How I Know ACAB

Growing up in the sixties and seventies I always wanted to let my hair grow out. But I had a dad who wore a military style flat top and insisted that his sons have buzz cuts. My parents divorced when I was 17, allowing me to grow my hair out in my Senior year in high school. Throughout college I let my hair grow even more. It being trimmed just a few times by a young lady who had visions of doing hair for rock stars. But then, during breaks at college, I was playing lead guitar in a traveling bar band.


After college I got a nice conservative businessman haircut, figuring that there was probably a lot of prejudices at corporations. As I do the type of work that is project based, I would work at a company for two to four years when the project ended. I would then find another company in need of a top notch design engineer to work on their latest innovative product. Thus I would let my hair grow out, sometimes to my shoulders, with a trim every now and then. And when the project ended, go in and get a nice conservative haircut for when I had to go and find another job.


Thus, from college until I was about 50 or so, I would let my hair grow for about two to four years, with trims, but it would still get as long as shoulder length. I would then get a nice conservative business man hair cut and repeat the cycle over again.


With this cycling of my hair length I started noticing certain patterns that seemed to correlate with the length of my hair. One being that I seemed to get more female attention, the longer my hair. But then in younger times, I did have some pretty nice hair.


I also noticed that certain men reacted badly towards me, the longer my hair. The funny ones were those who would whistle from a distance, having seen my long beautiful hair, only to start calling me a f@& when they got close. Which is funny because they were attracted to me, and not the other way around.


When I was a teenager cops would stop and question me and my friends ever so often. It even kind of became a game of police avoidance. It really didn’t dawn on me that it was my hair until odd encounters at the grocery store. At a nearby grocery store they always had a security guard who typically roamed back and forth at the front of the store. There was this one security guard, who looked to be an off duty police officer, who would follow me through the store. Once I discovered that he was, I would play games with him. I would duck behind some shelves, double back and lose him. Then circle around and come up on his backside. The surprised look on his face was quite entertaining. When the project I was working on was coming to an end, I went out and got one of those conservative businessman haircuts. The next time I saw that security guard, he said hello as I passed him on the way in and told me to have a nice day on the way out.


It wasn’t just the cops and security guards. Remember this was the early eighties. Once when my band was on the road, I think it was in Texas, could have been Arkansas. We were getting hungry and there was a road side restaurant with a great big sign advertising, BEER PIZZA ROCK AND ROLL. Being a Rock and Roll band we figured it would be the perfect place to stop. When we walked in, the place was full of hicks. Apparently none of their mothers never taught them no manners as they all the men seemed to be wearing a cowboy or baseball hat indoors. One of those ‘me and my pick-up truck’ songs was blaring out of the juke box. Just as we were about to sit at an empty table, an older middle aged women approached us and told us not to bother sitting down because, “we don’t serve your kind”.


A favorite activity of my children was when we would go out on day long bike trips. We would leave early, follow a bike route, stop somewhere, have lunch, then ride back. One day our adventure led us to a park in Arvada Colorado. A town known for its overhanded police tactics. We had ate our lunch and my children, nine and eleven at the time, had run off to play on the playground while I leaned back on the picnic table and began to read. Ever so often I looked up to see how the children were doing. This was at a time when my hair was on the long side.


As I sat there, an Arvada police officer approached me. He asked for my ID and began in on this long winded speech about how it was a family park and families wouldn’t want to come to the park if people like me were hanging out in the park. Just then my kids came running up, all happy and full of energy, going, “Daddy, Daddy”. As they reached me I told them we had to go. The officer seemed almost apologetic as he slinked away, but that was the last time I ever spent time in Arvada.


Mind you now, the entirety of my criminal record is a single speeding ticket.


It has often occurred to me that I felt a lot of prejudice and bigotry towards me as the length of my hair grew, yet all I had to do was cut my hair, and all the prejudices and bigotry would disappear. Yet I have seen the same type of behavior towards Blacks, and worse. Unfortunately, unlike me, Blacks cannot solve the problem with a simple hair cut.


Which I find quite interesting as information has been coming out that shows that both Nixon’s and Reagan’s Wars on Drugs were designed to harm Blacks and the hippies.


A lot of the bad behavior that comes from the police isn’t just a matter of training as much as it is a matter of mindset, of personality type. The experience that I have had, as my hair grew, was that of petty authorities acting in a way, as if they were scared of me. People like police officers, security guards, store managers, preachers, and the like. Yet, consistently every time a petty authority figure has jumped bad with me, it seems to have been met with the meeting of another woman to enter my life.


What I am leading to is that a lot of the bad behavior of police officers, is the behavior of testosterone fueled feelings of inadequacy. They are scared and full of unfounded prejudices and fears, with the need to control. Is that not why Eric Garner and George Floyd were killed. A group of officers having the need to absolutely control a larger man that scared them? Even this latest one in Atlanta. The officer couldn’t lose control, so he pulled out his gun and re-gained control.


