Rain Pryor
Freddie Gray was just hanging out when cops made eye contact with him…
Gray has a lengthy criminal record with over 20 arrests since 2007 for selling drugs, burglary,making drugs, assaults, the list goes on. Clearly he’s a low level thug at age 25, with two arrests just weeks before an incident in March.
Gray ran when cops just looked at him. He had a concealed weapon on him, a knife. And that’s pretty much all we know thus far.
Gray was placed in the back of a police van, cuffed.
And he was reportedly injured in a wreck the week before.
Did police cause the spinal cord issues that lead to Gray’s death, or was it the wreck and ride in the back of the van?
Nobody really knows at this time.
One thing is clear, Gray was not an innocent young man on his way to work or school or anything close to any of that. Did he deserve to die or be killed? Of course not, but what actually happened remains unknown.
The result:. The worst riots seen in Baltimore since Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in 1968.
The city is shut down. People are looting and stealing and destroying cars, businesses,, attacking police and the usual list of things done in these riots. Why, to show their love for Freddie Gray?
This could happen anywhere today. Even in Kansas City.
Let’s hope not.
Baltimore has a black police Chief. It’s police force is nearly 50% African American. And almost all the violence is in the urban core where the properties are owned or operated by black people.
Comic Dustin Diamond – aka “Screech” – will bat for Rain Pryor this week at Stanford’s.
Diamond’s Baltimore appearance was cancelled.
Clearly the relations between the police and young black men in urban areas is extremely poor nationwide.
The police fear the behavior of the black men as a result of the constant violence they deal with on a daily/hourly basis. Black men are all looked at with long eyes from police who treat them harder than others. And both sides don’t like each other much to begin with, that much is clear.
Non blacks view these riots as an excuse to loot and destroy.
A build up of feelings on both sides from so many past issues that it doesn’t take much.
Stanford’s was even touched by the riots.
We had Rain Pryor, legendary comic Richard Pryor’s daughter coming this week.
Rain’s career has taken off as of late, and she’s very talented like her famous dad. We were excited to have her, however she lives in Baltimore, has a baby daughter and her husband is a police officer. So she couldn’t leave under the current conditions. Sad.
So here we have an African American president yet race relations are still very poor in our nation. Whats the answer? Time. Maybe as more young Americans have children that are a mix of white, black and brown, we’ll all be on the same page one day. But man, that’s probably 50 to 100 years from now. It’s gonna be a long wait. At a high cost.
The economic divide is just too great.
Family values and education are the bandaid but that too is an uphill battle.
truth is race relations have always been bad. From the old days when
the leawood people didn’t want blacks or jews (go ask bobby bell) to today.
If not for the cameras and video phones it would continue to go on.
As I have always said the black community has to clean up it’s own situation.
But I know the west part of Baltimore. Had 2 friends grow up.
The rape and pillage of our once great nation has left these young kids with
really no hope.
Yes…some had no adult to raise them and no supervision. Some had no
choice….but lets be real…the downfall of America was done with a pen and
a white collar theif….not with some black kid selling a dime bag of coke on
the street.
Did not hear that the youong man killed had been in an accident the week
before…
sad…very sad.
But we are going to have to figure out how to deal with this problem because
it isn’t going away!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
END THE DRUG WAR NOW!
Smoking pot and using heroin and meth will not solve any problem.
The liberal agenda is over — Baltimore proved it.
But it will increase Taco Bell traffic.
Gray *had* a lengthy criminal record …
didn’t deserve to die….saw his record….we must end this drug war for the
sake of citizens and the police!
we’ll see what happens…if they broke his back and body in the police
car…someone will have to pay.!
Baltimore police are the worst police in the nation….and from the
guy who wrote “the wire” the worst ones were the black policemen.
crazy~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Meh. Heading to Vegas to see the Mayweather/Pacquiao fight. Next.
No one cares.
You cared enough to respond. LOL!
The direction this article takes from a potentially serious look at race issues to a plug for your yuk yuk shack is a bit much, Crag.
Heh….that was a good yuk yuk for me, dudeness!
Not at all dude. It was a tie in, a fact that the riots affected even us and our club in KC does matter.
GLAZER LIVES DO MATTER. Poor poor Craig. I hope you get back on your feet
“So here we have an African American president yet race relations are still very poor in our nation.”
