Cop out: My experience with the police

The recent confrontations (a number of them deadly) between African Americans and police officers that have spawned protests and rioting across the country got me thinking about what I did when I got stopped by the Collin County Sherriff’s Department. It was back in April 2000 for what should have been a ticket for coasting past a four-way stop sign in McKinney.

I have never questioned the traffic tickets police officers issued to me after being pulled over for speeding or not wearing a seat belt.

My attitude has always been, I did it. I am guilty. Give me the ticket and I’ll decide how to take care of it. It only takes police officers maybe 10 or 15 minutes at most to write you up after they are finished checking your license on the computer in their car.

That’s how long it should have taken the sheriff’s officer to give me a ticket that Sunday afternoon 15 years ago. My attitude towards this particular area in McKinney is, if I don’t see any cars at any of the other three stop signs, then I am just going to slow down and then continue going. That’s a bad attitude. But if there are no cars at the intersection, why should I stop? What should have been a standard citation for missing a stop sign in McKinney became a full-length search of my car.

The officer who asked me if it was OK to search my car said it looked like I was trying to get away from them when they saw me coast past the stop sign. I felt like asking, "If that was the case, why did I stop the minute you turned on the lights?"

I didn’t bring up the question though. I just kept my mouth shut.

The sheriff said it was my right to say no to the search, and I would have said no except two scenarios suddenly popped in my head. One was, I could say no and then they’d assume something was up which means they’d just get another car to come by with a search warrant while I wait.

The other assumption was, although I knew damn well there was nothing illegal in my car, would the officer plant anything to make an arrest stick in his opinion?

I pondered these two scenarios for a second and then told the officer to go ahead with the search. He found nothing, but I could tell he was looking for something since I saw him eying the inspection and registration stickers on the windshield making sure they were current.

Instead, I stood there outside my car and waited for his partner to get verification on my license, which obviously came back saying I had no warrants (which for the record, I currently have none and have never had any). Yet, his partner still asked if I had any outstanding warrants as he gave my license back.

I told him no. He responded saying for me not to go through stop signs in front of the police because it’s not very smart. I agree.

That’s not the point here. The point is the Collin County Sheriff’s Department asking if they can search my vehicle was their way of saying I was hiding something, which wasn’t the case.

When this happened, I sat there wondering if my rights were violated in some way, but things could have gotten worse if I had smarted off to them and not cooperated.

Therein lies the difference between what I did and what so many African Americans who died at the hands of police officers didn’t do, whether the search was legal or not.

I am not denying there are bad police officers out there, but I am also convinced there are three times more good officers than bad. The officers who purposefully wrongfully shot innocent civilians during a stop (I am not just talking about African Americans here) and committing murder do get prosecuted and do get prison time. Every police department in this country be it a small town or a metropolitan city like Dallas has its internal problems.

Police officers don’t out of their way targeting individuals based on the color of their skin in hopes of them getting to use deadly excessive force and maybe starting a war between society and cops. There’s always a reason why you are pulled over by law enforcement.

The lesson that ought to be learned is if you want to go home alive or prevent your arrest following a traffic stop, you might want to avoid any confrontation with the local police.

©10/28/15

The continuing battle for political correctness

When South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley signed a measure into law on July 9, to remove the Confederate flag from the state capitol (which was then removed the next day after flying for 54 years), I couldn’t help but ask this one question: If South Carolina (and so many other southern states that flew the Confederate flag) knew there was a race problem, why wasn’t the flag removed before 21-year-old Dylann Roof opened fire, killing nine African-Americans June 17 at a prayer meeting at Emanuel African Methodist Church?

A sick individual cold-bloodedly murders minorities in hopes of starting a race war and now South Carolina and the rest of the country have a change of heart. If such supposed offensive historical symbols of the Civil War had been taken down years earlier, would that have kept Roof’s shooting rampage from happening? I doubt that about as much as I doubt more stringent gun control laws would stop mass shootings from happening.

Truth is this wasn’t the first shooting inside a house of worship. There have been countless shootings inside churches before the Charleston incident. Many innocent lives have been lost. Where was all the shock and outrage then over gun violence and mental illness?

When I watched "All in the Family" (1971-1979) and "The Jeffersons" (1975-1985) as a kid I did not count how many racial epithets (and there were many) Archie Bunker said about most every race. I didn’t know what the words “honky” and “zebras” meant at the time when George Jefferson uttered those words to describe interracial couple Tom and Helen Willis. Apparently neither did the live audiences otherwise why were they all laughing? Or why did the networks incorporate laugh tracks when those comments were said?

