While installing marble curbstones in downtown Louisville, giving millions of dollars worth of public property to out of state developers, and using tax dollars to build a fucking sports arena, our local government has declared it is short of money so it is closing public swimming pools. The public pool near me is to be filled in and converted into a "spray park" (some sprinklers on concrete pads). This is yet another example of how the class war is being won by the wealthy and lost by the poor. Don't believe the people that say there is no class warfare, they are on the wealthy side of the equation (or the really stupid). The pool and buildings will be demolished at a cost of $300,000 despite the fact the local neighborhood has raised over $75,000 to keep it open as a pool. Who loses? Poor people. Who wins? Rich people.
[update 3/22/2010: Without bothering to see if the neighborhood could raise the remaining $150,000 to keep the pool open, the city has begun demolition. The giant front hoes with crushing jaws and jackhammers have already cracked the pool and torn down the lighting. God forbid we should raise the taxes on the ultra-megas to provide benefits for the larger community.]
Showing posts with label louisville. Show all posts
Showing posts with label louisville. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Monday, March 23, 2009
Spending Money Just Because They Have Money To Spend
A letter I fired off today:
Office of Mayor Jerry Abramson
Metro Hall / 4th Floor
527 W. Jefferson St.
Louisville, KY 40202
c.c.: LMPD, Governor Steve Beshear, LG&E, Miller Pipeline Co., MSD, LEO Weekly, Louisville Courier Journal, Me Talk Big Noise blog
Re: wasted money
To Whom It May Concern:
There is a question that has bothered me for some time and today I sought an answer: “Why does every utility project require at least one, and usually two cops sitting in their cars with the engine running and lights flashing?” A half of a block on Clay Street, between Market Street and the alley was closed for work by the electric company today. That particular block is short to begin with and the distance from the corner of Clay and Market to the alley is less than 200 feet. There were two massive Louisville Gas & Electric Company trucks blocking the western lane. The eastern lane was blocked by traffic cones and two police cars with an officer in each. One of the cops was asleep, and the other was watching a movie on his laptop. There is very little traffic on that stretch of road as the street is closed at the end of the block. The absurdity of two cars being used to block this is staggering and I would go so far as to say it is a form of theft from the public coffers.
I asked the movie watching officer (the one that was awake) what the logic of this set-up was. He answered that they were “under contract” with LG&E and officers were required wherever work was being done. He couldn’t explain why and I don’t think anyone in government or at LG&E can either, at least not honestly. These two officers, being paid well over $25/hr while their two cars were burning gasoline were doing the job that could be done just as well by a pair of barricades with flashing lights.
This ludicrous use of our police force has bothered me for years. Several years back when I-65 was being resurfaced there was an officer at every single exit and entrance to the highway, sitting in a running police car all night long every single night for several weeks. Explain to me how it would be more expensive and less effective to place concrete barriers with flashing lights and a sign at each of these ramps and remove them at the end of the night. You can’t because it would, in fact, be cheaper and just as effective. Put a phone number on the barricade and pay one person to answer and give directions to those confused about getting out of town. Paying a cop to sit there (especially at the ends of exit ramps) is at best moronic.
Last year here in the Highlands the gas lines were being replaced and along the blocks where work was on-going police officers were stationed with their cars. As best as I can tell they were doing absolutely nothing other than accompanying their gasoline wasting, pollution producing police cars turned lighted barriers. For several days in a row there were large trucks and backhoes parked along the shoulder at Winter and Edward, a difficult intersection in good times and during this work it was impossible to see if there was traffic coming from either direction. Were the officers directing traffic? Were they letting the drivers entering blind from Edward know that it was clear or they should wait? No. They were standing around talking to people from the pipeline company, not directing traffic. Not once in the months the gas crews were working this neighborhood did I see any of these officers doing anything other than standing around, getting paid for breathing.
During heavy work on Bardstown road there were cop cars parked behind concrete barriers with their motors running and lights flashing. To what purpose? None. These cars were doing nothing that could not be achieved by placing flashing lights on the concrete barriers. They were wasting our money, they were wasting natural resources, they were adding age and wear to the vehicles, and they were most certainly not patrolling our streets and alleys, reducing crime.
I thought this stupid waste would have ended after a deputy sheriff was killed while playing barricade on I-64 last year. He was sitting in his car where there should have been a couple of big, dumb hunks of concrete with lights and signs when a truck ran over his car at highway speed, killing him instantly. Did anyone in government think, “Wow, having living people acting as a barricade to traffic may not be a good idea”? Of course not.