– having a white President never cured white collar crime anymore than having Smurf would end singing of the Blues.
“Whats the answer?”
– same as the solution pi & the cure for mankind – ‘que sera, sera, whatever will be will be, the future’s not ours to see, que sera, sera’. Only, we have seen it… status quo will endure, world without end. No answer, no devil to blame, just ‘personal responsibility’; we ask too much, apparently.
“Time. ”
– has never healed anything, it just dulls hope and pays lip service resolve… Kerouac’s old pal EM Cioran said: “What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous labor of verification.”
The universal plea of a mother her criminal progeny – ‘he was always such a good boy’. Is it racist or factual say, in general, ‘white men can’t jump’ & ‘black men can’t swim’? If white men practice jumping and blacks swimming, why not practice being a decent human being(s) in lieu thug? Problem is, too many do not want to abide, so they don’t.
The home as the public, compliance untaught is defiance bred. Ferguson to Baltimore, hood to Okie from Muskogee. Case the latter, an recent shooting by a reserve deputy (under-trained, over-coddled who admitted a surreptitious recording he does not like to take direction from others, since first grade) suggests it’s as it has always been and ever will be – ‘everyone for himself’, variously.
“Maybe as more young Americans have children that are a mix of white, black and brown, we’ll all be on the same page one day. But man, that’s probably 50 to 100 years from now. It’s gonna be a long wait. At a high cost.”
– that high cost trying to mix a Pit Bull with a Cavalier King Charles? One ends up with a mongrel: welcome to America 2015, the attempted changing the guard. This is what it looks like, looking for an exit.
Quite aptly put, sir.
Fear not Harley and gang…Screech, DUSTIN DIAMOND was to do Baltimore Improv, they are closed due to riots so he is coming to Stanfords this week for Rain…he’s HERE NOW…good guy for helping us out…and he is damn funny Harley come see him!!!!
can hardly wait (lol).
going to royals games and other events rather than sit and watch
a comic that’s got an hour on you tube for free.
Glad he got out of Baltimore…heard the riots started once his
act started at that comedy club.
Call him and tell him not to look the police in the eye then run…not good
for the back and throat!
Tell him you need some extra condoms from the CVS that burned.
down.
SAw him with Geraldo on tv. He wasn’t funny at all.
good luck.
Harley
I met Dustin Diamond back when he played the Improv (I think) some years ago. Nice guy.
I read Beyond the Bell. Man he hates everyone from that show.
Blacks need to change how they approach life. Stop relying on the liberal agenda of free handouts. Work for a living — no one owes you anything.
The three comments in a three minute span suggest maybe you had a bad day today, Jack. Subtlety isn’t a problem for you.
Jack people have been saying that about blacks since the late ’70s. Unfortunately, people will continue to say that about blacks for the next forty years.
“Stanford’s was even touched by the riots.”
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!!! NOT STANFORD’S!!!! HOW WILL OUR NATION GO ON??!?!?
That was funny. Just giving a local tie in thats all.
I was just busting balls. I completely agree KC could see the same thing happen. Just imagine if it happened on the Plaza or Westport which are adjacent to the areas that are similar to where this happened in Ferguson and Baltimore. Kansas City has a finer line between the haves and have nots than most places.