I once met this woman who told me that she always wanted to go off into the wilderness but none of her friends or past boyfriends had wanted to go, and was too scared to go by herself. So we strapped on our backpacks and followed the trail deep into the Colorado wilderness. Late one night, as we sat there snuggling, listening to the critters of the night sing their songs, I told her of the recurring problem that I had with petty authority figures. About how scared police officers tended to act around me, how it make me nervous. It was at that point that I asked her, how is it, that all these big strong cops, groups of them, with all their training and everything, would be so scared of me even though I never acted in any way to threaten them. Yet here she was, a thin woman who I could easily over power and have my way with, if I so chose, yet she felt no fear at all?

 

You are free to move from your safe white suburb to the black inner city but you will not. How can we take you seriously when your actions do not match your words?

Blacks can solve the problem VERY easily. Don't dress like a thug and don't break the law. This isn't rocket science.

The parents of every murderer and rapist do not fear their child. Do you understand that to the cops YOU ARE STRANGER? Do you understand the difference between strangers and friends? The cop is betting HIS LIFE that you won't kill him. If you don't think appearance is gong to impact that wager then you don't understand the pattern recognition program that resides in mammals. Interestingly enough the ones who lacked that program went extinct. It is kind of interesting how nature selects against those who don't have the program isn't it? You need to understand what is on the line here. If you wrongly assess a threat as lethal, that is not going to harm you. If you wrongly assess a threat as benign, you will be taken out of the gene pool. I believe you understand this and that is why you live in a white suburb.

Please quit pretending the threat level of this:


Is equal to this:


It is embarrassing.

 

Both my sons grew up in the sixties and seventies. Both had long hair, even though I was in the military. They were never once stopped by the police for anything. There is an old saying. When you are having problems with everyone, it is most likely not everyone else that is causing the problem.

Nearly all the young people in our area had long hair. The police would not have had time to do anything else, if they spent all their time stopping young men with long hair.

 

That’s all fine and dandy but blacks represent less than 13% of our population and yet they’re responsible for approximately 50% of our violent crime. Do you think they should be treated the same as a group of people who are responsible for say 1% of our violent crime?

Should a black neighborhood with an absurdly high crime rate be policed with the same amount of police traffic as a white neighborhood with almost no crime? If a cop sees a group of blacks hanging around in a gang ridden neighborhood should he treat them the same as a group of whites hanging around in a neighborhood with essentially zero crime? Should a cop treat a black man in that crime-ridden neighborhood with tattoos, a doorag and an attitude the same way he treats a nice middle aged white man in a nice neighborhood?

Pretend for a moment that you’re a police chief with 10 neighborhoods to protect. 9 of them have virtual zero crime and are white neighborhoods. 1 of them is a black neighborhood FULL of crime, drugs, murder, rape, robberies, home invasions and gangs.

You have only 10 officers to do the job. Would you put one officer in each neighborhood? Or would you disproportionately send your officers into the black one?

 

In fact I’m going to start a thread about this.

 

That's odd because I grew up in that same time period in the NY Metro area (pretty densely populated) and the cops found plenty of time to pull over "hippies" like me.

Of course I was a "hippie" in only my appearance and occasional pot use. Beyond that I was pretty mainstream. And yea...I was treated as Oliver was treated and sort of like blacks are treated. I was looked at with suspicion and fear by cops...until I cut my hair and changed my dress

 

Let me see I got out of the army in '72. The first thing I did was let every hair I had grow. Funny I never had problems with the cops.
But then they never made me paranoid. The only time I was ever stopped by the cops was when I was doing something I shouldn't have. But then I always followed the advice of Clint Eastwood's character in Gran Torino. Be polite, but don't suck up.

 

Born in 1970, I wore my hair long for most of my life. 88-92 it was short while I was in the army, and then cut it a few years ago. It was long enough that I donated it to a place that makes wigs for kids with cancer. I shave my head now because barber shops are closed. I’m 6’-5” tall and around 230-240#, big enough to be intimidating but I have never had a run in with the law or experienced anything that is being complained about in this thread.

 

When rednecks fell in love with long hair in the 80s...that stigma ended. Mullets ya know...business in front...party out back...

But in the 60s and 70s it made those who wore their hair long a target of LE as Oliver noted.

Of course the mere act of cutting the air made that go away. Black folks don't have that luxury

And THAT was the point

 

I live in the heart of Portland. I have Black neighbors and there are Black cashiers at the grocery store. I run into Black people all the time. It is no big deal.


Fact of the matter is, I have more to fear from a police officer than he does from me.


