Disconnected to the Fullest
HarveyCanal
"a distraction from my main thesis." 13,234 Posts
For anyone who asked why I left the Austin Chronicle, here is a perfect example. http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/story?oid=oid:546600
Before I explain any further why I think this article is troublesome, I'd like to see if it elicits any response on its own.Late Thursday night, May 31, just two days before he died, Kevin Alexander Brown got a phone call from his friend Wesley Smith. Smith, who wanted information about an Eastside drug dealer known as "Icy Mike," was calling on behalf of another young man, Austin Ayers. Ayers had told Smith that earlier that evening, he and two of his friends, Theron Fisk and Annice Cannon, had been scammed by Icy Mike in a drug deal. Through an intermediary, Ayers had forked over $1,100 for an ounce of speed and in return got a plastic bag full of sugar. "We all got pissed and started talking about finding who'd ripped us off," he later told police. The group drove around the Eastside for a while looking for Icy Mike, then headed to a hotel near I-35 and Oltorf, where Smith and another group of friends were hanging out, to see if Smith could help. "Wes [Smith] said that he knew a guy who lives on the Eastside who knows everyone and that he could call him and ask if he knew the dude who ripped us off," Ayers wrote in his affidavit for investigators. "Wes called ... Black [as Kevin Brown was known to his friends] and asked him about the [dealer]. Black said that for $100 or something of value, he would tell us, because we weren't getting the information for free." Having already blown $1,100 on sugar, the group didn't have any cash. But they did still have something of value. That was a gun ??? specifically, a chrome, pocket-sized, .22-caliber Jennings Firearms Inc. pistol.As it happened, the gun did not in fact belong to Ayers, Fisk, or Cannon, and it wasn't really theirs to give away. It actually belonged to another man, Michael Lane, whose mother had given him the pistol as a gift in 1989. Lane brought the gun with him when he moved to Austin from Uvalde, and he kept it until March, when his friend Fisk asked if he could borrow it to do some target shooting. Lane agreed and never saw the gun again. "I never really asked [Fisk] to bring the pistol back," he told police.Instead, Fisk kept the pistol, which Cannon told police she found in the back seat of Fisk's Jeep on May 31, the night she rode with Fisk and Ayers, who were looking to buy some speed. Cannon picked up the pistol and "tucked the gun into the front of my pants, shoving it into my crotch area," she told police. According to Cannon's affidavit, the hotel meeting with Smith was tense, and she sounded nervous about the idea of exchanging the gun for information about the dealer. Nonethe??less, Smith, Ayers, Fisk, and Cannon followed one another to a Jack in the Box restaurant on Airport Boulevard, not far from Chester's Club on 12th Street, to meet with Brown. After some last-minute wrangling, with Brown and Smith standing at the driver-side window of the Jeep, Cannon reluctantly handed the pistol to Smith, who turned it over to Brown.Brown supplied the information on Icy Mike, but according to Ayers, Fisk, and Cannon, they didn't pursue it. Instead, after stopping briefly at an IHOP, the group split up and went their separate ways. And although Smith told police that Brown agreed to return the pistol if and when Lane or someone else came up with $100 in exchange, that never happened.Instead, the chrome .22 resurfaced just two nights later, in the early-morning hours of June 3. It was lying on the ground, roughly 30 feet from Kevin Brown's dead body in the courtyard of the apartment complex behind Ches??ter's. Brown had fled from Austin Police Sgt. Michael Olsen, who had attempted to search him in the Chester's parking lot. Olsen had been told by club staff that Brown was carrying a handgun, and their brief scuffle began a chase that ended with Brown's death ??? from two gunshots to the back, fired by Olsen in the court??yard of a neighboring apartment complex.If Brown hadn't answered Smith's call that Thursday night, if he hadn't agreed to supply information about Icy Mike, if he hadn't required a trade for that information, if Brown hadn't run away from Olsen when the officer approached him at Chester's, or if he simply hadn't carried the gun to the club that night, Brown might be alive today. But Smith's phone call set off a tragic chain of events that inexorably culminated in Brown's death. Whether Olsen's decision to shoot Brown as he fled, still tugging at his waistband, was in fact justified under Austin Police Department use-of-force policy, is a matter still under investigation by the department. (A Travis County grand jury no-billed Olsen in August, clearing him of any criminal responsibility for Brown's death.) But whatever happens to Olsen, it will not bring Brown back to life.Still, Brown's possession of the pistol that night was illegal ??? he did not have a concealed-handgun license, and even if he had, carrying the gun on club property is a criminal violation. Moreover, exchanging the gun for information on Icy Mike ??? in legal terms, a transaction made in furtherance of an illegal drug deal ??? was itself a violation of state firearms law, if not also federal gun laws. Yet such transactions involving firearms, especially in connection with drug-related crimes, are common, say local and federal law-enforcement officers.That also means that leading to and from the Brown shooting is another story: the tale of a gun, and of its journey from the legal firearms market, from friend to friend, and then to the black market, where it served as a catalyst for Brown's untimely demise. That story is also a stark, almost textbook illustration of the difficulty of enforcing the laws regulating the ownership and possession of handguns ??? as well as the virtually inevitable results.
