From the same mouth that told reporters the ludicrous tale that scouts from two Fortune 500 companies told a local realtor (let’s leave her unnamed, shall we) they rejected locating in Colorado Springs on account of the city’s homeless camps along I-25 –yeah right– comes a really despicable meme she’s now trying to spread of teenage “bat gangs” purportedly terrorizing our homeless.
The fabrication serves two purposes: to lend urgency to efforts to get the homeless out of their tents, and to scare the vulnerable would-be victims themselves. A tent isn’t shelter enough if there are gangs of youth ready to bludgeon every homeless they encounter.
I was almost taken in myself when I received this email titled “HOMELESS ATTACKS”, the text of which has also been copy and pasted unto other online forums:
Sitting here with a homeless friend who got beat up by the Bat Gang on Saturday. He said it was 8 kids with baseball bats who attacked him under the Bijou Bridge. He was taken to Memorial Hospital and spent the night. He got stitches around his right eye and his right elbow.
We’re lucky he is alive! Again we need your support to transition the homeless out of the tent camps to shelters.
It turns out a user “Beepbeep” has been peddling this hard on local websites, luckily without much traction. Any ideas about how to intervene if she lands another TV interview? Fear-mongering like this slanders the CSPD and further erodes the image of Colorado Springs.
A search of the Gazette brings up the murder last year of a vagrant on the I-25 pedestrian overpass, killed with a baseball bat. A teen bragged to his a friend about the crime, and now the friend may be implicated as well. This is a development from the recent trial. From this our enterprising Iago has extrapolated a “bat gang” of malevolent teens, to put fear into stories told around homeless campfires.
Her most recent example cannot be corroborated. Even given the benefit of the doubt, our misinformant may have fallen dupe to a homeless cliche, the public drunk’s version of “a dog ate my homework.” I remember from friends cleaning up their act at the Salvation Army, when someone fell off the wagon and returned literally bruised, from a fall or fight they were too inebriated to remember, the blame was cast away from themselves. What happened was often a recurring theme, the bang-up attributed to “teenage tormentors” armed with bats.
Can you think of a more despicable strategy, to haunt the neighborhood with a fictional specter, all for the sake of trying to shoo the homeless out of town. It’s the KKK’s burning cross strategy isn’t it?
The HomeFull wannabee terrorists would usually want to attack somebody out alone, if that. It would be instead of a reason to panic and abandon camp, a reason to band together.
They also have a nasty habit of attacking a camp while the person is in town, not at home-sweet-tent. Because, essentially they’re cowards.
What Ms Ann Ominous failed to mention, too, is that the hate rhetoric about the Homeless being a bunch of Drug-crazed or just crazed Wanted Felons who are also unregistered Sex Offenders, adds fuel to the fires of people wanting to assault the camps.
Judging from the levels of bile they don’t need much fanning of the flames.
Do the Fortune 500 companies refuse to bring businesses to whole nations of people living in shantytowns? Bhopal India for instance.
Guatemala perhaps.
Maybe the Fortune 500 guy realized that the people here would demand more than a couple of dollars a day in wages.
maybe our shantytown wasn’t big enough.
Maybe, too, the notion that there’s no Public Transportation to speak of,
Terrorists do attack the people who is week old or alone by attacking them they get the base to attack large place. They also attack camps where there is group of people
Around these parts, they’re called “Trollbusters” and they really exist.
Beware! What happens is after there’s enough proagandistic nonsense from the local media, government mouthpieces, etc. The parents talk it up around the house (you should see all the racist and anti-homeless trash talk on the Santa Cruz (California) Sentinel’s Topix forum and SC is supposed to be a luvyduvyhippietown) but rarely act on it.
But the kids, razed (sic) in affluence, and not understanding how EVERYONE isn’t just like them and their parents sure do!
Local-kid on Roadie-kid violence is quite common around here. But lately the local kids have taken to stabbing each other in some warped faux gang thang. These are kids that were yanked from town to town to town as their parent’s income and job needs to maintain lifestyle demanded, and they’re very insecure about their status in any town they live, so they act out.
Like Military brats but rudderless, mall rats without a home turf mall… Corporate kid gangs, and, under the ‘right’ circumstances, they WILL go at homeless people.
BTW, got to call a local cop a jackass, loud and clear, in front of everyone walking downtown yesterday.
These two heavily armed officers were ticketing some kid, looked like a local high school student with a guitar trying to impress the girls, for sitting on the sidewalk playing the guitar.
As I walke by, in this busy shoppind district on a sunny mid-morning, I said out loud “Why don’t you hassle the junkie nodding off on the bench down the block(there was none… hypothetical.)
The cop, one of the ‘supervising’ sergeants looked at me and said cynically joking”Are you a junkie?”