Possibly what I was getting at in the OP didn’t quite come through. If you want to get down to base animal instincts, let’s go there. A basic instinct of mammals is to procreate. Yet part of that process involves males competing for females. That is why you see those scenes of rams and bucks smashing their heads against each other. Humans aren’t always so violent, but that instinct exists, none the less. It has a lot to do with why men work out and drive fancy cars.

The problem with police officers and other such petty authority figures, is that their position gives them a heightened sense of manliness. That they can essentially rule over another, is a bit like being the bigger buck. Like having a bigger antler rack. After all he is there to lay down the law.

Yet, most police officers tend to not be the alpha males they pretend to be. For the most part, all it takes to become a police officer is to graduate from high school, not be a felon, and complete a four or five month training program. Sad to say, but the boys in blue are not our best and brightest.

Back when internet dating first became a thing I met a few women on line, talked and eventually met and dated. They were nice women, we had plenty of things in common to talk about and we got along fine. Even had sex with a couple of them. But no sparks. It was then that I realized that sexual attraction was a base animal instinct. That over my lifetime, those women who I have most enjoyed time with are those who I knew within a moment of meeting them, and it was mostly mutual, the attraction that is. And it was chemical, or whatever.

Not to say that all beat cops are sexually frustrated and acting out as such, even though that is something that Freud might of thought. After all, I have been talking about petty authority figures. Higher level authorities like police captains, executives, politicians, and rock stars never display that level of fear towards me. Quite the opposite.


If you pay attention to police at work, it becomes evident that while most are not educated, some of them are and they stand out. I’m certain they are the ones most likely to end up in command positions. In another thread I wrote about a melee that a girlfriend of mine, and I, had instigated for our entertainment, yet when the police came, an officer pulled us aside and had us sit on a little hill away from everyone else. I’ll never know why he set us aside, never even asked us for our names or ID, but there we sat as everyone else was either loaded into a paddy wagon or given a summons and sent on their way. Leaving us, just the two of us, sitting there in the cool night air.

 

Isn't Portland 80% white?

 

Once I was pulling into a store parking lot. As I had got to the head of a row of parking spaces, I noticed a car starting to pull out. I thought that I would give it plenty of space and pull in to the space. But the driver kept backing and backing, even with my horn blaring, the car continued backing catching the edge of my front bumper just behind the car’s front door, causing a scrape to continue digging in deeper, as the car continued on and only stopping once the front tire caught on my bumper. By the way I was driving a four wheel drive Ford pickup with a ram bar up front.

The driver jumped out and it was an old lady. She immediately began accusing me of running into her, even though I had been at a full stop before she even got out of her parking space and she had to back maybe three car lengths to hit me. An officer came and she cried on his shoulder and he wrote up a report that was pretty much her version of events. As it was on private property he couldn’t write me a ticket but made vague threats none the less.

A couple of weeks later I started getting letters in the mail from her and her insurance company wanting me to pay for damages to her car. I wrote a letter to her insurance company explaining the situation and even drew up a map a diagram to illustrate what had happened. I told the insurance company to look at the damage on her car. If I had rammed her, like she claimed, the damage would have been a smashed in side. But rather the damage was a scrape along the side, as my diagram showed. Never heard from her again. Although, a couple of years later I did see her driving along, her driver’s side door still ripped open.





When I was in college, it was discovered that students were having sex in the dorm rooms. There was this group of mostly older church ladies. They made a big stink, saying that since their tax dollars went to support the university that they had the right to regulate such things. Mostly they were a joke, but they seemed to get a lot of face time with he powers that be.


Perhaps the worse cop callers are old ladies. For awhile I lived in this cul-de-sac. There was this older woman who was always calling the cops. She often watched her grandchildren, as many as eight at a time, and would claim that she was just an old lady trying to keep the neighborhood safe so her grandchildren could come and visit. And her husband was one those fellows who thought working on his car meant putting up the hood and revving the engine endlessly. They probably made more noise than the rest of the cup-de-sac combined, but she was always calling the cops on others for making too much noise.

One night she called the cops on one of my neighbors claiming they were having a loud party keeping her from sleeping. From my window I could see what was going on. The thing is, in between her house and the house with the supposed loud party was my house and another. I heard no noise and neither did the people in the other house. It made me so mad I made a complaint about it to the police department and they ended up putting her on a list of some sort.



Ever in my life have I had Black people act so badly towards me as those old ladies.

 

I watched a number of people try to get in the police academy and fail. I learned a long time ago, not to judge all by a few. You should try that. The police come in contact with hundreds of thousands of civilians a day and almost all of them end with no problem except a ticket or court appearance.

Nearly all the deaths or injuries occur when they resist. You are doing is encouraging them to resist. That may not be your intent, but that is the result because you seed resentment towards the police. Also, this attitude will discourage the best and brightest. I know I would never recommend anyone to become a law enforcement officer. It is simply not worth the risk.

