A standoff with no one

On the same day the "baby bottle" charge gets tossed, WPD makes another avoidable mess

What is up! This post took so long to get together. Multiple 2 a.m. nights this week, poring through footage, records, scanner audio. Digging digging digging like a little mole. I am stoked to share it.

First, a little amuse-bouche from our neighbor to the east: "Video showing Shrewsbury officer stepping on, shooting injured goose prompts explanation from police"

You can't make this stuff up man...

The goose was then shot twice by the Shrewsbury officer, however, the shots were not fatal and the animal continued moving around.

“At this point the officer on scene made the decision to try to avoid shooting the bird again,” Shrewsbury Police said. “This decision was made to attempt to prevent any possible injuries, and to attempt to prevent the bird’s blood from being splattered, which would have increased exposure risks to officers, bystanders and other wildlife. The officer then attempted a cervical dislocation of the goose’s neck by stepping on it, a tactic that was unsuccessful.”

Hall of fame cop speak right there in that last sentence.

Boston 25 seems to have the only copy and they heavily edited it to take out parts they called “graphic” (read: embarrassing for police). It's gotta be floating around somewhere. If you have it, can you please send it to billshaner at substack dot com? Totally anonymous! I would never share the source of such gold.

Anyway. A cop struggling to kill an injured goose, claiming the bizarre scene served the public’s safety in any way, is, by luck of timing, a great metaphor for this whole post. A statement of theme.

Let’s get to it.

Weekly Index

Bill Coleman, longtime Worcester activist and frequent mayoral candidate who once made a big mosaic mural of the city seal, died Sunday. He was 70 years old. ⩫ Officials are considering a 500-foot buffer around businesses that sell tobacco. Philly Pretzel Company, which specializes in soft pretzels sopped in trans-fat-laden butter product, will open a Worcester location with no buffer. ⩫ On Monday, angry residents complained about the weeds and dead fish at Indian Lake. Others complained of herbicide-related skin conditions, stomach problems, and ear infections. A fertilizer ban went undiscussed despite the lake being completely surrounded by residentially zoned and heavily landscaped property on steep hillsides sloping directly toward the lake. ⩫ The Ecotarium celebrated 200 years in the field trip business. ⩫ A lawsuit filed against Holy Cross by a bitter donor over the naming of a building was dismissed in court. ⩫ The Greater Worcester Community Foundation received a $1.3 million private donation for disability-related projects. ⩫ Conspiracy theories about “a strange low-flying plane in the sky” swirl in the hinterlands north and west of Worcester despite the easy explanation: geological survey. ⩫ Local charges against the woman ICE abducted on Eureka Street—the pretext for ICE’s labeling her a “violent criminal illegal alien”—were quietly dropped, as was the felony assault charge filed against Ashley Spring, an activist who stood up for her and her family. Related assault charges filed against City Councilor Etel Haxhiaj moved along. In September, the court will hear a motion to dismiss. ⩫ Worcester Public Schools rolled out new electric school buses. ⩫West Nile virus detected in a city mosquito. The five-foot lizard on the lam from Webster was spotted in Thompson, Connecticut. ⩫ The Worcester Regional Research Bureau won an award. ⩫ Planned Parenthood’s Worcester campus received $2 million from the state to cover services amid Trump cuts. ⩫ Congressman Jim McGovern met with Mahmoud Khalil. ⩫ The price of a home in Worcester increased 6.6 percent over the past year.

I started a new section dedicated to guest pieces called “Guest Pieces”! So they’re not buried in these weekly newsletter posts. The section is web-only so I’m not spamming inboxes. From here on, I plan to link/run them at least partially in my weekly email, depending on space, but throw them up online first. There are two up and they’re both great. I’d excerpt if this post wasn’t overly long already (it’s worth it trust me).