I turned and said “You’re a Jackass.” (no exclamation…. just a statement of fact) and just walked away.
As Arlo Guthrie said in Alices Restaurant, “If 50 people a day walked in sat down sang a bar of Alices Restaurant and walked out… They’d think it was a movement.”
Just doing my part.
In an unverified incident a few years ago, after it was noted in the local papers that a small forest fire had caused the CDF to come upon a number of houseless encampments, a few weeks later there was a series of unresolved fires in the woods around here causing police pressure on the houseless, and quite a few bleary eyed folks who couldn’t get any rest.
I still suspect local kids of that, and the main ‘act up’ time I’ve noticed is right before, and for a couple of months after school goes back into session (It’s still in the 50s here in November).
They get a chance to show their little cojones to their peers and ‘run with the pack’.
My point being… DO NOT write this off as some myth… In the appropriate circumstances it CAN happen, as surely as a group of local kids tossed a 60 year old homeless man (Raul, the sun worshiper) off the flyway to the local park 50 feet to the ground killing him about 25 years ago, or the local cops running off-duty stick & bat goon squads (and collecting $$$ from the local merchants for their efforts) about 20 years back.
All it takes is the ‘right’ mix of disinformation and propaganda aimed at the ‘local’ community…
Here’s a writeup I did a week or so ago with some of the details on how Santa Cruz California socially engineered it’s city to create a mass of unemployed, houseless working class citizens, and then criminalized the victims, all the while violating the State Charter and Housing laws in the process.
http://razedbywolves.blogspot.com/2010/02/enquiring-minds-why-are-there-so-many.html
Yeah, our local political establishment, the big industry here is land.
Right now all the actually safe-to-build-upon land is already srarfed up. They’ve been on pushing the Ecologically Unsustainable Land for the past 40 years or so. Unstable, not enough water, poking up in all the wrong directions. They’ve got the mad notion of “taming” it. While and at the same time selling the idea of Wild and Untamed Land.
And the one at whom we’re poking the most fun here happens to be one of the Real Estate millionaires.
About half of the land within a mile either direction of the Tent City is for sale or lease. Everybody’s selling, nobody’s buying.
Vacant lots, vacant warehouses, shops, houses, apartments.
Maybe our Real Estate friend is hoping to sell a couple of parcels of land to the city at dirt cheap (heeheehee selling dirt at dirt cheap prices) prices, get what cash comes from that deal and deducting the difference between actual cash price and the estimated value of the land from her taxes. As it is, her business is in the crapper too.
If she tried to sell the land to the “Fortune 500” scouts at anywhere near the Valuation they probably made an excuse, a feint to get away without busting into laughter.
If they were here at all, it would be to get the land for as low as they possibly could.
The land prices, like the raw sewage, the rising crime rate, unemployment and so forth, were a massive problem three years ago and that was 2 years before the first tent went up in America “the beautiful” Park.
She God-Damn knows it too. She didn’t fall off the turnip truck yesterday, been here a while.
One of the Right Wing sayings is that the Liberals have the attention span and long term memory of a goldfish and we’ll supposedly forget something less than 6 months after it happened.
Apparently they feel that way about their base, too.
Eric wrote: “Fear-mongering like this slanders the CSPD and further erodes the image of Colorado Springs.”
Really? I’m surprised you or Brother Jonah care at all about CSPD… your consistent theme on this site has been disrespect and contempt.
I am encouraged by this new-found concern though… didn’t Jesus tell His disciples that it was easy to love our friends, but even more important to love our enemies?
So you love the CSPD? Well done, good and faithful servant!
It was cops who nailed Jesus to the Cross.
Judging by the cops I’ve met, I’d say that about, oh… ALL of them would cheerfully do the same thing to Him again.
Eric is an order of magnitude more polite than me.
My contempt for the cops mirrors their contempt for the poor.
When the out-of-control emotionally unstable youth do either break down the camps of the Poor or go as far as violent assault against them, the Cops treat the victims as though THEY are the criminals and invite criminal actions against themselves, merely by being poor. They tell us that to our faces, too. Just as long as there aren’t any witnesses other than their fellow cops.
Fact of the matter is, the people in the camps need to get their own ball bats, and knives, guns… to protect themselves because the Cops ain’t going to. Despite the assurances of the Back-the-Badge buffoons, who just by a bizarre co-inky-dink are urging that the cops join them in their anti-homeless PERSONS crime spree.
That’s the truth of the matter, rail against those who report it all you wish.
The cops only serve the Elitist Snobs who run the political show in this or any other town.
Dear Brother Jonah;
As you wrote:
“It was cops who nailed Jesus to the Cross.