And best yet, after witnessing the absolutely moronic use of police officers on Clay Street I drove past Cherokee Park where a far more complicated and much busier set of streets were half closed by barricades and a couple of guys with signs directing traffic. Not a cop in sight and traffic seemed to be moving fairly smoothly.
The city of Louisville has closed parks, cut education funding and increased fees for services because of budget woes but we’re still pissing away thousands of dollars a day having police officers and police cars doing unnecessary jobs. I want these officers on foot patrols in the housing projects, or walking the Highlands at night, not sleeping in a car blocking a half a block of downtown street. Maybe if these fat cops (the officer watching the movie had a belly that would have embarrassed Homer Simpson) were hiking around the city bad things like babies being shot in the Shepherd Square projects or my elderly neighbor’s house being emptied by thieves in the middle of the night might not happen.
Every year I pay my taxes to this city and this kind of thing makes me more angry than I can express in words. Rather than protecting and serving, the Mayor and Chief of Police are going for pretending and soaking. You go to the rich, white parts of this city and wait an hour and you’ll see a police car cruise through, slowly. You can sit at the corner of Jacob and Jackson (huge open air drug market) for two weeks and you won’t see a single cop that’s not driving fifteen miles an hour over the speed limit, eyes forward, passing through. That is unless it’s the week where they try to get in their drug busts for the quarter so they can suck at the Federal teet of “drug enforcement” funding. Then there are dozens of cops being rude to everyone in the area, pushing people around and telling kids to shut the f#@! up while pulling over and searching everyone they profile (i.e. white people or black kids in nice cars). Again, a waste of money, a waste of time, and a waste of any good will of the people that live there.
I invested in property in Smoketown (the historically black part of Louisville) expecting the housing projects to be destroyed and a light rail system (streetcar) to run in front of my door. Neither of these things happened but I’ve kept up the property and lived there for years. Last year my brother and I were held up at gunpoint by three young boys with a very big revolver. It took over a half hour for an officer to arrive (we were two blocks from Broadway). When we called the detective about this, two weeks later, he hadn’t even looked at the case and implied we were criminals ourselves asking sarcastically, “What were you doing in Smoketown, huh?” As it was 11:30am on a school day you would think a quick check of absent male students that lived in that area would’ve solved the case. I doubt he did a thing as we never heard a word from him. Perhaps if the officers sleeping in their cars where street work was going on had been walking around that neighborhood those kids wouldn’t have decided to hold us up. Perhaps if officers were interacting with these children and acting as roll models they wouldn’t think of police only as the bastards that beat up their uncle or sent their mother to prison.
What the police department is doing by accepting these “living barricade” jobs is a form of theft. It enriches the officers that get paid for doing nothing and it fattens the coffers of the police department by payments from the utility companies while taking officers off the street and away from actually keeping the rest of us safe. All of us citizens end up paying for this stupidity whether it’s through our taxes or through the money we pay the utilities. The vehicles we buy are worn doing nothing, the air we breath is polluted by these senselessly running engines, and our police officers feel they deserve to be paid for sitting on their asses which might explain the crap attitudes so many Louisville officers bring to the public they harass and ignore. This just reeks of one thief scratching the back of another thief. The executives of the utility companies get to rub shoulders with the mayor, assuring there will be little examination of what they charge the city, the chief of police can do that bureaucratic thing of taking pride in controlling more money than necessary while doing as little as possible with it, and the mayor can pretend that he’s worried about the city’s budget as he closes parks and slashes pay and benefits and ignores flagrant wastes of money like this while making the donors to his campaigns feel safe by sending cop cars cruising through their crime free subdivisions.
If anyone can explain to me how this makes any sense whatsoever I will be amazed. It smells like business as usual to me and that business is not to the benefit of the vast majority of the taxpayers and utility customers of this community.