On Friday, John Edward Keough wrote about Ozzy and his childhood and hypocritical televangelists! “I’ve Listened To Preachers, I’ve Listened To Fools”

Just this morning, I put up some election analysis from my Election Squad co-organizer Gillian Ganesan. “Four Precincts Control The Entire City”

Both of em did a great job and they both got paid so if you could pay me that would be great! Worcester Sucks Runs on that sweet sweet one Dunkies a month from several hundred of you! It’s just one Dunkies a month! For little old community journalism!

Venmo a tip / Paypal a Tip / Merch Store / Bandcamp

Don’t forget to come out Thursday night! Steel & Wire 7 p.m.

Gunna be great!

OK now to the writing and reporting you pay me for. There’s a lot of it this week.

WPD knew it was water in that baby bottle and they lied

Both Etel Haxhiaj and Ashley Spring had court dates on charges the WPD filed against them after Eureka Street. Both for “interfering” with WPD and “assaulting” officers. All of the charges filed against both of them become absurd in varying ways under even mild scrutiny. They fall apart as fast as the argument that WPD didn’t assist ICE that day. It’s just so plainly obvious they did. There’s nothing the police state can do about the naked truth of that situation, laid as it is in such an obviously bare state. And yet, with these charges, they’ve set themselves up for months upon months of further hole-digging. Not that they care. Check this out.

The charges against Etel, coming as they did some three weeks after the fact, were obviously political in nature. The charges against Spring perhaps weren’t so nakedly acts of narrative control—at first. They were filed the same day that ICE carted away a mother in front of her daughters for no reason save pressure to fill a quota. But after Wednesday, it’s downright irrefutable they were trumped-up, ridiculous charges maliciously leveled to make a crowd of well-meaning community members look like a violent mob. We’ll get to that in a bit.

Haxhiaj Arraignment

Dozens of supporters waited outside the courthouse as Etel was arraigned in one courtroom and then Spring appeared a few hours later for a “pre-trial conference” in another. Etel’s arraignment was stock standard, a brief formality as they always are. There’s a pretrial date set for September 15, and Etel’s attorney filed a motion to dismiss the charges, which a judge will rule on then.

Representing the state was not a member of DA Joe Early’s team but an outside prosecutor. Because it’s the WPD pressing the charges, and the WPD and Worcester County DA are so corruptly interlinked, it’s generally considered good form to bring in an outside attorney to lead such a case. For both Haxhiaj and Spring, that “special prosecutor” is Steven Gagne, the first assistant district attorney in the northwestern office of Hampshire County—way out there in the sticks, far away from the pressures a guy like patrolman’s union president Thomas Duffy can exert on a local ADA.

After, Etel and her family and a dozen or so supporters waved away a peppering and frankly extremely rude Telegram reporter in Toni Caushi as they made the long trek from the second third-floor courtroom out to the front of the courthouse, where dozens more greeted her with cheers. They were trailed by Jay Givan, the guy who definitely doesn’t run the Red Metro Worcester crank account and wasn’t lurking in the corner alone with a silly grin on his face. And Fred Nathan of course, who was “there to see the proceedings,” he told me. Joke’s on me, though. So was I.

Haxhiaj made a brief statement, her sons behind her, Luke especially looking like a badass in a leather duster. Like he’s security for Malcolm X or something. He told me he thrifted it recently and couldn’t not wear it to court. It is heartening to know Haxhiaj’s instincts have been passed down. Anywho.

Haxhiaj said:

“The overwhelming number of Worcester residents and Americans across the country are opposed to armed, masked men snatching our people off our streets and neighborhoods, terrifying mothers, children, fathers, families, and whole communities.

And while it is disappointing and disheartening to invest time, effort, and resources fighting these charges, it is absolutely nothing compared to Worcester families living in fear of being torn apart.”

I caught Caushi walking away without stopping to listen. After being such a jerk about it inside. Crazy. Whatever. The local outlets the next day led with choice adjectives like “defiant,” making Haxhiaj look all the more righteous. Duffy’s grand political ploy going exactly the opposite of how he wanted.

The question remains: What was Duffy thinking when he forced these obviously political charges into being? It’s like he’s working for Haxhiaj at this point.

