Boston, MA – When Suffolk County’s district attorney-elect Rachel Rollins takes over the prosecutor’s office in January, criminals will no longer need to worry about being held accountable for many offenses – including resisting arrest.
“It’s a recipe for disaster,” veteran Boston defense attorney, Robert Griffin, told the Boston Globe.
“The problem is the message that you’re sending,” Griffin stressed. “You’re encouraging bad behavior. You’re telling people that we’re not going to do anything about this.”
Rollins, 47, has been widely hailed – and widely criticized – for her well-publicized “Charges to be Declined” list, which she has featured on her campaign webpage.
The list of crimes that will no longer be prosecuted are:
-A stand alone resisting arrest charge, i.e. cases where a person is charged with resisting arrest and that is the only charge
-A resisting arrest charge combined with only charges that all fall under the list of charges to decline to prosecute, e.g. resisting arrest charge combined only with a trespassing charge
-Trespassing
-Shoplifting (including offenses that are essentially shoplifting but charged as larceny)
-Larceny under $250
-Disorderly conduct
-Disturbing the peace
-Receiving stolen property
-Minor driving offenses, including operating with a suspend or revoked license
-Breaking and entering — where it is into a vacant property or where it is for the purpose of sleeping or seeking refuge from the cold and there is no actual damage to property
-Wanton or malicious destruction of property
-Threats – excluding domestic violence
-Minor in possession of alcohol
-Drug possession
-Drug possession with intent to distribute.
And this being Massachusetts, you know the citizens have by limited opportunities to defend themselves when the inevitable societal breakdown happens. As long as a criminal steals under certain amount of money, he is safe. Now imagine five friends walking into a liquor store and each of the pilfer booze in the amount of $200 each. Imagine that it is several groups of five, every day for a week. That would be one business that will shut down before Sunday. Mom & Pop grocery stores? Pack of smokes in Mass is almost $10 so an individual can come and steal 25 packs every instance and not be arrested? Beers?
Go to the mall and get yourself a nice pat of $185 Nike LeBrons and just walk out of the Foot Locker knowing you more than likely will not be arrested and if you are, you won’t be prosecuted. Walk around the counter of the Cinnabon in the food court, break open the register and steal only $250? Approved!
Your imagination can do the rest.
As long as they do not touch anything Federal, it is gonna be a full Christmas coming January 2019 for the Criminal Element in Suffolk County.
The Forward has always been a progressive Jewish magazine. Usually I could forgive their progressiveness because despite it, they were good about calling out Left Wing anti-Semitism.
That was, until now.
The Forward published an article that was so woke, I thought it was going to give me an intracranial bleed trying to wrap my mind around it.
Jews are being targeted in Brooklyn, somehow that’s not anti-Semitic.
Mindel Zaetz’s husband was chased down the street last week by a group of men while he was on his way home from work, just off of Eastern Parkway, the broad thoroughfare that runs through the middle of Crown Heights, in Brooklyn.
“He came home really spooked,” said Zaetz, 29, as she was on her way home from midday shopping. “He said, ‘I’m not going out at night anymore.’ I said, ‘Finally.’”
Out of six attacks on Jews in Brooklyn in the last month and a half, three have occurred in Crown Heights. On Oct. 15, a teenager beat a Jewish man with a stick. On Nov. 19, a high school-age yeshiva student was “sucker-punched” by an assailant. On Saturday, a man was punched without provocation on his way to synagogue. The last incident came amid four attacks on Jewish people — two of them on children — that occurred on the same weekend.
Also, why have I not heard of this string of attacks on Jews in Brooklyn on CNN or MSNBC.
The attacks have triggered fears in those communities that more violence is in the offing. In Crown Heights, many residents interviewed this week, like Zaetz, have a story about an attack or a near miss that didn’t get reported to the police. Jews are being targeted, say residents of these communities, by members of non-white ethnic groups who see Jews as symbols of gentrification in their neighborhoods.
