Louisville Cops "Community Relations"

I'm not a big fan of cops in general and Louisville cops specifically. More and more the police force has become a haven for failed jocks and thugs looking for an excuse to push people around and bash heads, especially "nappy" ones. I could go on for pages about them but I'll start with one post about last Friday.

I am renovating a house I own in the "historically black" section of Louisville known as Smoketown. I currently live in a part of town known as the Highlands but I lived in my Smoketown house for over five years so I'm pretty familiar with the neighborhood. Immediately across the alley behind my garage is a decaying housing projects called Shepard Square. Now I have spent many hours working on the roofs of my garage and house as well as many other exterior repairs that gives me a great view of the projects and as best as I can tell cops enter those projects for only one reason: to arrest somebody. There are no community patrols, no cops on foot or bicycle that regularly pass through, for that matter there aren't even cops driving around the area.

"But the police force is stretched thin," I hear you say. If that is true then why when I work in the wealthy white parts of town do I see regular (like every hour or two) patrols pass by? There is not a lot of crime in the cul-de-sac neighborhoods around the park, no crackheads cutting across the two acre lawns in front of the 10,000 square foot homes, but you can guarantee a cop is going to cruise by several times a day. Go to where the crack is being sold and the babies are being shot by stray bullets and you can't get a cop to your house within twenty minutes of a 911 call. Get mugged in the Highlands and the cops are there in minutes, get mugged in the projects and the mugger can walk leisurely away because the cops sure as shit aren't going to get there quickly enough to find him.

So last Friday I pull up to my house in the afternoon and there are cops everywhere. Cops on bikes, cops in cars, cops standing around. The first cop I saw crossed the street ahead of me on his bike and I thought, "Excellent. They're finally patrolling the area." Then I turned the corner and saw the cops were everywhere. They weren't in there getting to know the people, talk to the kids, or keep an eye on the crack addicts heading to the same three apartments they always go to for their rocks. They were in there to push people around. They were in there to be thugs. My brother was working on his building next door to mine and when he left to drive back to his farm in the country he was pulled over by vice squad who, of course, treated him like a liar and criminal until they realized he hadn't been buying crack. They were jarhead thugs out to push somebody around. Of course if there were patrols in the area they would've known he's there three or four days a week, parked in his yard, working in the building. For that matter, if they'd been paying any attention at all they would've seen him parked there all day, working on his house. He was parked in his yard on the alley in site of two of the crack dealing apartments. His view of the third one is blocked by a building while I've got a clear view from right next door.

Rather than devote an officer full time to walk around those projects and make friends and allies, the Louisville Metro Police feel they should come in once every few years and make sure everyone hates them. The kids trust the crack dealers and will look out for them because every time they've had a dealing with a cop they've either been ignored or threatened with arrest or watched someone they know get carted off in handcuffs. The crack dealers will give them five bucks to go buy candy and the cops will arrest their uncle. They're not busting the dealers for reasons I can't understand. If I can watch the courtyard behind my house for fifteen minutes and figure out which apartments the crack is coming out of (the crackheads are so obvious you can't mistake them for residents), why can't the cops? Oh, that's right, it's because they're never actually in the projects unless they're reacting to another shooting of a baby or serving a warrant against some poor loser that fucked up his parole again.

In the future I will write about the way Louisville (and Kentucky cops in general) drive and make a tenuous connection between the fact they feel traffic laws do not apply to them and the "I am the law!" attitude exhibited by cops shooting suspects in the back or assassinating political adversaries.

One observation I've made is that you can always tell from a distance the color of a driver that's been pulled over in Louisville by the number of cars behind it. White female driver = one car. White male driver = one car (unless they're a "wangsta.") Black driver (of any sex but not looking like a "gangsta") or a "wangsta" = two cars. Black driver looking like a gangsta = two to five cars. I've been making these observations since I moved here in 2000 and only once have I seen two cars behind a non-wangsta white person.