Spring Hearing

After the statement, I schlepped back up the stairs to catch Spring’s hearing. I had to suffer with the rest of the unlucky souls in the pews, there on the wrong side of the class-war fence from the judge and the state attorneys and the public defenders they abuse and ridicule. All of us tapping our feet and fidgeting impatiently, waiting for our number to be called. We watched in stifling enforced silence, straining to hear an unmic’d and unbothered judge. A double set of security doors latched loudly at random intervals, a frightening sonic contrast to the lull of the proceedings. I considered idly whether it was a purposeful decision to buy the loudest doors possible. The most agonizing Zoom calls you could imagine, a legacy of the pandemic that hit jails worse than almost anywhere, took place on a haphazardly-placed flat screen TV.

An ADA in Early’s office tried to deny a motion to dismiss against a man with mental health issues who was charged with assaulting a police officer—same as Etel and Spring—during an involuntary sectioning. The judge found the motion overly cruel and ruled against the ADA, who went back to the bullpen, defeated, his colleagues watching him fail to maximize cruelty on desperate people. When they were called to the bench, they gave their go at it. Almost 10 minutes were spent making sure an elderly man, who showed up to court in a dirty T-shirt and gym shorts and sneakers well past their reasonably useable life—who limped to the podium, one ankle noticeably and worryingly swollen—got due legal representation to argue his innocence in the case the state was preparing against him. The alleged crime: one single trespassing charge.

As a beat reporter, I used to sit in court like that once a week or so. It took a while to understand what the place really is, and it took even longer than that—a decade, really—to publicly and confidently make a statement like the following: The district courtroom on any given day in any given city in America is the principal engine which the largest carceral state in world history drives itself to oblivion. It is where the most nihilistic strivers of the middle class are most wantonly sicced on the poor. It is wicked and rotten and violent in a way that’s worse than the cops. The cops aren’t the beast so much as the feeders of the beast, too dumb to do anything but drag the meat into the cave. The courts are the beast. The cops come daily with fresh sacrifices. An exchange, they understand, for not being eaten themselves.

Finally, Spring’s name was called. Steven Gagne re-entered the scene. He’d be trying this case too. To the surprise of Ashley’s attorney and, it appeared, the judge at the bench, Gagne motioned to dismiss the one felony count Spring faced: assault with a dangerous weapon. (A baby bottle full of water, you may remember.)

“Due to the discovery in this case, I don’t believe there’s sufficient evidence to sustain the element of a dangerous weapon,” said Gagne.

“By all accounts, what appears to have been sprayed or splashed upon the main victim was water. I don’t believe I could prove that charge. I don’t think it would be proper to keep it open.”

The judge asked Spring’s lawyer, Carl Williams, if he agreed to the dropped charge. Williams said yeah duh in lawyerly fashion, adding, “I’ll just say for the record it was water from a baby’s bottle.” The motion to dismiss was allowed. Spring’s case was reduced from a felony, leaving the three stock standard misdemeanors deployed against activists all the time and almost always dropped.

In a terse police report submitted to the DA, WPD Officer Tayler Boucher wrote that officers “observed Ashley directly point at and spray an unknown liquid in a bottle at officers that were on duty attempting to conduct their job.”

I pulled the body camera footage. The city has quietly uploaded hours more of it to their YouTube page. There are about 20 different angles up now. In Officer Vega’s footage, you see Officer Juan Vallejo point his finger in Spring’s face, and say “disturbing disorderly.” Cop-speak for “the package”: A&B on police, disorderly conduct, and interfering with police—all low-level charges they file on any and everyone at will. Charges that are then used by assistant district attorneys to coerce the plea deals necessary for the courts to function. If every case went to trial, the courts would spin out under the weight of the low-level drug, morality, and “quality of life” arrests brought in by the police on a routine basis. So they almost never do. But the county jail gets filled to the brim and the bail payments keep coming. Lots of people have busy work to complete until retirement.

