision in the in-custody death of Eric Garner this week, Police Commissioner Bill Bratton met with Staten Island leaders Monday to discuss community concerns and new NYPD initiatives.
The grand jury is to decide whether Officer Daniel Pantaleo will face criminal charges in Garner’s July 17 death outside a Staten Island convenience store. Garner died after being placed in an apparent chokehold during an arrest attempt. Police suspected Garner of selling illegal cigarettes.
Cigarettes? Cigarillos? Perhaps the Surgeon General should add a health warning on tobacco products about the risk of death by summary execution. You don't even have to smoke them.
The NYPD is already frustrated over Ferguson-related protests in the city last week. The New York Post reports that protesters "ran rings around the NYPD." Protesters' secret weapon (according to Gawker)? "[t]he cutting edge of 2006 technology: Twitter and disposable cell phones." Per the Post:
“They wore me out,” said one counterterror expert who monitored the protests. “Their ability to strategize on the fly is something we haven’t dealt with before to this degree.”
Clearly a situation that requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody's part. Involving deployment of surplus military hardware, perhaps?
“A lot of these anarchists are from the Occupy Wall Street group. They are little rich kids, little techie brats," a source said.“They get their money from Mommy and Daddy. And they travel from the West Coast to the East Coast and everywhere in between to disrupt events that involve corporate America, world summits, civil rights and especially those that involve law enforcement.”
“They have their little MacBook Air computers, their Wi-Fi, their smartphones, and they’re off to the races. We’re reacting to these situations, which means we are not fully in control of them,” the source said.
The "little techie brats" just won't play fair. All the police have are Glocks, tasers, pepper spray, shotguns, assault rifles, sniper rifles, up-armored Humvees, armored personnel carriers, sound cannons, and heat rays. Somebody has "not fully in control" issues.