Sincerely,
Alan Miller
Office of Mayor Jerry Abramson
Metro Hall / 4th Floor
527 W. Jefferson St.
Louisville, KY 40202
c.c.: LMPD, Governor Steve Beshear, LG&E, Miller Pipeline Co., MSD, LEO Weekly, Louisville Courier Journal, Me Talk Big Noise blog
Re: wasted money
To Whom It May Concern:
There is a question that has bothered me for some time and today I sought an answer: “Why does every utility project require at least one, and usually two cops sitting in their cars with the engine running and lights flashing?” A half of a block on Clay Street, between Market Street and the alley was closed for work by the electric company today. That particular block is short to begin with and the distance from the corner of Clay and Market to the alley is less than 200 feet. There were two massive Louisville Gas & Electric Company trucks blocking the western lane. The eastern lane was blocked by traffic cones and two police cars with an officer in each. One of the cops was asleep, and the other was watching a movie on his laptop. There is very little traffic on that stretch of road as the street is closed at the end of the block. The absurdity of two cars being used to block this is staggering and I would go so far as to say it is a form of theft from the public coffers.
I asked the movie watching officer (the one that was awake) what the logic of this set-up was. He answered that they were “under contract” with LG&E and officers were required wherever work was being done. He couldn’t explain why and I don’t think anyone in government or at LG&E can either, at least not honestly. These two officers, being paid well over $25/hr while their two cars were burning gasoline were doing the job that could be done just as well by a pair of barricades with flashing lights.
This ludicrous use of our police force has bothered me for years. Several years back when I-65 was being resurfaced there was an officer at every single exit and entrance to the highway, sitting in a running police car all night long every single night for several weeks. Explain to me how it would be more expensive and less effective to place concrete barriers with flashing lights and a sign at each of these ramps and remove them at the end of the night. You can’t because it would, in fact, be cheaper and just as effective. Put a phone number on the barricade and pay one person to answer and give directions to those confused about getting out of town. Paying a cop to sit there (especially at the ends of exit ramps) is at best moronic.
Last year here in the Highlands the gas lines were being replaced and along the blocks where work was on-going police officers were stationed with their cars. As best as I can tell they were doing absolutely nothing other than accompanying their gasoline wasting, pollution producing police cars turned lighted barriers. For several days in a row there were large trucks and backhoes parked along the shoulder at Winter and Edward, a difficult intersection in good times and during this work it was impossible to see if there was traffic coming from either direction. Were the officers directing traffic? Were they letting the drivers entering blind from Edward know that it was clear or they should wait? No. They were standing around talking to people from the pipeline company, not directing traffic. Not once in the months the gas crews were working this neighborhood did I see any of these officers doing anything other than standing around, getting paid for breathing.
During heavy work on Bardstown road there were cop cars parked behind concrete barriers with their motors running and lights flashing. To what purpose? None. These cars were doing nothing that could not be achieved by placing flashing lights on the concrete barriers. They were wasting our money, they were wasting natural resources, they were adding age and wear to the vehicles, and they were most certainly not patrolling our streets and alleys, reducing crime.
I thought this stupid waste would have ended after a deputy sheriff was killed while playing barricade on I-64 last year. He was sitting in his car where there should have been a couple of big, dumb hunks of concrete with lights and signs when a truck ran over his car at highway speed, killing him instantly. Did anyone in government think, “Wow, having living people acting as a barricade to traffic may not be a good idea”? Of course not.
And best yet, after witnessing the absolutely moronic use of police officers on Clay Street I drove past Cherokee Park where a far more complicated and much busier set of streets were half closed by barricades and a couple of guys with signs directing traffic. Not a cop in sight and traffic seemed to be moving fairly smoothly.
The city of Louisville has closed parks, cut education funding and increased fees for services because of budget woes but we’re still pissing away thousands of dollars a day having police officers and police cars doing unnecessary jobs. I want these officers on foot patrols in the housing projects, or walking the Highlands at night, not sleeping in a car blocking a half a block of downtown street. Maybe if these fat cops (the officer watching the movie had a belly that would have embarrassed Homer Simpson) were hiking around the city bad things like babies being shot in the Shepherd Square projects or my elderly neighbor’s house being emptied by thieves in the middle of the night might not happen.
Every year I pay my taxes to this city and this kind of thing makes me more angry than I can express in words. Rather than protecting and serving, the Mayor and Chief of Police are going for pretending and soaking. You go to the rich, white parts of this city and wait an hour and you’ll see a police car cruise through, slowly. You can sit at the corner of Jacob and Jackson (huge open air drug market) for two weeks and you won’t see a single cop that’s not driving fifteen miles an hour over the speed limit, eyes forward, passing through. That is unless it’s the week where they try to get in their drug busts for the quarter so they can suck at the Federal teet of “drug enforcement” funding. Then there are dozens of cops being rude to everyone in the area, pushing people around and telling kids to shut the f#@! up while pulling over and searching everyone they profile (i.e. white people or black kids in nice cars). Again, a waste of money, a waste of time, and a waste of any good will of the people that live there.