In the video, Vallejo then says, unambiguously, “She just sprayed me in the face with water.” I’ve seen footage from other angles that call into question the validity of “sprayed.” Spring had a baby bottle in her hand. She rushed to the aid of a young girl the cops had thrown to the ground. Some of the water got on the officer. For the record, the charges against that girl were quickly dropped, and, just recently, so were the charges against the mother whom ICE took away that day. Just this week, the court found that Rosane Ferreira-De Oliveira wasn’t actually the “violent criminal illegal alien” that ICE said she was. Not that it matters now.

In the footage, we see Officer Vega pick up the bottle, after Vallejo said it was water. He unscrewed it, sniffed it, put it back down. He knew it was water. There is no way he didn’t. They all knew it was water.

In Massachusetts, there are fairly clear standards a prosecutor needs to meet for “dangerous weapon” to stick, especially vis-à-vis a non-weapon like the classic “shod foot” or the admittedly new “baby bottle water.” Such an item needs to be “used in a way that it reasonably appears to be capable of causing serious injury or death to another person.” The advisory from the state’s website I’m quoting uses the example of a brick thrown at a head, or a pillow used to smother. Gagne, perhaps more concerned with his conviction rate than the ego of the WPD, saw that it was impossible to meet that standard. Or maybe just the thought of making the argument, in front of god and everyone, was too embarrassing to consider. A matter of basic self-respect.

Not the case for the good folks down at the WPD!

Consider: Assault and battery on its own is almost always a misdemeanor, even against a municipal employee like a cop. The “dangerous weapon” element makes it a felony. While a baby bottle full of water isn’t a dangerous weapon, an unknown liquid could be. There’s some case law there. So the cops decided to lie in a police report in order to insert a felony charge into a narrative that needed one.

The officer who was splashed with a bit of water turned around and said what happened. That’s on video. He did not say “she sprayed me with a liquid that could be anything even like anthrax or whatever. This is a liquid unknown to me and I am in peril.” He said water. He was pissed, but he wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t hurt.

The police report written later that day repeats at least four times the phrase “spray an unknown liquid.” It never once mentions water, or the fact that an officer knew it was water.

That is a lie. That is lying. The WPD objectively lied in a police report. That lie allowed for a felony charge as opposed to a misdemeanor. That decision to lie, made by a WPD officer, cost Spring her job with the Worcester Public Schools. It is, by the way, illegal to lie in a police report, but who’s going to arrest a cop for something cops do on a daily basis?

Outside the courtroom after the hearing, Spring was overcome with emotion.

“The charge of the felony has impacted my life in an extremely negative way,” they said through tears.

A traveling nurse with the Worcester Public Schools, Spring couldn’t reapply for her job because of district rules barring those with felonies on their record from work. “As a single parent, solo parent, that's two children, it’s the only job that I can actually work, as a disability specialist.” The job, they said, had the sort of “mother’s hours” schedule that’s hard to come by. Whether dropping the charge impacts Spring’s employment status remains unknown, the difference between “charge” and “conviction” being murky in employment matters.

There’s a mutual aid request circling local social media.

Here’s a link to the Venmo to make it easy for ya. Anything you can send Spring’s way would be great!

Spring also talked about how they’re grateful for their community. “I’m very thankful to be surrounded by the community who loves and cares for me deeply, as you can see, the people have shown up today to show their support for me. So I feel supported in that respect, but it’s also a very difficult situation to be in, and I’m feeling targeted.”

Back to the video and we see Officer Vega have a very telling conversation with School Committee Member Sue Mailman immediately after the fact.

Vega: Stay back. Right there.

Sue: Is there a warrant?

Vega: I... I saw the warrant

Sue: “I saw the warrant.” You saw the warrant?

Vega: I didn’t see the warrant. I’m a Worcester cop, I’m here for the disorderly.

Sue: Yeah, I know. You’re supposed to be helping our citizens, not ICE.

Vega: We are.

You see here that he also lies, just like the lieutenant who wrote the report. He does so carelessly, several times, directly to the face of an elected official. Behind him there’s a 16-year-old Worcester girl on the ground in handcuffs, about to be hit with charges that will be dropped a week or so later.