I realize I could get in a lot of trouble for saying this, but is it really too much to ask to hold off making assessment until the city’s report on the incident is complete? The “chattering classes” in this country seem incapable of learning from their mistakes. Remember the Duke Lacrosse case? The letter from “Concerned Duke Faculty” demanding “swift justice” with “no legal obstructionism” for the obviously guilty Lacrosse players? (When I was growing up in the South and the Border States during the 1960’s the people who called for “swift justice” with “no legal obstructionism” wore white robes and burned crosses; Al Sharpton, meet your “Soul Mate”: David Duke of the Ku Klux Klan.) It is not going to kill anyone to wait a few days until the report comes out and then we will have some actual hard data to assess the situation. And, don’t tell me you “know what happened”–I heard a lot of stories growing up about lynch mob participants who said: “The n***** said he was innocent but we know what those people are like.” No, you don’t know what happened any more than those idiots on the Duke faculty did. Finally, after the Duke case one of my GOP friends said to me: “Ernest, didn’t it used to be you liberals and Democrats who were the ones opposed to McCarthyism and lynch mobs?” Good question. Sincerely and Respectfully, Ernest Evans
Hello again!! Just saw on the news that in Baltimore suddenly all of the city’s politicos have suddenly developed a reverence for due process and are saying that they cannot release the results of the investigation into Mr. Gray’s death because so releasing would complicate criminal indictments. Now, as a firm supporter of the right of due process, I am most enthusiastic to see that the political class is jumping on the bandwagon of support for due process, but also a little confused–seems like only yesterday the nation’s politicos were calling for “swift justice” with “no legal obstructionism.” (Come to think of it, it was only yesterday that they were saying that!!) So, why the sudden conversion to reverence for the rights of the accused? I suspect that facts are coming to light that infringe on the pet interpretations of a number of the interested parties involved in this controversy; and a horrific possibility is suddenly on the agenda: It is quite possible that this crisis may end up destroying Baltimore as we know it just the way that the Ferguson tragedy appears to be in the process of destroying Saint Louis as we know it; and so the US political class now is responsible for destroying two great historic US cities. So, stall on releasing any inconvenient facts and change the focus of the political class back to worrying about the threat of our way of life posed by anti-choice fanatics and bigoted homophobes; that way if Baltimore does self-destruct hopefully it will get little media attention. Take care!! In Christ, Ernest Evans
Mr Gray also suffered a crushed larynx during his time in custody; his injuries – the broken vertebrae and the crushed larynx – could have very easily been caused by a single punch to the throat. That should have come out in the autopsy, if one was performed. If you suffer a crushed larynx before you get taken into custody, you’re not going to be able to ask for an asthma inhaler when taken into custody, if in fact you can barely breathe due to swelling of the airway. You’re not going to be running much of anyplace with that kind of injury.
Most interesting coincidence–or maybe not a coincidence. The Washington Post has just published a story on its site saying that another prisoner in the van with Mr. Gray has stated that it appeared to him that Mr. Gray was trying to injure himself during his ride to jail. Again, no certainty in this story–needs to be investigated. But, here is the coincidence I mentioned. In Oct. 2014 the popular TV show “Blue Bloods” ran an episode entitled “Excessive Force.” In the episode a young black man goes through a window of a two story residence and breaks a leg in his fall. He immediately accuses a white detective of pushing him out the window. The “usual suspects” all get involved but of course in the end Tom Selleck resolves the controversy in a fair way; it turns out the young man jumped of his own accord and was not pushed and has to retract his claims. Now, there may be no connection–but it is worth looking into–art imitates life and life imitates art. In Christ, Ernest Evans
Ok. What I want to know is how the hell did Thomas Magnum go from being a private eye to a police chief — under a different name and all? I think that bears looking into as well.
ernest bass…..see todays news……all 6 officers areabout to be charged….
let justice take it’s course……someone is lying and dead men tell no
lies….
Baltimore hasnt had a republican mayor since 1967. The mayor is black, the police chief is black, and the city council is entirely made up of democrats. Elijah Cummings an African American leftist has represented Baltimore in Congress for 30 years. Unions run the schools. Year after year that city has deteriorated and devolved until it arrived at it’s current third world state. Bmo has the 5th highest murder rate in the nation, almost entirely black on black. Baltimore is a failed social experiment, a once great city twisting in the wind as it dies and withers on the vine. I saw one of the self appointed local Bmore reverends on CNN yesterday bragging about how he had brought the Bloods, Crips, Black Gangster Disciples, and Nation of Islam members together, a co-op, to watch over the protesters and quell violence. Consider the first 3 gangs are responsible for much of the crime and homicide in the city, and it’s a good example of why Baltimore is in its current state. The welfare state hasnt worked, beginning with LBJ and his policies, the black family has deteriorated. The left has created a plantation of votes, bought and sold through Govt. assistance and a mantra repeated for decades ” You are victims. Only we care. We will provide”. Education, self reliance, and restoring the family unit, could have turned things around for urban blacks, but that time has come and gone. So you get what you got in Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, and the beat goes on. Now if we can just find a way to blame it on the evil rethuglicans.
go read the comments from the man who worked the desk in
balitmore and wrote and eventually produced THE WIRE…..
he had an interesting take on the whole issue and how the
event came to occur. Google it….well worth the read and he
said te worst cops were the black cops!!!!!!!!