“The Dukes of Hazzard" (1979-1985) was and is no more a show seated in racism than Breaking Bad was a show seated in reality,” said Hazzard’s star John Schneider upon hearing the series was pulled by TV Land in response to the Charleston shootings and the suddenly racist Confederate flag painted on the famous car Bo and Luke drove, the General Lee.

“I am saddened that one angry and misguided individual can cause one of the most beloved television shows in the history of the medium to suddenly be seen in this light,” Schneider told The Hollywood Reporter. “Are people who grew up watching the show now suddenly racists? Will they have to go through a detox and a 12-step program to kick their Dukes habit?”

We can’t say Merry Christmas to anyone out of fear of offending someone who doesn’t celebrate it. Comedienne Nicole Arbour can’t do what she thinks was a humorous commentary about her opinion of fat people without YouTube, in a brief moment of madness, pull the video before restoring it due to so many hits the segment was getting. We can’t dress up as “Caitlyn Jenner” for Halloween because the LGBT (Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender) community finds it insulting.

When people aren’t busy wasting their breath on the dumbest of debates, like changing the name of the Washington Redskins football team to something else that won’t be offensive to Native Americans, they’re busy setting double standards.

They say nothing when liberal hate commentator Ed Schultz shouts how former Vice President Dick Cheney’s heart should be ripped out, kicked around and stuffed back into him. The minute Rush Limbaugh, however, calls Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke a slut, without bothering to read the transcript of where Limbaugh was coming from when he said it, the double standard liberals want “The Doctor of Democracy” gone from the airwaves.

The minute I criticize President Obama I get called racist when my criticism of him has nothing to do with his race. It’s his lousy policies destroying America that I have no stomach for.

With the Confederate flag now in a museum I can’t help but wonder (as I drive throughout my neighborhood seeing the American flag proudly displayed outside numerous homes), how long will it be before someone finds the symbol offensive and demands that it be removed from a neighbor’s home?

In case you were born yesterday, I got news for you. It’s already happening.

©10/21/15

Enough is already way too much

This is the eighth column I have written about a mass shooting since the Columbine school massacre in 1999. I am just as fed up with these tragic incidents as President Barack Obama was when he spoke hours after the latest shooting Oct. 1 at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Ore. The tragedy left nine students dead, in addition to the gunman, who took his own life.

I am so disgusted I am not even going to criticize the president when he said, “We know that states with the most gun laws tend to have the fewest gun deaths.”

I’ll let the right-wing political pundits such as Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity at Fox News bring up Chicago when it comes to how the state of Illinois has the strictest gun laws and just about every weekend the body count in the Windy City continues to reign with double digits.

I am tired of hearing the names of the dead and their young ages being read off by law enforcement officers at crime scenes. I’m also tired of the “drive-by” media, acting like vampires in need of fresh blood who hope the more people killed, the more they can keep the tragedy alive, reporting it for days.

I am tired of hearing from survivors recounting their horror with stories about how the killer in this latest shooting asked students about the religion and, depending on their answer, would either shoot them in the head or the leg. I am tired of hearing survivors talk about how this is not how they envisioned their fifth day in college to be.

I am tired of hearing from friends and family members of these shooters about how they had no idea the person was planning to commit mass murder.

“That’s not the son I raised” would be among the many responses from the parents.

I get so tired of hearing about how these shooters attempted to seek, refused to seek or were undergoing psychological counseling before they went off the deep end. The red flags consistently were missed every time these tragedies occurred.

Most of all, I am sick and tired of politicians using such tragedies as a means to get on their political soapboxes about how more stringent gun control laws need to be put on the books to stop these tragedies from happening. It’s nothing but talk.

Three days after the shooting at Umpqua Community College, it was reported four students were arrested in northern California for plotting to carry out a similar Columbine-style attack at Summerville High School in Tuolumne. I don’t believe for one minute that if California had the same stringent gun laws that Illinois has such a mass shooting would have been prevented. If someone is intent on killing, it doesn’t matter how he got the gun. Nor does it matter how many rounds the weapon can fire so long as the person can take out a few people before his cowardly act of turning the gun on himself.

Let’s face it: Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.

Politicians in Washington have been debating the gun control issue since the deaths of the Kennedys in the ‘60s, Beatle John Lennon in 1980 and President Ronald Reagan’s attempted assassination in 1981. Both of the last two assailants were mentally ill.

We have gotten nowhere. Every incident since Columbine has been, as Obama called it in his speech, “routine.”