The attacks were committed by “non-white ethnic groups,” that explains the media blackout. This is nothing new of course.
The media has had shit coverage topic for more than a quarter of a century.
“It’s less of an anti-Semitic thing than they needed a target to respond to this word: gentrification,” said Mendel Turner, 28, a salesman at the Borsalino hat store on Kingston Avenue.
What? Anybody who knows anything about New York City knows about the issue of “Jewish landlords.” It is something that has gotten so bad that one politician ran for city council – as a Democrat – on a platform of:
He just believes a cabal of “greedy Jewish landlords” is conspiring, funded by money from Israel, to conduct “ethnic cleansing” of black and Latino residents from Harlem. He believes the Jewish media are covering it up.
This was one of his campaign videos:
So saying these attacks are “anti gentrification” is the local New York City equivalent to being “anti Zionist.” It means raging anti-Semitism with a progressive candy coating to justify the hatred.
The New York Police Department declined to respond to emailed questions from the Forward, and declined to make any representatives available to answer questions.
The incidents come amid reports about a 37% national rise in anti-Semitic incidents in 2017, according to FBI statistics. Yet the Jewish residents of Crown Heights say what’s happening in their neighborhoods is unrelated to the white nationalism that seems to have fueled numerous incidents of Nazi-inflected vandalism nationally. Indeed, no one who was arrested for perpetrating an anti-Semitic hate crime in New York City in the 22 months leading up to October has been associated with a far right group.
And since it can’t be blamed on Trump, nobody in New York City gives a shit.
The attacks in Crown Heights are “clearly anti-Semitic,” said the executive director of the Crown Heights Jewish Community Council, Rabbi Eli Cohen. But, he said, “if someone feels that white supremacists are feeling more empowered, how would that make a young minority kid hit a Jewish person?”
At least the Rabbi get it.
Zaetz said that she is having her elementary school-age son take the bus to school — a three-block journey he used to do by foot. When explaining her decision, Zaetz said she used the early evening winter darkness as an excuse, lest she scare him.
“I don’t feel threatened when I walked down the streets, but I know this area has changed,” said Shani, 36, who declined to give her last name. Public school children frequently yell “Heil Hitler!” into the front gate of her kids’ school, she said.
But when black children yell “Heil Hitler!” at Jewish children, that’s not anti-Semitic?
Crown Heights residents say that the attacks here are caused by local issues, and need local solutions. They say that rapid gentrification, less intensive policing and other pressures are combining to stoke animosity between Jewish and other minority communities.
Jews are pegged as the representatives of gentrification because, in many poor Brooklyn neighborhoods, they are, says Avi Leshes, a director of economic development at the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce. He pointed to hotly contested development project like one in the Broadway Triangle, in East Williamsburg, from a Hasidic-owned company.
This is nothing new. The next paragraph blew my mind.
Like, I had to pause and make my head stop spinning from reading it.
And while the attacks are targeting Jews, it may be because black people identify Judaism as “a form of almost hyper-whiteness,” according to Mark Winston Griffith, executive director of the Black Movement Center, a not-for-profit group that promotes communal organizing in the black community in Crown Heights.
Did you catch that?
it may be because black people identify Judaism as “a form of almost hyper-whiteness,” according to Mark Winston Griffith, executive director of the Black Movement Center
Fast forward to 2018, and instead of the Jews not being white, the way history has always classified them, they are “super white.”
It’s amazing just how fact Progressives can reinvent language to suit their needs to justify Jew hatred.
In that regard, Griffith said, the attacks may Be an extension of animosity toward white people in general, who drive gentrification in Brooklyn. He added that the attacks are not on the radar of people involved in social justice initiatives in Crown Heights.
That’s how you make a string of violent, anti-Semitic attacks disappear. It’s a woke magic trick.
“To the extent that people hear about it, they are probably thinking about it in the national context of anti-Semitic acts, and the larger landscape of hatred that is being painted by Donald Trump,” he said.