Judging by the cops I’ve met, I’d say that about, oh… ALL of them would cheerfully do the same thing to Him again…My contempt for the cops mirrors their contempt for the poor.”
Harboring a centuries-old grudge… judging our brothers… yikes…
I thought Jesus asked God to “forgive them, for they know not what they do..” (Luke 23:34)….
So I’m kinda’ confused… do you love or hate CSPD officers?
Have you ever met CSPD Homeless Outreach Team Officer MJ Thompson? The reason I ask, he’s a Pastor’s Kid, and I’ve never seen him crucify anyone.
Sorry to put a name and face on the discussion – I understand how much easier it is for you to condemn “ALL of them” without knowing one of them.
Just giving back the “respect” I’ve been shown.
Your pet officer will undoubtedly show a different face to me or to the homeless people than he shows to you.
“Go ahead and file a complaint, it’s our word against YOURS and we’ll make sure nobody believes YOU!”
Pigs are pigs, they stick up for each other especially when they’re in the wrong.
I don’t have to apologize to any of them for saying that.
Oh, yeah, they sure did “teach me a lesson”. Just not the lesson they hoped.
Sure hope you read the Gazette today – and all the links attached to the story –
Department of Corrections responds to claims of forced homelessness from
News First 5 learned about 175 inmates that are paroled, each month, with no where to live. These numbers are from the Department of Corrections.
http://www.newsfirst5.com/news/doc-responds-to-claims-of-forced-homelessness-from-parolee/
Our community needs to sit down with DOC and get this problem resolved. Is the DOC wanting the community to house ex-cons? Because if they keeping dumping them off on the bridge homeless and into the Shelters, that is exactly what we are doing
beepbeep, you are absolutely right – I support your efforts completely.
Eric & I both support your views and solutions with the Homeless in Colorado Springs.
Expect to see us all involved in the upcoming Homeless Camping Meeting on 2.24.10.
We want to a part of the Solution.
OH MY GOODNESS. The reason we post IPs at NMT is to verify the true sources of our comments. In this case, Ms. Janice Heuberger, the aforementioned real estate propagandist and anti-homeless fear-monger, is now posting comments here as beepbeep and BROTHER JONAH!. Are you kidding me? Counterfeit Jonah can be differentiated because “he” writes from Janice’s IP: 75.70.17.163
Janice, you are absolutely unprincipled. Such duplicity is unwelcome here and will be flagged, where we don’t ban you again outright.
BTW, we do support every effort to help the homeless, but not for the exclusive motive of white-washing our city.
Also, we’re not so enthusiastic about faith-based programs which require the poor to find religion as a condition of being helped. These missionaries are motivated by the best of intentions, but are taking advantage of the needy who are in no position to say no.
And we’re not crazy about your choice of meeting date, which is scheduled one day AFTER city council’s next deliberation, too late to fight for the dignity of our victimized poor. The city decides on 2/23 whether it really wants to criminalize homelessness. I remain optimistic they will not do something so unchristian.
Even now, she continues to submit comments as “Brother Jonah”
And as “Eric”
Then “Karl Marx”
Well, Janice, not really that easy huh? This system is a bit like flypaper, you can get in, but your sneaky tracks stick for all to see.
But we’re not going to throttle discussion on NMT just to keep lunatics like you out. Go away. Deceit will get you nowhere here.
Well, let’s see, Passwords… now, to get my blue (link) Brother Jonah name up I logged on the site from a far different page, which the Hackers, the real ones, know where it is anyway.
If you’re going to pretend to teach computer skills perhaps you could learn some first.
As Eric pointed out, you still left your IP address up.
What was that Spock said on the Star Trek episode where Kirk and Sulu were transported into an alternate universe where the Nazis had won, and the Nazi Kirk and Sulu were transported on to the Enterprise. Real Kirk and Real Sulu were able to act like the barbarian Hosts long enough to figure out a way to get back. Nazi Kirk and Nazi Sulu were pegged off immediately and placed in the brig until the exchange could be made.
Spock noted that it’s far easier for a Civilized person to behave barbarically than the other way round.
Incidentally, you’ve gotten Marx all mirxed up with either Trotsky or Chairman Mao.
Marxism is an economic system, not a revolutionary one.
You should read your Libertarian publications a bit more carefully, “Liberty Reclaimed”, I believe, is the one where the notation is made that the only real differences between the United States and the Soviet Union were economic, not political.
Totalitarians have a standard uniform, you might notice my post with a comparison between a Modern Praetorian armed slave of the Empire and one from 20 centuries ago.
The tactics nor the uniforms change much, Kevlar instead of bronze, Plexiglass instead of bronze shields, lethal tazers and Lethal tear gas and Lethal plastic bullets instead of a Lethal Gladius Maximus.
