Posted on 10/03/2011 6:20:37 AM PDT by Immerito
You know it's coming, because even the Mexican border drug gangs aren't totally stupid.
When a developer/city/county/state wants your land, you’d be amazed by what they’ll do to get it.
The local prime outlets mall was once a nice little neighborhood populated by mostly older folks who built their ranchers in the 50s/60s.
One by one, the owners either sold for a pathetic “offer” or said no.
Those who said no suffered incredibly unsafe, noisy, intolerable living conditions as the builders worked perilously close to their homes with massive equipment and blasting.
They eventually gave up the homes they’d worked so hard for their whole lives and hoped to retire in and left.
One old man stuck it out for several years.
The builders put a filthy runoff pond right in his backyard and then surrounded his house with construction debris.
Piles of dirt, rocks and rotting construction material so high you could barely see his house any more.
From what I heard, the stress killed him.
Two lane Maugans Avenue was was widened to four lanes a couple years ago.
Most of the houses’ front doors open mere feet from the road and heavy traffic, now, their yards eaten by county blacktop.
What they want, they’ll get...one way or the other.
The Democrats will author a bill to ban civilian guns.
I think this cuts to the heart of the issue...
“coated with a layer of 1/4” nuts”
Plain or salted?
:)
Desperados!
Mike
How did this end up in the Tribune?
The Tribune loves the police state.
Mike
—The Harris family appear to be a nexus of bad news in an otherwise-gentrifying neighborhood. Some neighbors finally decided that they were bad for property values and had to go.—
If that is closer to the truth, this seems a little more acceptable, though I don’t know if Swat was really necessary.
I live in an area where some neighbors sound like the Harris family. That kind of thing works in a rural setting. Not so much in an urban or suburban setting. You have to get along or else.
Go look at Zillow.com and see how much the world can know about your home.
And, don't get me started on Pitbulls around children. Anyone watching Judge “Joe” Knows the folly of doing that!
Since when are SWAT raids by 40 police officers justified to investigate allegations of poorly nourished dogs, allegations of trespassing and/or possible building code violations?
As for the claim that Mr. Harris had “retreated in to his own troubled world”, I will say this: So what?! Is that against the law?
Or else WHAT? You'll get together with the neighbors and make up lies about me dealing drugs so you can sic a SWAT team on me?
Why do you think SWAT prefers to kick down doors of the "Mr Harris"-types, rather than approaching real crack houses of real hardcore check gangs? Could it be that they do not want to face actual return fire or booby traps?
It would be pretty easy for the drug gangs to "send a message" to the SWAT unit, by having an informant tip them off to a drug house which is booby-trapped up the wazoo, and which goes off when the door is kicked in. They wouldn't even need C4 -- a few barrels of gasoline and some gunpowder would do.
So all of that justifies using SWAT?
Wow, Chicago is bad enough but many of the responses are even worse. This is nothing but goverment approved theft, it is worse than the Kelo case.
—You’ll get together with the neighbors and make up lies about me dealing drugs so you can sic a SWAT team on me?—
Depends on the neighbors - and you. Sometimes they do nothing. Sometimes they make up stuff. Sometimes they make a big deal about what is there.
Bottom line is that if you don’t like your neighbors and they don’t like you and you are a minority of one in a fairly densely populated neighborhood, staying there basically just makes you an a**hole.
Of course, this all assumes you are doing something to ACTIVELY aggrivate the situation as, apparently, this family was.
What kind of sane person would WANT to continuously be surrounded by neighbors who don’t like them? If you are that eccentric, you probably should find a nice piece of acreage where you don’t see your neighbors, except at Wal-Mart.
Fine, however SWAT teams in the middle of the night are not the way that these things are to be addressed in our society - this is an improper 'legal' recourse and I would agree that it is an abuse of power and their rights.
Ok, this story stinks, on several levels. But this is what I don’t understand. The owner of the homes is black. The story has gone national now. So why can’t the good Rev. Al, or Jesse Jackass Jackson, or Jimmy Habitat for Humanity Carter, get a group together to fix the code violations?
It says the friends of the family are getting together to throw a going away party. Why don’t they all donate a few materials, get together, and fix up the house?
It says in the story they can stay if they get the two homes up to code. In a city the size of Chicago, you can’t tell me there isn’t ONE group that couldn’t/wouldn’t help these people. Hell, all it would take is ONE church. In my little chunk of Texas, it’s not at all unusual for a church to help out in a situation like this, even if the people don’t go to church.
I admit, the homeowner has some real winners living in his house, but I do understand that he feels he has to help out his kids. He should also get out of the dog-pet thing, since no one in that house knows that you are supposed to feed your pets once in great while.
I just don’t understand....
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