Comments
Carrying said gun illegally and allowing someone in a club to see it = Genius
Running from the police while carrying illegal gun = Brain Surgeon
Believing eveything the cops report in a situation where they've shot someone running from them in the back = Patriotism?
But shaming a dead young man that the paper had formerly positioned itself to advocate for is hardly the biggest problem with the article.
See anything else that might seem inappropriate?
Why don't you just expand on this straight away, instead of the usual ritual which involves people making their guesses before being picked apart by you as you tell them how disconnected or racist they are. This is possibly a reason for the lack of response in this thread, it's certainly what stopped me commenting on the actual article...
Bottom line is that further senseless violence stemming from what this article reveals is highly likely.
Oh, what the hell, I need to kill a little time, so I'll bite: And the above is a bad thing because...?
Because innocent criminals will likely kill each other!!
Harvey has always lived vicariously through drug dealers and would hate it if his imaginary character got snitched on.
Than he'd have to go to imaginary court and maybe even imaginary jail where his imaginary black ass would have to become an imaginary muslim in order not to get shanked by imaginary white guys that hate him for his imaginary skin tone
I would be the first to say that Icy Mike ain't the best dude. But there are certain rights that he has that shouldn't be stepped on just because some newspaper writer feels that they've happened upon an inside scoop (which obviously came from the cops who have something to gain by painiting Kevin Bown as unsavory).
Anyway, the overall goal of the article is to minimize violence. Yet the more immediate result will very likely be an increase in violence.
He has the right to not be correctly labeled as a drug dealer?
I thought you were "let go"?
Who's to say it's correct? As far as the streets talking, he has yet to be arrested. The paper didn't bother to interview him directly. So that leaves the accusation as compete hearsay.
I think the paper tried to cover its base by only referring to dude by his street name...which to the paper, as people who don't ever interact with the Eastside community, is an abstract name that shouldn't necessarily point to one person in particular...but like I said, Icy Mike is very well known to those who do interact with the Eastside community.
If I'm Icy Mike, I'm hiring a lawyer and suing the hell out of the Chronicle.
And yeah, that was quite a bit of dragging peoples' names through the mud, even potentially illegally, just to intro yet another canned perspective on gun control legislation.
So you can say with a clear conscience that Icy Mike isn't a drug dealer?
or are you saying that because he's not a convicted drug dealer he shouldn't be gven the job title "drug dealer"?
Nope, I definitely left.
In other words, I could still be writing for the Chronicle right now...but I'd rather not.
And this is the exact sort of crap that I knew would eventually get me into trouble by continuing to be associated with the Chronicle. They have me cover this same controversial ground from a rap perspective to the point that I'm the face-man in these neighborhoods for the Chronicle. And then they leave me out to get fucked by compromising the entire interaction.
I've got too much on the line to be putting myself in such real-deal dangerous predicaments as coordinated by purposefully diconnected and ultimately racist dimwits.
If the paper is going to call anyone a drug dealer, shouldn't they be required to at least cite their source for such information?
And if it's the cops, don't they need to cite at least a warrant if not an arrest?
And no, while I do know many things about Icy Mike...such as he's got a daughter less than a year old...until yesterday I had never heard anyone refer to him as a drug dealer.
cool. sorry for the sidebar.
i was in your fair city and SA this past weekend visiting fam. Can't say i miss it all too much (except for the food)
and yes, Austin is pretty predictable and despicable when it comes to these sort of matters.