NORFOLK - Police are targeting low-income neighborhoods to enforce a little-known bicycle law that's left dozens of people - even the homeless - without a way to get around.
Bicycle seizures in the city have jumped 300 percent in the past three years, according to a NewsChannel 3 analysis of police records. City law allows police to impound bicycles that do not have a city registration sticker. Officers can take the bikes from where they are parked, or from the bike riders.
Police records show dozens of bike seizures in the past three years from the city's lowest-income neighborhoods, including Park Place, Huntersville, Barraud Park and public housing. Those same records show police steer clear of the city's more affluent areas like Ghent, Larchmont/Edgewater and Lambert's Point. No bikes were seized anywhere around Old Dominion University.
James Davidson was pedaling to his South Norfolk home from Park Place when police pulled him over on Aug. 19, 2007.
"They told me that since I didn't have a license for the bike, they had to take it," Davidson said. "I haven't had a bike since."
...
No one from the city would say why police do not enforce this law in the city's middle- and upper-income neighborhoods.
I feel that there is a fascistic element, for example, in the Rolling Stones . . .
— Morton Feldman
I've studied the phenomenon of neo-provincialism in self-isolating online communities but this place takes the fucking cake.
— Clashy
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a bowl of soup
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a rolling hoop
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a ton of lead
Wiggle - you can raise the dead
Colin wrote:This is really bizarre to me. I didn't realize there even were cities that required you to show a bike permit.
Most major cities have those requirements but don't enforce them because the police departments are understaffed and overworked with violent crime and so forth. But in crime free utopias like Norfolk, the cops need to find something to do.
Sit on my lap, I'm sober! - cretin Dylan can never care about anything, not a troublesome woman, not a beleagured workingman, not a fingerless glove or sleeveless jacket, as much as Andrew WK cares about partying. - Silent Majority
I’m not sure what you’re asking. Of course, I don’t personally have the power to prevent much of anything. I’m not aiming to prevent things by writing, much though I might wish I could; rather, I’m aiming to reach people — to persuade, embolden, and provoke conversation with the small group of people who have views similar enough to mine that they might listen seriously to what I have to say; and to inform the much larger group of people who are unlikely to ever believe anything like what I believe, at least, that the view exists and that people are willing to seriously defend it. I do this with a certain amount of hope, for historical reasons and reasons of contemporary trends, which we can discuss if you want to. (I certainly don’t think police brutality, for example, is anything new; and in fact I think that some aspects of the problem, though awful, are not nearly as bad as they were 30, 60, or 90 years ago; and that we are today significantly closer to a serious struggle against police violence than we have been at any time in history since the development of professional policing. As awful as government policing is today, I think it’s a serious mistake to treat the matter as something that’s getting systematically, steadily, or unequivocally worse.)
And while I, personally, don’t have the power to change much of anything other than, perhaps, a few minds, I do think that there is hope for a lot of people to work together in many different ways to check and to reverse the situation that we do face today. Who’s working on it now? Well, there are lots of organizations that are working on trying to reform or ameliorate their way out of the problem (the ACLU; November Coalition; DRCNet; et al.); far fewer that are opposing it root-and-branch (CopWatch and related anarchist efforts are about it, as far as I know). That’s too bad, but it’s not a reason for hopelessness; it’s a reason to start talking about the root-and-branch stuff, because nobody’s going to act on that kind of analysis unless some people start making it. And if people are going to start making that kind of analysis, then somebody is going to have to teach them to, preferably by example. It certainly won’t come from Ron Paul; and I doubt it will come from any elected politician whatever. (But what successful social struggle ever came about from an elected politician? I don’t worry about a lack of electoral success because I prefer strategies that don’t depend on electoral processes.)
That said, even if I believed that, politically, there is no hope, I might think that’s a reason to stop being an activist; but I wouldn’t think that’s a reason to stop being a writer. And as a writer, I think that one of the most important things to do is to tell the truth — however small may be the Remnant who hears it.
I feel that there is a fascistic element, for example, in the Rolling Stones . . .
— Morton Feldman
I've studied the phenomenon of neo-provincialism in self-isolating online communities but this place takes the fucking cake.
— Clashy
Flex, you might be interested in the first. It's from (pre-anarchism?) Roderick Long and discusses a polycentric law system but in the context of a national government. Reading that, some thoughts occurred. You might even be able to build a broader modular system out of that, e.g. allowing people to opt out of certain taxes as long as they agree to surrender a right to certain services--that would satisfy the statist anti-welfare crowd, wouldn't it? There are plenty of rich people who are liberal in outlook and willing to pay taxes for the greater good of welfare for instance so I don't think welfare funding would be an issue, especially if there's a tit-for-tat renunciation of national services. Certainly variations in the design of the state have not been exhausted, so just from a model-building angle you could probably come up with some interesting schemes that satisfy individual liberty to a greater extent than current systems. Of course I oppose all states, but some are more tolerable than others! When I was a kid I would think up different governmental structures as a thought experiment to try and understand why things shake out like they do. I'm probably one of a very few people who liked to write constitutions as a kid. I also thought dinosaurs were cool, though, so I guess it all evens out.
I feel that there is a fascistic element, for example, in the Rolling Stones . . .
— Morton Feldman
I've studied the phenomenon of neo-provincialism in self-isolating online communities but this place takes the fucking cake.
— Clashy
http://praxeology.net/Spooner-Krakow.doc
This is superb. Manages to summarize Spooner and provide an argument for natural law at the same time. Kind of shifts the argument to first principles--if you dispute it, you're arguing for an altogether different conception of justice. Interesting.
I feel that there is a fascistic element, for example, in the Rolling Stones . . .
— Morton Feldman
I've studied the phenomenon of neo-provincialism in self-isolating online communities but this place takes the fucking cake.
— Clashy