Sure, not all those who get tear gassed or tasered actually die from it, but then, not everybody the Roman pigs beat with their batons or cut with their swords died either
You’d have to try harder, Janis.
I’ll gladly sell you a computer with the Tutorials pre-installed for doing the crap you so inexpertly tried.
Unlike the discounts I offer to people who are trying to train their way out of poverty, I’d have to charge you full price though.
You do understand, I’m sure.
If these so called bat gangs were in existence they were probably paid by Janis Hueberger or they were told by Dee Cunningham of Keep Colorado Springs beautiful to attack the homeless as part of their community service.
Dear Eric;
Just wanted to let you know I finally got my t-shirt from your online store… I know you told me you out-sourced production to Canada to, as you said, “pay the bills” – at the expense of American workers, but mine came marked “Made in Nicaragua”… which is a brilliant use of Capitalism, since – according to Wikipedia – 79% of Nicaraguans make less than $2.00 per day, you won’t have to deal with those whiny American workers demanding minimum wage… hope this doesn’t put you in a bad light with your fellow faux activists… if it does, I could use a permanent marker to line through “Nicaragua” and write in whatever country you’d like to pretend you’re supporting this week…I just don’t want to cause you embarrassment or stand out at your next demonstration…
BTW, how’s your un-holy alliance opposing the No-Camping Ordinance with Doug Bruce working out? Man, I gotta’ tell you… the video of you and Doug at the Council Meeting… standing united…. made me all “goose-bumpy”…
Yeah, what have YOU done for people in Nicaragua, “patchsi”?
I mean, aside from supporting the Death Squads, the Babykilling Contras and their American Masters?
You know, the ones who own YOU.
Talk about “faux” activism, you’re still crowing about getting your Murderous Fascist CSPD to do your dirty work for you, get the homeless PEOPLE into prisons.
Why not volunteer to walk ahead of your PIGS in case some of the People do what they have every right to do, FIGHT BACK?
I’ll laugh my ass off if somebody puts a booby trap in his tent that KILLS a couple of your Pig Minions.
Or your stupid coward ass.
You and your Hate Rhetoric against the Homeless are what caused the MURDER by baseball bat, committed not by Homeless PEOPLE but by some teenage punk whose parents echoed your sentiments about the Homeless People being “crazy” and “Drunks” and “bums”
That’s right, the blood of the PERSON killed under the bridge is on YOUR nasty little hands, Patch. Even though you personally are too YELLOW to do the deed yourself.
Just like your Christ-Killer cops would be without their buddies backing them up.
I bet you’re hoping to see a few resisters get beaten down or KILLED by your Pigs. You’d have a real orgasm over that. Fascists are like that. I bet you have videos of Police Beatings where the prisoner is handcuffed in your Porn Collection.
I know your Boyfriend Chief Meyers does.
Eric can delete those two posts. I believe the point was made. Patchsi aka (probably) Janis gets off to exercise of power, especially if she makes a profit from it. Hiding it behind Bible quotes only makes her insane Sado-masochistic perversion both easier to see and harder to look upon.
Patchsi, you should get a mental health checkup.
Megalomania is a serious sexual deviance that often leads to murder.
That, and she is more than likely making a FAT and UGLY profit from the Prison Slave Labor system which would be the only “help” available from her side.
Some one identifying himself as a relative mentioned, too, that you’re dangerously unstable. I’m not worried that you would attack me. People who are on a Power-trip don’t usually attack somebody who they can’t subdue.
My worries, Janis-Patchsi, are that you’ll assault somebody truly helpless in your rage. And that your cop buddies will look the other way, as usual.
Your attempts to bring Nicaragua or any other nation into it, is an example of your hypocrisy.
“would not it have been better to have sold the ointment and given the money to the poor?
And this he said, not because he cared for the poor, but because he was a Thief, and held the bag”.
Guilty conscience peeking through, Janis-Patchsi? Can’t justify your own VIOLENT persecution of the poor so you have to try to tear down those of us who stand in the way of your Mini-Police State Establishment?
Dear BJ;
Once again, you’ve shown your utter lack of rational thought by trying to re-direct the focus from your faux activism to your shop-worn, over-tired rants and raves.
The truth – that you seem unable to discuss – is that you and Eric, and NMT, appear to be, at best t-shirt selling scammers, and at worst, insignificant frauds, as you claim to stand for the down-trodden, while your actions show you have no desire to surrender your life-time victim status or release your hapless dupes (useful idiots) that listen to your monotonous pablum. Save the drama for your mama.
I hear they need somebody to tongue wash the floors at the torture center on Guantanamo.
Now, I can’t even apply for the job, it takes a genuine Piglover. Maybe Patchsi can think of somebody…