I recall an incident some years ago in Kent that discovered me on one side of a crosswalk and a Hispanic female on the other side. In between us was a police car. The cop inside was giving me the “eye,” apparently either trying to induce a “guilty” movement, or intimidate me into a quivering fear freak. I responded by “saluting” him, which cause him to look in the other direction. The cop smiled and waved at the female, and she smiled and waved back at him. That’s right, I said to myself—treat the men like criminals, and the women like they are their strumpets. The difference was that the men don’t like it, and (some) women seemingly do.
That introduction does have a point, but first let’s make clear that I’m not a great “friend” of the police, for reasons I’ve enumerated many times here. But that doesn’t mean I’m into amplifying an issue into the realm of hypocrisy. Take for instance a recent cover story by the Seattle Weekly. Now, I will credit the Weekly for thinking “outside the box,” such as the story concerning child prostitution, which disturbed many myths about the issue. However, I found the story in question exploitive from the jump. On the cover, illustrated by someone named Dominic Bugatto (who seems to have a impressive clientele), is a black cop putting his hand on a frightened, pallid-skinned girl. What was his point? To exploit the darker aspects of the human psyche for the salacious taboo subject? To excite racial frenzy over suggestions of miscegenation? To get people to actually read the article, since if it were just a white-on-white sex crime, it just wouldn’t be as interesting?
Or is something more mundane, like getting back on the female-as-perpetual-victim bandwagon? It turns out that the tale to be told is that some professor at the University of Nebraska, Samuel Walker, uncovered yet another “epidemic” of sexual mayhem befalling the female of the species. Walker is an advocate for police accountability, and to be fair his advocation covers the whole spectrum of police abuse; he was last seen being interviewed on an Omaha television news station last September, following the release of a videotape showing a blonde police woman repeatedly kicking a “suspect” in the head while a half-dozen other cops were holding him down. The "study" in question was based on an assumption, and the assumption was “confirmed” by conducting an internet search using narrowly defined terms (like police, sexual abuse, girls), and extrapolated from 20 cases that he and his assistants discovered it was determined that this almost certainly was merely the “tip of the iceberg” in regard to the totality of sexual abuse by police with females. Now, from this core sample, there seems to be a few cases involving the Explorer scouts, who are involved in some program about getting to know your local cop. It was mostly for teenage males affiliated with the Boy Scouts, but to avoid the taint of sexism, a few teenage females were allowed to participate, riding along in squad cars and helping out with the desk work. It appears that some—although the Weekly story gives the impression that it is an epidemic’s worth—of these post-puberty females were involved in ‘involuntary” flagrante with lonely cops more used to youthful citizenry hating their guts. In light of the recent “shocking” revelations of pedophilia involving “troubled” boys in the Penn State and Syracuse University cases, it is useful to point out that Walker and the Weekly only confess that if there are male victims at all of police sexual abuse, it is only of a “lesser” extent, and otherwise not even worth noting. So you can see where my cynicism is derived from.
It is also useful to point out that the "girls" involved in the cases mentioned were not "troubled” or frightened like the girl on the Weekly cover, but wannabe cops. It goes without saying that the police in question were certainly guilty of abusing their position, although not necessarily with the intent to cause physical pain or death as they are with other demographics. Why should we deny that at least some of these teenage (or young adult) females found the "power" and "authority" of the police “attractive” in more ways than one, and no doubt some police were more than obliging to take advantage of their "prestige?" Some of these teenagers were involved in the program because they wished to be cops themselves; maybe they thought if they got in good with a cop, they’d get a free pass to the academy. Who knows for sure unless we bother to even ask the questions in the first place.
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In the same issue, the Weekly printed a brief story that once more illuminated the hypocrisy of the media on the immigration issue. Instead of wasting money on the Canadian border, nab those pesky Mexicans coming through “ports of entry.” It is not specifically identified what “ports of entry” are, but if we are talking about ports where merchant ships dock, you’re not likely to find “Mexicans.” More likely you’ll find people coming from China and Southeast Asia; the problem is that nobody seems to have much “success” in catching them—mainly because no one is actually looking for them. Or talking about them. But back in 2006, when the illegal immigration issue started to heat-up again (curiously when Democrats were threatening to take control of Congress), the San Francisco Chronicle--covering a region where like the Puget Sound region has a large Asian immigrant presence—reported that there was an estimated 1.5 million illegal immigrants of Asian extraction in the country, and an AP story noted that contrary to popular belief, most of them came into the country illegally rather than "overstaying" their visas as is the popular apologist myth (besides denying their existence altogether). What happens during the rare occasions they are actually caught, hiding in shipping containers or just jumping ship? According to the AP story, they are either given "refugee" status, or simply released into the population. The ICE doesn't even bother with them. That is the dirty little secret about the immigration issue; everyone prefers to demonize "Mexicans," because they are not the "preferred" minority. Will a publication like the Weekly, which takes pride in exposing issues the mainstream media does not, expose what needs to be exposed? Probably not, because it’s more impolitic to draw offensive caricatures of Asians than it is “Mexicans.”
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