Sue: So maybe you can talk to ICE...

Vega: You can call ICE, find out what’s going on.

Some other footage of note...

Officer Mangra—by accident, it seems—full-on bodychecks one sister while she’s holding her child, on his way to intentionally do the same to her sister.

I forget this next officer’s name, but he was the ranking guy on the scene. He spoke to reporters after the fact. In that conversation, he assured me they didn’t collude or collaborate with ICE. In this video, all that is called to question...

Seems pretty collaborative! And then, classic:

Stuff like this makes it exceedingly obvious which side the police are on. You’d have to be willfully naive to believe otherwise, and extremely cynical to make a public claim to the effect. That means the mayor, the city manager, and most of the city council are somewhere between naive and cynical. Regardless, they are also, like the police, on ICE’s side. Let’s not mince words about that.

For no reason other than controlling an ego-harming narrative, the cops lied in order to hit Spring with a felony charge. The charge was so flimsy that the outside special prosecutor dropped it voluntarily as soon as he could. But by then, the damage was already done. Cruelty not just for the sake of it, but out of some perverse need to manufacture victimhood—a round of the “oppression olympics” these guys will happily accuse the “snowflakes” of engaging in.

This clip of a white lady thanking them becomes interesting.

“We need it where we can get it.” Babies.

The assault charge filed against Etel is just as flimsy. Though the DA didn’t drop it on Wednesday, it’s hard to see how he wouldn’t come to the same conclusion. And, because the charges against Etel were filed so late, some three weeks after the fact, her case isn’t as far along as Spring’s. On Wednesday, Spring was there for a pretrial conference, having already been arraigned weeks ago. Etel’s pretrial conference is set for September 15. What will happen to the police’s ego then, if, on that day, this outside DA makes the same decision he made in Spring’s case? Could shake out that he says, “This charge is too ridiculously flimsy for me even to try.”

They’ve already dropped one of the two assault cases, mind you. The one they’re going forward with is the thinner of the two, in my opinion. But I’ve gone on long enough. We’ll save that for another time. Perhaps in the week leading up to the motion to dismiss.

On to part two of this story.

A standoff with no one

On the same day, a few hours later, a spurious 911 call led the WPD to engage in a three-hour “standoff” (as it was reported) on West Boylston Street. The cops shut down half the city, and the mass engagement of the post-9/11 on-call domestic occupation army made for a climate of fear. As helicopters swirled overhead, the Worcester Police brought out their IDF-style tactical helmets, their long guns, their riot shields, their command center mobile trailers, their drones.

They barged into a triple-decker ready for combat and left disappointed. There wasn’t anyone there to fight because there wasn’t anyone there at all. They had a “standoff” with no one.

At 3:22 p.m., a video from the Telegram’s Craig Semon shows them going into a triple-decker next to Gallagher’s Pub. At 3:28 p.m., another video shows them leaving. Their shields and guns now at their sides, they casually stroll out, as if they didn’t just senselessly shut down a main artery of the city for a public safety threat they all knew wasn’t real. It was, however, a pretext to bring out the toys.

Like this gun in the bottom left over here...

Looks to me, after some light perusing of the Gun Guy Internet, to be a “Law Enforcement M4 UTAW (Urban Tactical Assault Weapon)” manufactured by the U.S. Arms Company. In the marketing copy, the company writes...

Our standard and short barrel M4’s for law enforcement are designed for dependability and accuracy, ensuring the safety of law enforcement personnel when they need it most.

Starting at just $1,500 if you buy now! Of course that’s before vertical foregrip and digital dot sight modifications, coming at extra cost to the anonymous taxpayer.

Look at all this kit lined up in front of the bar with nowhere to go...

Those helmets? $900 a pop at Galls—a company I’d never heard of before. It’s just REI for cops?

Listen, I’m a musician and a red-blooded American man, so I fully understand the allure of “gear” and going out of your way to use said toys, simply because you have them. I have found a way to do that without shutting down multiple four-lane highways. I think these guys should too.