Think about it.

 

Portland has about the smallest black population of any large city in the US, around 6%.

But @ImNotOliver refuses to even acknowledge that simple reality, because he prefers the fantasy that his white bread whitey white city is highly diverse.

He does that, and then he accuses other posters of being deluded, and believing things that aren't true.

 

You are intelligent enough to realize that arguments from personal experience are utterly and completely invalid. People with evidence and data on their side never have to fall back on such weak argumentation. I believe you are also intelligent enough to realize that the argument from personal experience is the only argument you have for your position. What does this say about the validity of your position? What does it say about the validity of my position that I don't need to use personal experience and instead rely on the observational data and the known science?

 

Growing up in Ohio and Colorado, pretty much every Black person I knew, I knew through sports. It gave me a distorted view. I thought that Blacks tended to be muscular and in good shape. It was only after moving to Portland that I realized that most Blacks are noticeably shorter than I am and probably not all that good at sports. There are more Swedes in Portland than Blacks. Also a lot of Koreans and Chinese. China Town used to be called Japan Town, but after the government rounded up the Japanese people during WWII, the Koreans moved in and changed the name to China Town.

 

So you're really in no position to preach about the superior "diversity" of Portland to anybody in the "flyover states", now are you?

 

It isn't always our appearance that seems to attract the police to us. I'm one of those rednecks with the baseball caps and had an installation I had to put in at a Naval Air Station in Beaufort,. SC. The cops would stop me at least once or twice a week. When I was out of town I liked to have my own wheels.
Here's a picture of a 1957 Lincoln Premier that was not only a chick magnet but also a cop magnet. I thought it was just their cops but in Virginia Beach, Va they the cops there would trail me when I left the clubs. I finally sold it to fix that problem. I loved that car as much as a 1967 Ford Mustang I had.

 

I have a few in my close circle that are police. I resent your ACAB, and will gladly tell you to stuff that where the sun doesn't shine. Pretty easy to judge another profession sitting in your lofty tower. Ever give any thought to what it must be like to deal with the lowest of the low, the absolute worst mankind has to offer, daily? The things they see, daily, year after year after year? You expect them to not develop some sense of internal profiling? Nah, you're in your safe ivory tower playing armchair quarterback. Hell, the FBI has a profiling department. There's a reason for this.

I had long hair and looked pretty menacing back in my late teens and early 20's. Got harassed several times. Ya know what? I deserved it. Likely you did too. Look the look, or talk the talk, and there is a higher likelihood you're going to walk the walk. Where there's smoke there's fire. These saying didn't pop up out of thin air for no reason.

 

It was combinations of the Hispanic, I’m not even sure they all could speak Spanish, ghetto like culture that seemed to be growing in Colorado. Not all Hispanics, but the Americanized ones who often roamed with White trash. That coupled with Bill Owens and the coming of the focus on the family crowd, made Colorado unpalatable for my tastes.

As I started down the highway on my way out of Colorado, what should come on the radio but, Bob Seger singing, “get out of Denver better go / get out of Denver better go go / you look just like a commie and just might be a member better go go”.

I chose Portland, really Oregon almost entirely for environmental considerations. Oregon has perhaps the most robust growing conditions of any state. Anything and everything grows here. There are more trees than anywhere else. It is a tree huggers paradise. I settled in Portland Because that is where the money is. Where all the action is. California is a little too hot and dry and Washington is a little to cold and wet. Oregon is just right. Besides, if all the predictions pan out, Oregon will most benefit from global warming.

And have I not been saying all along that liberalism is the ideology of Northern European intellectuals and their descendants here in America.

The reason that places like Boulder, Seattle, and Portland are so liberal is because they are full of educated people of Northern European descent.

 

So places like Boulder, Seattle, and Portland are superior because of all the white people of Northern European descent who live in those cities?

Wow, that seems a bit... problematic.

Seems like the sort of sentiment that would get a person cancelled, or beat senseless by a mob, in Boulder, Seattle, and Portland.

I do appreciate your honesty though.

 

So black folks "look the look"...but CAN'T just cut their hair

Ya get it yet?

 

I’ve had a couple of mustangs in my life. Yellow Mustangs. As mom said, “you might as well put a flashing light on top that says come get me”.

I think that the police tend to force orthodoxy. I have no problem playing the part of good ole red blooded all American male. Baseball, apple pie and all that. It is when one defies the norm that they attract the police. I noticed that about bullies. Their excuse tends to be that their target was being different in some way. It is why, I think a lot get away with it. Teachers like to use them to keep the odd balls in line. The whole peer pressure thing.

 

A simple, cogent explanation that seems to be missing in all of the sensational news accounts of police brutality, don't expect a liberal to accept it, it does not fit their narrative or world view. Spot on!!!

 

Nope. Didn't happen.