In the coming weeks or months, though I hope it doesn’t happen (and that’s wishful thinking on my part), another mass shooting will occur on another campus. Obama and the rest of the country will express the same shock and go through that same routine all over again. Campus newspapers will do more predictable news stories interviewing campus police and administrators asking what are they doing to keep students safe and there will likely be more regurgitated editorials and columns.

Treating the mentally ill is the only way these mass shootings will stop. I have always believed that, based on the treatment (or lack thereof) these mass murderers were receiving.

Republican presidential front runner Donald Trump said on CNN’s “New Day” this “…isn’t a gun problem. This is a mental problem. It’s not a question of the laws. It’s really the people.”

Commenting about the problem and actually doing something about it are two different things. I don’t think a presidential candidate, Republican or Democrat, has ever said during their campaigns what they intend to do about treating the mentally ill in this country.

Maybe it’s time for them to start.

©10/14/15

Gone Too Soon: John Lennon (1940-1980)

It happened on a Monday night. The date was Dec. 8, 1980. Some say it was the day the music died. This December will mark the 35th anniversary when former Beatle/songwriter John Lennon was shot to death by a deranged fan outside the gates of the Dakota Apartments in New York City as he and his wife, Yoko Ono, were returning home from a recording studio session. Lennon would have turned 75 this year on October 9.

Rock star Sheryl Crow and actor/comedian Mike Myers, according to a retrospective article on Lennon in the Nov. 9, 2000 issue of Rolling Stone, heard about the singer’s assassination watching "Monday Night Football" when sportscaster Howard Cosell made the shocking announcement to TV viewers.

I found out the next morning from my dad as I was getting ready for school.

I remembered hearing Beatles’ songs like "Yesterday" on the radio the morning after the singer’s death and seeing hour-long newscasts and specials covering the life of the late Beatle on TV that night.



I also recall reading various newspaper articles about fans who were so distraught by the tragic news that they committed suicide. Some fans of Nirvana repeated that same senseless act 14 years later when they found out the group’s lead singer, Kurt Cobain, killed himself in 1994.

The founding member of The Beatles, however, wasn’t like Cobain who freely chose the self-destructive lifestyle through drugs or a bloated Elvis Presley, who near the end of his life forgot the lines to most of his songs during live performances.

Lennon came out of hiding in 1980 with what was to be his comeback album, "Double Fantasy," after devoting the last half of the decade to raising his son, Sean. Some of the music he wrote after The Beatles broke up in 1970 were as much about him as they were about others. "Jealous Guy" made obvious references to Lennon’s relationship with his second wife, Yoko Ono, while "Cold Turkey" spoke of the singer’s battles with drugs. Then there was Beautiful Boy, which Lennon wrote as a tribute to his son.

A couple Beatles’ songs, however, like "Julia" were about his mother whom Lennon lost when she died in an auto accident in 1958, while "The Ballad of John and Yoko" talked about the two as a couple.



Listening to some of Lennon’s best hits on disc, I have often felt as though some of his lyrics described me, like in the song, "Watching the Wheels." The lyrics go "People say I’m crazy doing what I’m doing. Well, they give me all kinds of advice to save me from ruin...I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round, I really love to watch them roll, no longer hide behind the merry-go-round, I just have to let it go."

I am sure someone else will interpret those lyrics differently but for me, they seem to say, "Look, you’re getting older now so stop wasting time." Then there’s "Borrowed Time," which came out in 1984 whose lyrics talk about how one’s young carefree days never last forever.

"My role in society, or any artist or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel," the singer was quoted saying in the 1988 book, "Imagine: John Lennon."

I was in fifth grade when Lennon was killed in 1980. I wasn’t old enough to realize what his death would mean.

For older fans who remember when The Beatles first came to America in 1964 and grew up listening to their songs, the death of John Lennon dashed any hopes, if there were any, of a possible reunion.



That notion finally hit me in 1995 when the three surviving members of the "Fab Four", Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr came together to record their first Beatles song in 15 years called "Free as a Bird." The song was part of an unfinished lyric Lennon recorded on cassette tape back in the late 70s.

When it comes to the subject of John Lennon and The Beatles, there is always that lingering question. If Lennon has lived, would the Beatles have gotten together again?

The question is like pondering whether or not President Kennedy would have pulled American troops out of Vietnam in 1964 had he lived to see a second term.

What I do know is if Lennon were around today, it’s a good bet he’d have a lot to say about many current events the past three decades, in particular about 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, some of which he probably would have written songs about.

Lennon was our generation’s JFK. His passing brings to mind the opening line from the Beatles’ lyric, "A Day in yhe Life" and was the last song on the "Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band" album.

The line was "I read the news today oh boy..."

©10/7/15