BRAVO – couldn’t have said it better myself!
thanks for the compliment shoedog.
Got some old shoes that need some new soles. Can you
get me the address of the cobblers in Lawrence.
NOt that I’d waste my time with it…but that was one of
your funniest pieces of writing.
you’re right the welfare state hasn’t worked.
tell those millionaire farmers to give back the 85 billion they’ve taken.
Tell the corpoations who steal tax money to the tune of 100 million
dollars a year by moving their profits offshore ILLEGALLY we want
thatbmoney back.
Tell the insurance industry to give back the 3 billion they take from the
government.
Tell the tax cheats to pay up or go to jail.
tell the millionaire/billionaires that there’s no more tax cuts for their
jets or yachts
then come back to me and tell me therer’s no money to bring back
America to it’s greatness aagain.
Its greed dude that caused all this….and we all fell asleep while those
thieves with their fancy suits and pens stole from the nation and sent
all the jobs overseas/shut down the factories that once made American
products…and that made this nation grow from world war 2 til the
time the conmen moved in and took trillions fom the middle class of
this nation.
good luck…..
Harley
Dead on the money Mark.
Dear Mr. Mark: I am sure that all of the problems of Baltimore are caused by the anti-choice fanatics and the bigoted homophobes!! Sincerely, Ernest Evans
you can be flippant and condescending all you want to Mr Evans,however when your response is such it tells me I’ve struck a nerve. Now for a guy who loves to quote statistics the fact that you don’t have any that run contrary to mine is very telling. Sometimes you just have to concede to failure..the grand experiment started with LBJ and the results are in those crime stats you love to quote.
smith…you’re a ditch digger too according to your own words.
Where’s chuck? Ibet he’s right in front of tv watching fox news and
typing more vile b.s.!
Great take on this one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7yQol7B0Tk
thanks.
Don’t take it personally Ernie, for what it’s worth I am growing to dislike the Republican party as much if not more than you prog liberals. But Baltimore is all on the leftists shoulders.
Again, dead on the money.
mark….we don’t need you. Stay on the right. Thanks….Harley.
Dear Mr. Mark: No offense taken!! Learned a long time ago to take politics seriously but not personally. As for two parties, they are a pair of drunks who remain standing only because they have collapsed into each other’s arms. Take care and God bless!! Sincerely, Ernest Evans
Earnest Evans has some great stats usually and posts them frequently as I recall. His comments are spot on and I don’t think there is all that much disagreement between Mark and E.E.
Just my opinion.
Dear Mr. Chuck : Thanks for your point of clarification!! Yes, Mark makes some excellent points about the damage that the “leaders” and “activists” of the black community to their own community. People like Sharpton cultivate a “victimization mindset” that is strongly counter-productive to any community self-advancement. The extreme case here in the US of the disaster of the victimization mindset is the Native Americans–they have been huddled on reservations for over a century waiting for the white man to say he was sorry for what he did to them. Now, maybe in a just world that would happen–but this is not a just world. The extraordinary achievements in our society of Asian Americans is because they have none of this victimization mindset–they are delighted to be in America and to have the opportunities that this great country offers. Take care and God bless!! Sincerely, Ernest Evans
With reference to crime stats, here is an interesting question. The media is “shaking the rafters” with the slogan “Black Lives Matter.” I firmly agree: Mother Teresa was right when she said that there is no such thing as an expendable person. However, here we come to a paradox. The NY Times did a story today that argued that if one accepts the most expansive definition of police-caused deaths (which includes not just actual police shootings but people killed accidentally in police chases and people who commit suicide in standoffs) there are about 1,000 such deaths a year–of which 300 are black. In 2013, the last year for which we have stats, there were a total of 12,253 homicides in the US–of which 6,261 were black. Approximately 93% of blacks killed every year are killed by other blacks. So, nearly 6,000 black people were killed in 2013 by other blacks and 300 were killed by cops– cops of all races. Those 6,000 black deaths by other blacks are ignored by Sharpton et al–and those 300 deaths at the hands of cops get saturation attention. I guess I have to agree with the great French socialist Simone Weil who said: “If you don’t care about every martyred child you don’t care about any of them.” If Sharpton et al don’t give a damn about young black people being killed by other blacks, I really don’t want to hear any nonsense out of them about how concerned they are about young black men being killed by the cops. Sincerely and Respectfully, Ernest Evans PS: Anyone interested in crime stats should go to the Uniform Crime Report, published annually by the FBI. But, let me warn you: It is very, very hard in this report to find the crime stats by race–former Attorney General Eric Holder was a big supporter of the myth that the big violence problem for the black community is racist white vigilantes and racist cops–so he made it quite hard to “dig out” crime stats by race in this annual report.