I invested in property in Smoketown (the historically black part of Louisville) expecting the housing projects to be destroyed and a light rail system (streetcar) to run in front of my door. Neither of these things happened but I’ve kept up the property and lived there for years. Last year my brother and I were held up at gunpoint by three young boys with a very big revolver. It took over a half hour for an officer to arrive (we were two blocks from Broadway). When we called the detective about this, two weeks later, he hadn’t even looked at the case and implied we were criminals ourselves asking sarcastically, “What were you doing in Smoketown, huh?” As it was 11:30am on a school day you would think a quick check of absent male students that lived in that area would’ve solved the case. I doubt he did a thing as we never heard a word from him. Perhaps if the officers sleeping in their cars where street work was going on had been walking around that neighborhood those kids wouldn’t have decided to hold us up. Perhaps if officers were interacting with these children and acting as roll models they wouldn’t think of police only as the bastards that beat up their uncle or sent their mother to prison.
What the police department is doing by accepting these “living barricade” jobs is a form of theft. It enriches the officers that get paid for doing nothing and it fattens the coffers of the police department by payments from the utility companies while taking officers off the street and away from actually keeping the rest of us safe. All of us citizens end up paying for this stupidity whether it’s through our taxes or through the money we pay the utilities. The vehicles we buy are worn doing nothing, the air we breath is polluted by these senselessly running engines, and our police officers feel they deserve to be paid for sitting on their asses which might explain the crap attitudes so many Louisville officers bring to the public they harass and ignore. This just reeks of one thief scratching the back of another thief. The executives of the utility companies get to rub shoulders with the mayor, assuring there will be little examination of what they charge the city, the chief of police can do that bureaucratic thing of taking pride in controlling more money than necessary while doing as little as possible with it, and the mayor can pretend that he’s worried about the city’s budget as he closes parks and slashes pay and benefits and ignores flagrant wastes of money like this while making the donors to his campaigns feel safe by sending cop cars cruising through their crime free subdivisions.
If anyone can explain to me how this makes any sense whatsoever I will be amazed. It smells like business as usual to me and that business is not to the benefit of the vast majority of the taxpayers and utility customers of this community.
Sincerely,
Alan Miller
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Ice Storm
The weather hasn't been kind to Louisville the last few months. We had the awful windstorm from Hurricane Ike that destroyed trees and power lines and now we have this amazing ice storm hit us. Conditions here are nowhere near as bad as far western Kentucky where they had nothing but freezing rain for an entire night and day. We had a little freezing rain followed by several inches of snow followed by freezing rain leaving around 3/4 of an inch of ice coating everything while in west KY they had around double that much ice (hard to fathom the weight of it). Trees are snapped, bent, and broken, power, phone, and cable lines fell under their own weight as well as falling limbs, and many streets and most sidewalks are solid ice. Today we are getting a big thaw with the temperatures in the sun approaching 60 degrees but I just wonder how much will be left tonight to re-freeze for tomorrow.
I took a LOT of pictures because it's been absolutely beautiful despite the tragedy of it. Below are a few select pictures.
For more pictures you can check my Flickr page where you will find these sets:
1-27-09
1-28-09
1-29-09
1-30-09
1-31-09
I took a LOT of pictures because it's been absolutely beautiful despite the tragedy of it. Below are a few select pictures.
For more pictures you can check my Flickr page where you will find these sets:
1-27-09
1-28-09
1-29-09
1-30-09
1-31-09
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Why I Still Don't Listen to WFPL
Over a year ago I posted a piece about WFPL, a Louisville NPR news/talk station. It was a first person essay explaining why I can't stand to listen to them anymore. Much to my surprise, yesterday I received a lengthy response which I have copied, along with my response to the response, below. I get my NPR and PRI content via podcasts now though I occasionally hear WFPL in the evenings when my girlfriend or others have it on. They still play the same music behind their sponsor slots and I have to put my fingers in my ears and hum. Note that "Anonymous" says he or she doesn't "get a chance to listen to WFPL very often." I have a feeling that's true of most of the staff.
Anonymous said...
I work for Louisville Public Media (formerly the Public Radio Partnership) which is the home of WPFL, WUOL, and WFPK. I don't get a chance to listen to WFPL very often and must say I haven't heard these conditions that the blogger talks about.
