This San Francisco blogger on Open Salon writes of a “disturbing” police takedown of a fleeing suspect who was, judging from her account, pretty much not fleeing when they tackled him.

He was practically standing still when they tackled him. There was no shout, no order. The first cop hit him squarely from the back, another hit him from the side. They knocked him face down on the pavement, hitting his head on the neighbor’s motorcycle fender. More cops jumped on top. There was no resistance from the guy at all. Now there was a lot of hollering, which seemed to be about handcuffing the guy. It sounded like the cops were saying to each other to get the cuffs on him. There were so many of them — five cops — on the guy, I’m sure it was difficult to do even the simple task of handcuffing an immobilized, unresisting suspect. The guy must have had an even harder time breathing.

The man survived the arrest.

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A posting on propagandapress.org — whoever they are — about Lovelle Mixon, the Oakland parolee who gunned down four Oakland cops, includes a fake URL that suggests, among other things, that Mixon is the “greatest cop killer of all time” and is “getting his dick sucked by virgins” in some unspecified hereafter. Click the thumbnail for a full view. The URL is, of course, non-existent; the post explains that it was “was removed from the web for being too offensive to big.whitey.”

BART closed its investigation today into the police shooting of an unarmed passenger in the early hours of New Year’s Day without any testimony from the police officer who shot the man.

Former officer Johannes Mehserle, who resigned from the force last week without ever talking to investigators, claimed his 5th amendment rights against self-incrimination. Meanwhile, California Attorney General Jerry Brown assigned an investigator to the case.

A demonstration last week in Oakland turned violent, with 120 people arrested, several cars burned, and storefronts damaged.

Demonstrators were gathering at this hour in San Francisco for another demonstration. (The last link courtesy SFist.) Update: The SF protest was relatively peaceful, with no arrests. You can read the somewhat juvenile account by a demonstrator on Indymedia.

Local comedian Michael Weiner, who broadcasts nationally as a right-wing foamer called “Michael Savage,” is back at the well, making fun of local customs for the amusement of the auslanders. Now it’s the standard sensitivity training classes for police detectives, classes designed to teach the sherlocks about our more colorful residents. According to Weiner:

The San Francisco Police Department is forcing detectives to undergo brainwashing by a transgendered detective… I would not let myself be brainwashed by this freak.

This sad little man, who is paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to spew this shit over the radio, loves that kind of talk, because his demented listeners love it even more. All I can say is, I hope he spends some of his huge salary locally, because that’s all the benefit we’ll ever get out of the fact that he actually works here.

Previously:
Local demagogue finds new way to offend people

A very warm day in the middle of a heat wave. I spend much of the day working on my book in a borrowed room, and at the end of the afternoon I go to the Atlas Cafe in the Mission District to have a cappucino and make a few notes.

As I circle to find a parking place, which is difficult in the Mission even on a Saturday afternoon, I notice an unmarked police car with a plainclothes driver keeping an eagle eye out for something. And a couple minutes later I see three cop cars come roaring up the street. They turn the corner by the cafe.

When I reach its front door I see the cops have detained two Latino teenagers dressed in the baggy, neutral uniform of the neighborhood: white t-shirts and black shorts. There are now five cop cars for these two kids, whom I had idly noticed walking quietly along a block away when I was looking for parking.

Inside the cafe, most of the tables are occupied with people studying or working on laptops. A young woman and young man are playing guitars — mostly ragtime and songs from the 1920s. They play a few choruses and then the woman sings one of those old songs in a clear tenor voice. (Their names, I found out when I looked at the CD they had for sale, are Craig Ventresco and Meredith Axelrod, and here’s a YoutTube video of them performing at the Atlas earlier this year.)

The cops let the two kids go and the police cars drive away. Almost no one in the cafe noticed the roust taking place across the street.

After several songs, the woman’s place is taken by a young man, who plays instrumentals while the woman passes a hat. Then a couple in their thirties — the man in a straw fedora, a woman in a sundress — stand up and begin to dance the tango. The guitarists are still playing ragtime but the dancers are good enough to do the tango to ragtime anyway.