Blacks beating up Jews in NYC can’t be blamed on Trump so it never happened and down the memory with the news.
Leshes, Cohen and others also say that police are not as present in the neighborhood as they once were, leading to a culture of permissiveness for would-be assailants.
“We’re seeing that the police department has taken a new approach to policing that is much more hands-off,” Cohen said. “I hear from the cops that they feel that there is a little bit of a sense of lawlessness.”
The Ferguson Effect strikes again!!!
However, Jewish community leaders like Cohen are cautious about “explaining away” the anti-Semitic nature of the attacks, worrying that it could detract from the severity of the crime.
But that would require progressives to confront the issue of people of color committing hate crimes and racist acts. I’m not sure they are capable of doing that.
I believe for a Progressive that is like making a robot try and solve a paradox. Eventually it goes “does not compute” and just shuts down.
What some non-Jewish residents miss is that the issues the assailants may be responding to are things the Jewish community is struggling to deal with as well.
Imani Keith Henry, the executive director of Equality For Flatbush, a not-for-profit that organizes tenants in Brooklyn, said that while many notorious landlords in Crown Heights are Jewish, it’s important to remember that gentrification also impacts poor Jews.
Turner, the hat salesman, said that his parents are finding it increasingly difficult to pay the rent on their apartment, which is not rent-controlled or -stabilized.
“We’re thinking, okay, how are we gonna live here?” he said. “I don’t think people realize that we all have the same concern.”
For Progressives, there is no such thing as poor Jews, that’s just another paradox.
To stop the attacks, community leaders say they are hoping to see more police patrols. Many of them were meeting Tuesday with the commanding officer of the precinct that covers the southern portion of Crown Heights, said the head of governmental affairs for the Crown Heights Community Jewish Council, Chanina Sperlin.
“I always tell them, they have to put a police officer on every corner,” Sperlin said. “You have to make sure the residents are safe.”
Cohen said that he also wants to know if there is some central source of motivation for these attacks.
Yes there is, it’s the Progressive victim mentality.
This is the zenith of Woke. The Jews have money, white people have money, the Jews are super white and therefore it’s okay to hate them and hurt them and it not be anti-Semitism or bigotry.
That’s progress, going from “kill the untermensch” to “hurt the ubermensch” in a little less than a century.
I wonder how the neo-Nazis and white supremacists feel about the Jews being lumped in with them when it comes to being white and the victims of anti-White violence.
It is almost funny if it weren’t so fucking terrible.
They posted this “advice” in their Facebook page and it went downhill on nitro boosting after that. I selected some replies that go from the funny to the downright brutal. And you may need to click to enlarge.
Durham’s Human Rights Commission has recommended ceasing the longtime tradition, with members saying it is associated with the Christian faith and Christmas celebrations, which may be exclusionary to some people who follow different faiths or are atheist.
The issue came up this year because Rabbi Berel Slavaticki at the UNH & Seacoast Chabad Jewish Center asked to place a 9-foot menorah in the same public park on Main Street where the tree is lit.
Slavaticki was asked to complete an application for a permit, which was denied by Town Administrator Todd Selig because of concerns about vandalism and public safety. It was agreed that Slavaticki could host a one-time ceremony at a different public park, which took place Sunday evening, the first night of Hanukkah.
On Monday, Selig said that he has received correspondence about decorating the town’s tree over the years, but he views it as a nonreligious symbol. A menorah is a religious symbol and subject to more scrutiny, Selig said.
“The menorah raised a broader concern for me. I have a concern about the display of religious symbols on public property. We should have it for all, or none at all,” Selig said.
The menorah request and whether to have a tree on the public square at public expense were discussed at the Human Rights Commission’s Nov. 26 meeting, and that led to the panel’s recommendation.
Selig said there isn’t room on the small plot of land known as Memorial Park for symbols from every religion, so community members will have to talk further about what should be done with the tree. The Parks and Recreation Department might come up with a “winter carnival” theme instead of the traditional lighting of the Christmas tree, he said.