What I DO KNOW is that, during business hours (8-5 M-F) we certainly know when a station is on or off the air. There are "dead air" electronic monitors connected to radio receivers that sound a loud alarm when one of the three stations has no audio for more than like a minute or so. So, we are monitoring the on-air signal from the transmitter and not just what is going out of the studio.
Now, I am not sure that this alarm is audible at the Receptionist's area. She has enough to do with routing calls and dealing with walk-ins and can't hear any of the stations. That fact that she wouldn't know doesn't surprise me in the least.
Occasionally for maintenance we have to take the transmitter off the air for brief (or longer) periods. No one may know about this except for the Engineer.
A lot of WFPL is automated. No one is there overnight. If you ever hear two shows at once, it is most likely that someone left more than one pot up on the console. Yep, that's user error - but sorry that no one is there to apologize to you for it.
If you hear a promo over an ongoing show, it could also perhaps be the same reason. Often the hosts will cut their promos while their show is on. Of course, you monitor what you are doing at the time and not what is going out so one pot routed to the wrong place is going to cause this problem. This is NOT dead air so the alarm doesn't go off.
There is no substitute for a person manning the console 24/7 to make everything go smoothly. This position was eliminated years ago to save costs.
With all of these faults, WFPL is like basically no other station in the country. Most markets have one Public radio station. Some markets don't even have that many! A market with one station is trying to be all things to all people all of the time. News maybe for an hour, then classical music around dinner, then Jazz at night and they might even sign off before midnight. To have a station that is all news/talk is pretty much a rarity!
11/27/08 12:47 PM
Alan Evil said...
So, by virtue of your singularity it is acceptable to fail in some instances and be mediocre in others?
I thank you for the lengthy rebuttal except you rebutted very little. There were three specific reasons I stopped listening to your station. Let's review them again, shall we?
1. The music. You are still using the same song snippets behind your sponsor announcements. That drives me bat shit crazy! The music is horrible. It probably wouldn't bother me at all if I only heard it a few times, but every last note of what you use now makes me grind my teeth. You pay someone to "produce" your music for you. FIRE HIM.
2. Your automatic switching system can remain maladjusted for weeks at a time and you do not staff WFPL to cover 24 hours of broadcasting so the station can crash and burn after 7:00pm and there's nobody there to fix it. Admitting that you "save costs" by not having a human in the control booth does not make it the right way to run a radio station. An alarm that sounds in an empty room... that's like that tree in a forest with noone around.
3. State of Affairs is still on and I still don't listen to it. You guys produce some good stuff but State of Affairs managed to fail most of the time. I really don't know if it's improved because I've stopped listening to WFPL.
When it comes down to it, if you people would just change the fucking music regularly I would send you some money and become a listener again. But as it is I simply can't stand to listen to your station because of that music. It's like you don't want to wash your underwear or clean the glass in your front door. It's as if you really don't care what your station sounds like to the people that listen to it every day.
The original piece about WFPL is a first person observation and a negative critique. I won't sing your praises because you're obviously doing just fine at that on your own. The way WFPL is run at the most basic level of broadcasting programming over the air is lame in my opinion. My breast has not swollen with pride because you're so special. You may be a one of a kind but that doesn't make you great. It just makes you one of a kind.
11/29/08 9:18 PM
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Ike Really Tore Up Louisville
[A quick note: I was in Nashville from Monday through Friday evening
so I'm only just now able to make this post]
so I'm only just now able to make this post]
Sunday September the 14th the worst weather event in Louisville, Kentucky's recorded history blew through town. For over two hours we experienced sustained winds of 50mph with gusts over 75mph. Trees were literally ripped from the ground, splintered from their bases, and generally tossed around like toothpicks. The path of the storm was fairly wide and it appears it ran right up the Ohio River. I went out in the morning and took pictures of the approaching front, thinking we were going to get some rain and thunderstorms. Boy was I in for a surprise. Not only did we get almost no rain (just a few drops), the sun was shining and the skies were half blue with clouds racing overhead as trees were bent double, first one way and then another (explaining why so many broke). It was truly amazing.
You will find a collection of pictures I took after the storm here. Unfortunately, some streets still look like this a week later. Though we got electricity back about 12 hours after it went out, most houses and businesses around us are still dark. LG&E, our local utility, has been saying it may be another week before all power is restored.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Government Fees - Tax or Theft?
