> With that said, I think there are legitimate criticisms about the car club. For one, they absolutely trash the place every Sunday. When I walk down to the lake on Monday, there’s just tons of trash on the ground. I don’t know who picks it up but it’s certainly not the car club. Also, doing burnouts and donuts on public streets sounds fun but it leaves the road covered in tire rubber and I imagine it smells awful while they’re doing it.
Sounds to me like those legitimate criticisms are exactly what the "insane Weaver residents" are complaining about. That and the violation of noise ordinances in a residential area, for half the weekend, every single week.
People move around in America. Both within cities and across cities. I don't see why people shouldn't be allowed to complain about laws being broken, just because they are new to a neighborhood. If the city decides that certain neighborhoods are exempt from certain laws, they are certainly welcome to make that official. And make it very clear to prospective tenants that the "normal laws" do not apply in those neighborhoods. Alternatively, there are also plenty of non-residential areas where people can gather, play ear-piercing music, trash the place, and have all the fun they want.
I don't understand why having laws, enforcing them, and residents requesting for their enforcement, is somehow a bad thing. Much less a matter of racial debate. Selective and subjective enforcement of rules are generally harmful to people of color - we need more consistently enforced laws, not less.
“The law” is decided by the most powerful people in society. Why do you think weed dealers have done 20 years in jail while Purdue Pharmaceuticals executives paid a $3 million fine for killing 500,000 people and counting? It’s not the weed dealers writing that law.
"Sounds to me like those legitimate criticisms are exactly what the "insane Weaver residents" are complaining about."
Really, the white dude who complained to the cops to do something about the black and latino car club because they are "scary" is just genuinely concerned about law and order and the imperative that all minor violations of local codes must always be enforced?
Color me skeptical.
Calling the cops on scary black people for minor infractions of ticky-tack laws is how Eric Garner and many others have ended up killed at the hands of law enforcement.
Calling the cops for a sustained and recurrent noise, environmental and traffic disturbance that means you can't reasonably enjoy your home or its immediate environment at the weekend... Seems fair, not racist or even bizarrely NIMBY.
"This is a tradition" isn't good enough. It has to remain a tradition that people want in their back yards. If they don't, find somewhere else to do your noisy car things.
Clearly the police here disagree, and feel that anyone can be as disruptive as they like.
The article literally has people saying they complained to the police because the black and brown men are "scary"
And here you are claiming there's NOTHING AT ALL wrong with that.
Sure let's just ignore decades of selective enforcement of law to discriminate against black and brown people, I guess "racism is over" because it makes you uncomfortable
That's not even an honest reading of the text. It does not report that a white person says brown people are scary, it says they complained about a "celebration".
Leave your baggage at the door. These things are objectively noisy, objectively disruptive and leave a whole heap of very real mess in their wake. Those are my problems, skin colour is yours.
Talk about a strawman. Are there some people who might have complained for dumb reasons? Sure. Are there more people would would have complained because they don't want their residential neighborhood to:
- be filled with thrash
- smell like burning rubber
- violate noise ordinances
every single Sunday? Yes. Most middle-aged people do not want to live in such an environment, and neither do I. This is exactly why residential zoning laws exist, and most people support some form of restrictions in residential neighborhoods. Not sure what there is to be skeptical about.
...YOU are the one who claimed everyone that was complaining had a legitimate complaint about law and order and enforcement of local codes.
I mean it's literally in the first few paragraphs of the piece that some dude thought the black and brown guys at the car club were "scary" so he reported them.
"Are there some people who might have complained for dumb reasons?"
"dumb reasons"?
I think the term you should be looking for is "bigoted" reasons.
> ...YOU are the one who claimed everyone that was complaining had a legitimate complaint about law and order and enforcement of local codes.
Read again. I never claimed that 100% of complainers had legitimate motivations or complaints. And YOU responded by cherry-picking a single person who had dumb motivations, and acting as though he is representative of everyone else, and the point I am making. This is the definition of a cherry-picking and a strawman.