“I think it’s a topic we really need to be thoughtful about,” Selig said.
Kitty Marple is the chairman of the Human Rights Commission and the town council. She said she could support a winter carnival theme.
“I am a person of no religious affiliation. These things don’t bother me, but I understand how they might bother someone else,” Marple said.
Marple said the commission has not gotten a lot of feedback from residents on the issue yet.
Sally Tobias is a member of the town council and said the annual tree lighting in Durham is not a religious ceremony and is a tradition that takes place throughout the country during the darkest time of the year.
“The whole idea behind the lights is to bring light into darkness. It’s a positive thing,” Tobias said.
Tobias said she is looking forward to having an in-depth conversation on the subject. Residents in Durham are not afraid to take on tough issues and it may be time to evaluate the meaning behind the tree, she said.
The Human Rights Commission in Durham is the group that pushed for the celebration of Indigenous Peoples’ Day on Columbus Day. The town council approved that idea in September 2017.
That was the whole article.
Here is the problem with it. I don’t normally read the Union Leader, I caught this article reposted. Comment after comment that I have seen boils down to “the snowflake Jooos are destroying Christmas.”
Nobody bothered to ask Town Administrator Todd Selig why he thought that a Christmas tree wasn’t religious but a Menorah is, or why he felt that the only accommodation he felt the Rabbi deserved was one night? Or why he thought that anti-Semitic vandalism of the Menorah was an appropriate hecklers veto?
Nobody thought to ask him why he didn’t do a 5 minute Wikipedia search on this topic.
There are two SCOUTS cases and one Court of Appeals case that addresses this issue.
Lynch v. Donnelly was a 1984 SCOUTS case that decided a Christmas tree, Santa, and Nativity Scene were all permitted on city property and didn’t violate the Establishment Clause of the 1st Amendment.
County of Allegheny v. American Civil Liberties Unionwas a 1989 SCOTUS case that decided that a Christmas Tree and Menorah in front of a town hall were allowed under the 1A but a Nativity Scene in the courthouse was a violation.
American Civil Liberties Union v. Schundler was a 1999 Third Circuit Court case in which a Christmas Tree, Menorah, and Nativity Scene were challenged on 1A grounds. Jersey City kept adding more secular decorations such as a snowman and Kwanzaa menorah until the court decided that it wasn’t a violation by being super inclusive.
Allegheny v. ACLU is the most interesting of the cases because the Menorah and Nativity Scene were both challenged as being in violation and the Court decided 6-3 that the Menorah wasn’t in violation. Some arguments were that the Menorah has become a quasi-secularized symbol since Hanukkah is a minor holiday and the city doesn’t do anything for more significant holidays like Rosh Hashanah or Passover. Some argued that in front of the building wasn’t a problem but inside a courthouse was. Others argued that showing the Tree next to the Menorah next to each other showed plurality while the Nativity Scene alone was an endorsement of one religion.
Regardless, in all three cases a Christmas tree was allowed and in two cases a Menorah was allowed.
What Selig by rejecting the Menorah but keeping the tree was violating both the Third Circuit and SCOTUS. It seems like the town Human Rights Commission is going overboard for no reason established by SCOTUS.
But in not addressing any of this “the Jews killed Christmas in Durham” is the narrative that is allowed to flourish.
Thanks for that. Your lack of journalistic responsibility is noted.
I forgot to congratulate myself last month on Two Years Being Smoke Free and also Two Years Without Being Preachy Asshole Against Smoking.
If you want to know, I did the Chantix treatment and worked amazingly well. I had no side effects.
But some smoking was done last Friday:
I love that smoke ring. And I feel I am getting better results since I began to slit the skin under the ribs. Three long cuts seem to do it fine.
And if you read about my fixing of the smoker back in May, I want to let you know it is still working like a champ. I don’t know if the Cast iron pan may have something to do, but it seems that I can control the temperature better.