There's this little thing that bothers me and I thought I'd air it out a bit today. Have you noticed that every time you go to do something with the government there are strange, overly large fees involved? Just two instances I've encountered today include a $2.00 fee to mail in your vehicle registration renewal (for "handling") and a whopping $2.50 charge per transaction at the DMV to use a debit card. Both of these things pissed me off for multiple reasons so I fired off a couple of letters. First is to the Jefferson County Kentucky Court Clerk over the registration renewal fee and the second is to the Kentucky Department of Motor Vehicles about the debit charge (my name has been changed to protect me):
9-20-2007
Alan Evil
Bobbie Holsclaw, Jefferson County Clerk
P.O. Box 33033
Louisville KY 40232-3033
Re: $2.00 “handling” fee for mail-in registration renewal.
Dear Mrs. Holsclaw,
I was wondering if you could explain to me the $2.00 handling fee for registration renewal by mail.
First it seems renewing by mail would be much more efficient on your end as it could not possibly take an employee longer to open an envelope and process the renewal than it would take an employee to scream out a number, wait for the customer, talk with them, etc. So that’s a savings, right? Adding to the improved efficiency is the fact that you do not need a large, air conditioned space with waiting rooms, banks of lights, etc. A big plus of this is, of course, that we, the citizens, need but write a check and fill out an envelope thereby allowing us to save the hour or more it takes to renew in person most of the time and use this in a productive way.
Second, unless you are sending a full plate, the postage for the renewed registration and sticker could not possibly exceed forty one cents, throw in an envelope purchased in bulk and you might make it up to fifty cents. Of course, if you mailed in bulk the cost would be less, probably around thirty cents.
So what is the $2 for? Is it just a way to add expense to a convenience to increase your department’s coffers? If the process is more efficient and requires less manpower then it should either cost the same as the less efficient method or it should be cheaper. Please explain to me how it is $2 more expensive per registration renewal by mail as opposed to in person.
Sincerely,
Alan Evil
9-20-2007
Alan Evil
Division of Driver Licensing
200 Mero Street
Frankfort, KY 40622
Re: $2.50 per transaction debit card fee
To Whom It May Concern:
I noticed today while replacing my stolen driver’s license that the downtown Louisville branch has begun to accept debit cards for payment. I applaud this… or at least I would if your weren’t charging $2.50 per transaction to use a debit card. Where does that $2.50 go and why is it necessary?
Not only is the debit card more convenient (and more commonly used) than cash or check, it makes the job of your clerks easier and less apt to error. I worked retail for over 12 years and know this to be a simple fact. Not only is it more efficient at the counter, it’s more efficient afterward as, without any filling out of deposit slips, counting of cash, manual adding of checks, etc. the money from customers’ accounts is deposited automatically for you at midnight. All you have to do is print a summary for your records.
Either you are skimming this money to fatten your department’s coffers rather than requesting more funding (and higher taxes) as you should, or whomever set the system up is robbing all of us blind.
Have you ever had a convenience store charge you anything at all for using a debit card? The only time I know of charges being added to debit cards is at ATM machines run by banks other than the cardholder’s. I have seen really small stores requiring $5 or $10 minimum to use debit or charge cards, but not in many years. Every little podunk store in the State takes debit cards without charging $2.50 for each use (for a $45 license renewal that’s over 5%!). This sounds like theft to me.
As a matter of a fact, I know individual people that have credit card readers attached to their cel phones so they can sell at art festivals and the like and they don’t charge their customers a penny for this convenience. You can’t get much smaller than one person selling stuff in a festival booth.
I am sure the DMV does enough business that you could find a company that would charge a pittance (less than a percent) for debit card use. So why are you using a company that would simply rob us? Could it be cronyism? Lack of oversight? Some obscure rule that says you have to milk every penny possible from those you serve? As always, this fee is much more a burden on the poor than the rich, but this seems to be the way government works these days. You’ll cut the taxes for an industrial plant and raise fees that will be a disproportionate percentage of income of the poor. You’ll allow overloaded coal trucks to destroy our roads and then bump up the average person’s fees for everything concerning driving.
Please convince me that there is a legitimate reason for this fee. In my opinion whoever set up your debit system should be fired and replaced with someone who at least is competent. If you were running a retail business and one of your employees set up a debit system that cost you $2.50 every time you ran a card, you would fire that person so quickly they wouldn’t even have time to gather up their children’s pictures off their desk. That’s how I feel about this and I’m one of the people paying your salaries.
Sincerely,
Alan Evil
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
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.
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.
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