A spokesperson later told reporters, “The possible threat was not connected to the area,” a line designed to mean as little as possible. Every single outlet dutifully reported it and didn’t look any further. The “incident” was “over.”

A review of the police scanner tape tells a more complete story. The police had so many opportunities to call off a situation they knew was bullshit hours ahead of time.

Quick aside: Assembling this scanner timeline took a lot of time to do haha please clap…

Venmo a tip / Paypal a Tip / Merch Store / Bandcamp

No one else, as is manifestly obvious in the other outlets’ coverage of the event, is going to dig like this. Time constraints or fealty prevents them. Thank you!

12:45 p.m. — The first call came in. The dispatcher reported a caller on the line who said there was a person with a gun at the West Boylston Street location. The caller told the dispatcher the guy who lives on the second floor had a bunch of guns and a bomb. Cops quickly rerouted to the scene.

12:48 — Another update from the dispatcher. The caller is on the line, she said, and she’s trying to get more information. “OK, we need something,” an officer said. Dispatcher: “We’re trying as hard as we can, Sarge.” Officers began to “stage” across the street, in front of a tae kwon do gym.

12:50 — Dispatcher: “Only update that we have is the male is in apartment two. Guns are on the floor. Rifles are in a case. Pipe bomb is in a blue and black backpack. And the caller is saying that he was seeing all of this over FaceTime.”

12:51 — Police radioed out to close the stretch of West Boylston Street to traffic. A minute or two later, after they set in motion a major road closure, one officer asked for the first time whether there was any sort of threat made. The dispatcher said the caller “just said he was showing him all the guns and bombs and weapons.”

Minutes later, an officer asked if the caller on the line had a phone number for the guy in the apartment.

Dispatcher: “The male is now saying that they weren’t contacting over FaceTime. They were contacting each other over Snapchat video.”

Once the story changes from FaceTime to Snapchat, the credibility of this caller is thrown into serious question. But no one involved stops to ask. They go on treating the threat seriously, or at least pretending to. They close down more roads, eventually to the highway. The first officer to respond to this new bit of information about it being a Snapchat—meaning it could have been a video from years ago—completely glosses over it.

“OK, but does he have a phone number for the person?”

When she says no, he asks the dispatcher to look it up in the “Master Card,” a system the police apparently have that tabulates all sorts of data about citizens. She pulls up a call made by the suspect’s mother in 2021 and reads the phone number into the record.

1:00 — Several officers monitored the second floor, looking for signs of a person inside.

Officer 1: “I did see some movement on the second floor.”

He stopped short of saying what was moving. Just a “shape.”

Officer 2: “That second-floor window is open, and the wind is blowing the curtain.”

A good stormtrooper bit if there are any writers for the Star Wars franchise reading this. Feel free to steal.

All the while, other officers from around the city are reporting in “community engagements,” the police’s new euphemism for hassling and shuffling along unhoused people. These patrols are synthesized into data the police chief then reports to the council as “community policing” initiatives and the council goes awwww that’s nice great work.

1:12 — Officers run the first- and third-floor apartments through the Master Card system (apparently there’s an address search feature) instead of just knocking on the door.

1:14 — They shut down the 190 on-ramp.

After shutting off access to the highway, one officer finally asks how recent these Snapchat videos are.

Officer: “How recent were those Snapchat videos? Do we know?”

Dispatcher: “I do not know that right now.”

The officer asks her to check. “That just might be an important piece of info for later on.”

1:28 — WPD called in the state police to help shut down more of the highway. They spent the next hour shutting down traffic as much as they could while moving their “command post” to Crown Bakery and its bigger, more spacious parking lot.

A few officers remained somewhere in the woods with a “nice visual” of the house. They do not report spotting anyone.

1:36 — Officers “make contact” with a woman on the third floor. They demanded she evacuate.“A female on the third floor stuck her head out. She thinks she's alone up here with her dog, and we told her to evacuate. She wasn't too receptive.”