In all of America there are actual laws against littering, noise and pollution and wherever I move I expect them to be enforced.
Also I wonder if these lawbreakers were respectful of the culture that existed prior to them arriving? I doubt it and with that I will conclude that they probably don't deserve the same respect. It's a free country you know? If they don't like it they can move somewhere else (and probably disrupt wherever they move to).
I've been on the receiving end of car heads moving into my neighborhood. I ended up having to move out. What goes around, comes around I guess.
I did. I also told the cops and other regulators numerous times. Unfortunately it's hard to catch someone running a professional mechanics garage out of their house. You have to setup 24/7 audio/video surveillance with expensive equipment to measure decibels, review it daily and eventually bring them to court (and win). Furthermore, even if you do get the laws enforced, you still have to put up with them doing legal things like running machinery in their garage every day up until 10pm (in that town) while they work on "their own/family" vehicles which would still be annoying.
If a bunch of people like me moved into town and started complaining, we probably could have gotten rid of those lowly pests that moved next door to me.
Since that wasn't happening anytime soon, I figured the next best thing is to just use some of my high income to move to a place where these kinds of lower class people can't afford to live and that's exactly what I did. I saved plenty of money living in a lower class neighborhood for a long time and the market conditions were totally right for a move so in the end, I actually won.
We supposedly live in a democracy, but the ability to affect what laws exist is not distributed equally. Sometimes there are two groups with opposing views of what the law should be, and the smaller group loses out. Oftentimes those people gather together in a place and have the local law enforcement disregard the law in their area. For example, pot is legal in Colorado even though it's illegal in the United States as a whole. Similarly, the residents of this neighborhood don't want the noise ordinance to be enforced, and they have been just fine with the way things have been going for decades. The newcomers can certainly appeal to the city that the law is being broken, but in doing so they are exercising political power to undermine the will of their neighbors, who spent time and energy to build a community they would be happy to live in. Having the law on their side doesn't make it a nice thing to do.
> the residents of this neighborhood don't want the noise ordinance to be enforced, and they have been just fine with the way things have been going for decades
Or maybe the silent majority of the old residents actually agree with the new people, except they already got tired of trying to enforce those rules, being ignored? That's just as likely in my opinion.
So many people, the majority even, have spent an extended period pleading with authorities on this issue with no media attention and now merely several residents of one apartment building make the same pleas. These don't seem equally likely. Or should we be interpreting your view through the lens of the "silent majority" euphemism?
> the residents of this neighborhood don't want the noise ordinance to be enforced
I think that sort of local override is something that needs to be tested on frequent intervals. Communities change. They get older, they have kids, whatever, situations change. It's not enough to say that "this is the way we've done things since 1582". It's the people today that matter.
Clearly laws are there in case they need to be enforced. Lot of laws are there "in case". However in this case the community seems okay with it for a couple decades. Clearly these new people come in and think they run the neighborhood but neither the cops nor the city sees the need to enforce "the law" if it's only disruptive to a couple of gentrifiers moving in trying to continue the tradition of white imperialism to subdue local culture.
Sounds to me like those legitimate criticisms are exactly what the "insane Weaver residents" are complaining about. That and the violation of noise ordinances in a residential area, for half the weekend, every single week.
People move around in America. Both within cities and across cities. I don't see why people shouldn't be allowed to complain about laws being broken, just because they are new to a neighborhood. If the city decides that certain neighborhoods are exempt from certain laws, they are certainly welcome to make that official. And make it very clear to prospective tenants that the "normal laws" do not apply in those neighborhoods. Alternatively, there are also plenty of non-residential areas where people can gather, play ear-piercing music, trash the place, and have all the fun they want.
I don't understand why having laws, enforcing them, and residents requesting for their enforcement, is somehow a bad thing. Much less a matter of racial debate. Selective and subjective enforcement of rules are generally harmful to people of color - we need more consistently enforced laws, not less.