Police want Portland residents to be aware that there should be no barriers for people who seek mental health support services in the city.
The department held its first Family Forum on Tuesday night at the police station to promote those services and make its position clear: no one, regardless of their situation, should be denied help in a crisis.
Outside, Portland, ME is dark at 4pm in November. Suffering from a spell of cabin fever on one such evening in 2011 and the dog needing to go out, I ventured out not suspecting what I was about to experience on the street in front of the house where I have lived for ten years.
Some ten years ago, I lived in the West End of Portland before I moved to where I presently stay and have resided for ten years.
When I lived on the West End of Portland, On or about June 11, 2001, I was stopped by three burly officers of the law in cruisers at Longfellow Square and was asked why I was crowing like a rooster as they had reports of my yelling slurs.
I explained that I was not slurring people; that I hated nobody and that I was crowing like a rooster because miscreants were calling me a chicken adding:
"I was walking in VD Port the other day reading the Casco Bay Jerkly when all of a sudden one of those high school kids and you know how they hang out down there up and says 'have fun going home with your dog tonight.' So, being a clown I tooted my bike horn twice like a clown does."
One of the officers said that this was good, but told me to go home and go to work. I did.
(For the full story: google "Mental Illness Prophecy").
I was hospitalized for SZ in July 2001 after being beaten down in my rental apartment on the fourth of July, 2001 at 1am by the landlord's underage drinking buddies from Portland HS when the landlord and his wife had been out of town and I caught the kids fucking over the chickens in the back yard being awoken by their party.
I had called the police, but when the police came, they said not to call them anymore as the kids had hidden and then reappeared after the police left. I was hospitalized for SZ after the Fourth of July, 2001 and released from the psych ward on August 3, 2001.
On August 4, 2001, one of the kids from July 4, 2001 shouted at me when he saw me and said that he would "kill me."
I proceeded to notify my doctor, my parents, the landlord's friends down the street and the doctor told me to tell the police and file a report, the which when I went to the station, they escorted me to the hospital yet again.
I was in approximately ten police paddy wagons, cruisers and ambulances between 2001 and 2002 in Portland, ME taking me for five hospitalizations due to an illness aggravated by miscreants (or otherwise known as other people's kids) and bad parenting in the community.
On the night in question, Tuesday, November 15, 2011: I was suffering from cabin fever and ventured out for a few minutes with my dog for air.
When I opened the front door and stepped out onto the walk where I live, I noticed a police cruiser with lights flashing and parked. Another cruiser was up the street. A police man standing next to the nearer cruiser was texting and a large group of kids (no more in age than 15yo) were running around on the next block apparently going up to different houses and "knocking for suspicious activity" (as I was to find out later is what's dubbed: "Community Policing").
"The Portland Police Department is committed to a community approach to policing our neighbourhoods. This requires officers to become immersed in the neighbourhoods they serve and become a resource for residents as well as law enforcement."
Apparently, Community Policing is fifteen year old kids knocking for suspicious activity. Then, as my dog made his usual rounds on the corner with my "rubber necking" some, I was about to turn back into my house when at least six of the group of +/-twenty kids I had seen, ran up to me on the corner while my dog relieved himself, confronted me, and told me to take my hands out of my pockets: that they were going to ask me a few questions.
Having seen a urologist for that particular side effect due to my experiences with other people's kids, I curtly told them to "fuck off," turned around and walked back to my house.
I was standing on the walk way to where I live at the foot of the steps for the front door of the house and the police man whom I had seen texting strode up to me out of the dark and said in an authoritative tone:
"Why were you rude to those kids!?"
I replied:
"I saw a urologist for that particular side effect."
"What does that have to do with what you told them?" he retorted.
"It means that I don't do what kids tell me and you should know that," failing to mention "Lance the dispatcher" and his knowledge of me my having listened to a police scanner 24/7 for six months once upon a time.
I heard "Lance the dispatcher" tell an officer jokingly that he would order the officer to go after "Jimmy," (assumedly me in my mind), if the officer didn't follow another dispatch order.
The officer standing on the walkway to the house where I live continued:
"Well, those kids are performing a community service. You shouldn't have told them that. Do you have ID?"
"Well, I'm schizoid," I told him. "I saw my doctor today. I was just coming out to walk my dog. I live here," I told him.
I gave him my ID and then asked:
"What!? You going to take me to jail?"
"I might," he retorted as he called in my license number and found out from the "Lance on duty" who I was and my history with police in Portland.
"Hey!" I told him as he was calling into a dispatcher: "I counted to 24-1000 on December 8 last year. I haven't done anything."
Upon retrieving information on my license, he said after he told me to be quiet so he could tell me something:
"If I hear of you being mean to kids again, I am going to arrest you."
Then, I asked:
"Can I tell you something now?"
He acquiesced and I barked:
"Kids were mean to me once upon a time. You tell those kids NOT to be mean to me or I'll sue!"
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Pennsylvania man won $50,000 after he was cited for flipping off a cop. "The U.S. Supreme Court has consistently held that speech may not be prohibited simply because some may find it offensive," said Ira P. Robbins, a law professor from American University in Washington D.C. "Virtually every time someone is arrested for this, assuming there's no other criminal behavior... the case is either dismissed before trial or the person is convicted at trial and wins on appeal."
----------------------------------------------------------------
In my experience, Portland's programs for Mental Health Support Services and Community Policing are divergent, contradictory and aggravate situations. "howler and spider monkeys diverged from a common ancestor".
---------------------------------------------------------
"FUCK YOU: YA ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT KIDS!" Arrest me.
No comments:
Post a Comment