No shit she wasn’t receptive. She’s trying to tell the cops the guy’s not even home and they won’t listen to her. They insist on ruining her nice afternoon. The officer a moment later said she’s “not very cooperative, Sergeant.” But they get her to evacuate eventually.

1:40 — WPD call in the drone team. By 1:50, they’re considering moving the staging area again, over to the bigger parking lot in front of the liquor store because Too Many Guys. “We're going to use that as a spillover for any more resources that come.”

1:52 — “Can you ask state police to shut down I-190 entirely?”

1:54 — An officer who apparently knows the suspect chimed in for the first time: “Alright, I've sent down an email with [Suspect Name], he may be walking the area, I know him,” the officer said, meaning he’s not home. Then he added “...but also may be inside the apartment.” Because he’s not going to be the one who sticks his neck out and says it’s empty for a definitive fact.

No one, not even then, called off this “standoff.”

Instead, the scanner chatter is mostly preoccupied with shutting down as much traffic as possible.

2:00 — They ran a number for a “female,” presumably the mother they referenced earlier, through a “GPS thing” and it pinged back as being in Taunton. (All sorts of questions in this one call for any ambitious civil rights lawyer. Billshaner at substack dot com.) Still, the drone operator was on his way.

Officer 1: “Greeny’s just getting to the station now. He’s going to grab the drone if you need him, I told him. Is Crown Bakery the place to meet?”

Officer 2: “Yeah, we're definitely going to need him. Bring both if he can.”

Definitely. Bring both!

A minute later, an officer reports that “we have the whole west side over here,” meaning the rest of an entire half of the city was left unguarded. Life went on. Unless you were unlucky enough to be driving on West Boylston Street.

2:20 — Another false alarm.

Officer 1: “Fifteen, there’s movement. Second floor, delta side window.” ... “There’s three windows in the middle window.” ... “Nothing visible at this time.”2:24 — State Police sent in officers, including a police dog unit. News helicopters swirled constantly. No word on the scanner about the drone operator or the obviously empty apartment that a drone would have easily been able to confirm. We do not learn if Greeny brought both or just one.

2:52 — They got themselves a SWAT team. By now, the road has been closed for almost two hours.

3:06 — The standoff is still underway. A call comes in from elsewhere on the west side: a woman who has to have the car of an upset tenant towed. She’s afraid of him and would like someone to be there in case he shows up. “OK, we’re not going to respond to that right now,” one of the commanding officers said. Too busy to help the woman.

3:21 — The SWAT team entered the building. They have rifles, riot shields, and helmets identical to the IDF in everything but color—like the rest of their tactical gear, it’s navy blue, same as their non-tactical uniforms. One guy, however, has the fatigues. Can you imagine the envy the other guys felt? A real war fighter among lowly crime fighters. On they went: one team through the back, one team through the front. Just like how they did Bin Laden.

Link

A minute later, one of the officers on Apartment Watch excitedly reported movement.

Officer 1: “I can see a light beam moving around on the second floor. Watch for the flashlight.”

Officer 2: “The SWAT team and EOD guys are on the second floor searching right now.”

3:28 — The SWAT team ambled out of the building.

Link

The scanner chatter simmered. Semon’s camera followed a pair of officers slowly walking away from the scene, a tactical shield hanging despondent in one of their hands.

3:29 — “You can have everyone start opening up the roads.”

Odds and ends

Please consider supporting this outlet!

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Gotta keep this brief. Rushing to get this out before heading out to the woods for a few days of camping with Katie. I’ll be back around on Wednesday night. See you all at Election Squad!! Steel and Wire Thursday 7 p.m.

And read those guest pieces!

John Edward Keough: “I’ve Listened To Preachers, I’ve Listened To Fools”

Gillian Ganesan: “Four Precincts Control The Entire City”

I’ll leave you with a very cool record to check out while I’m gone.

I’ve got a cop in me
You’ve got a cop in you too
You gotta find the cop in yourself

Whole record’s like that! Rips.

Ok til next time!