Ernest Evans,
A crime committed by the government is a far graver risk to society than 6000 crimes by its citizens.
Well glaze looks like that concealed weapon was completely legal. And that the officers made an unlawful arrest. An unlawful arrest is just that unlawful.
So your statement that he wasn’t innocent appears false. Freddy gray was an innocent man. Committed crimes in his life, but so did you. He was unlawfully arrested that day. And that unlawful arrest led to his death.
That may all be true. So that justifies the riots? I said he didn’t deserve to die. If they went over the top, the officers should be punished. But burn your city down, loot and destroy. No. I don’t see that as an excuse. Its wrong.
Well CG I don’t ever want to see someone get hurt. I don’t have as much concern for property. After all, businesses insure their assets for a reason. The stores could just as easily be destroyed by a hurricane or whatever weather events they get in Baltimore.
But to your point of justification. Read the initial reporting on the shooting. http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20150406/PC16/150409558
http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20150404/PC16/150409635
And compare that reporting to the reporting you hear about almost all of the 1000 police shootings cited by Dr. Ernest Evans. Weigh that against the fact that had there not been a video, Officer Slager would have walked.
Citizens cannot be in position to film every encounter with the police, and so long as they aren’t the police will be allowed to do whatever they please.
So how should citizens stand up to the government? The only actions that have gotten results so far are protests and riots. Protests and riots bring a spotlight to the case and cause further investigation. In Ferguson this exonerated the officer, in Baltimore this has led to 6 officers arrest.
As long as the only way to have police investigated is to protest, people will protest. Government cannot be allowed to commit crimes without punishment.
But to the point, answer this CG. How should citizens react when they believe their government to be corrupt? If not protests and riots then how? And has your method been successful before?
The articles are about the SC shooting, I am using that as an example.
Off Topic, but whats with Mick Foley going to Improv instead of S&S? Would much rather see him at S&S, but Improv it is…
We had him two years ago, he likes to do new spots each year. Great guy, if you love what he does, interesting guy. We will try and bring him in next year.
Dear Mr. CG: This promises to be a complicated case to try. I am not a lawyer so I don’t have any real sense of how the trial is going to go, but from what I know of the law putting a restrained individual in a police wagon without securing them with a seat belt is such an obvious risk that it seems to be clearly a case of manslaughter. However, there is the possibly extenuating question of whether Mr. Gray deliberately tried to hurt himself during the ride in the hope of having ground for a lawsuit. But this is why we try those accused in courts before judges and juries–not in the streets. And, last I looked, there is no clause in the Constitution that says that the guarantees of due process in the 5th and 14th Amendments do not apply to cops accused of mistreating black suspects just as they do not apply to black men accused of raping white women. Time for Sharpton et al to stop trying to get their way on these high-profile cases by unsubtlely threatening race riots–in my native South what Sharpton has been doing in recent years used to be done by guys who wore white robes and burned crosses. Sincerely, Ernest Evans
How is Sharpton threatening race riots any worse than FOP leadership threatening work slowdowns or “de-policing”?
Dear Mr. Snave: I fully agree that it is wrong for FOP to encourage work slow down of to encourage de-policing. As for Al Sharpton and his encouraging of race riots, just remember he is not doing this because he gives a damn about issues of police brutality–he is doing this because he is being paid to do so by the “War With Iran” lobby. This lobby, which has a war chest in the billions to buy off people, feels (for reasons I would rather not go into in a public arena) that a series of ugly, bloody race riots in the US would serve its agenda of blackmailing/coercing/manipulating the US into a war with Iran. Take care. Sincerely and Respectfully, Ernest Evans