You’ve probably seen the ads: “The BART Police Department is Hiring!” In response to overwhelming public demand for greater safety on the trains, BART is engaged in its most intense hiring program in years. But not everybody is supportive of the effort.
Predictably, Cat Brooks, the cop hater, posted this on her Anti Police-Terror Project’s Facebook page: “Oscar Grant’s uncle Cephus ‘Uncle Bobby X’ Johnson slammed the agency [i.e., BART]. He said beefing up police would lead to small disturbances escalating into conflict. ‘Officers are going to be bored to death. So they’re going to say something out of line to somebody that is going to create, sadly, some really stressful situations,’ he said. ‘Those that might be just having fun as children are now being harassed and accosted and criminalized for taking the BART.’”
If you take BART, you know exactly what the problem is. If you don’t, let me tell you. Cars taken over by young hoodlums, often high on drugs, menacing and intimidating innocent patrons. Dirty, zombie-eyed beggars, stinky and rank, sometimes partly naked. Slobs throwing fast-food wrappers and cans on the floor, occasionally urinating on it. Sketchy people lurching ominously from car to car, smoking, vaping, taking pleasure in arousing fear. Unkempt people passed out in seats. The environment is creepy and frightening, especially at night. These are not “children,” they’re feral humans, and they’re why BART’s future is at risk: normal people are hesitant to use the system because it’s so scary and unpleasant.
But not to Uncle Bobby X! It’s just “children having fun.” Well, sorry, Uncle Bobby X, there’s nothing “fun” about it for the rest of us. Every time I see these “children having fun,” I think, “There goes a future criminal, who someday will either be shot dead or in prison.” The truth is, normal children don’t terrorize BART cars. They sit quietly in their seat, same as the rest of us, and politely await their destination. Normal children don’t fare-jump, and they don’t litter. They don’t smoke in the cars, they don’t prowl around like wannabe gangsters, they don’t blast music, they don’t get in passengers’ faces, and they don’t threaten anyone.
There’s also this statement by Uncle Bobby X: “Officers are going to be bored to death. So they’re going to say something out of line to somebody that is going to create, sadly, some really stressful situations.” This is so disrespectful to BART officers and by extension all police officers. It shows the systemic bias toward law enforcement on the part of anti-police types, as if an officer would deliberately amuse himself by hassling a troublemaker. If a BART officer says to somebody, “Sorry, sir, but smoking is prohibited on BART,” I suppose for Uncle Bobby X that would be “out of line” and would lead to a “stressful situation.” I call it doing your job.
Is it stressful to be confronted by a BART officer for inappropriate behavior? I wouldn’t know; my behavior on BART is never inappropriate. I welcome the presence of BART officers; my only complaint is there’s not enough of them, and too often they don’t intercede with people when I think they should. My attitude is, if you don’t like being confronted by a BART officer, then don’t do anything that needs confronting!
I don’t see what’s so hard for Uncle Bobby X to understand. But then, this is what the far left does: it normalizes aberrant behavior. Today, it’s “children having fun” on BART. Tomorrow, it’s murderers, as evidenced by Pamela Price trying to normalize murder by paroling killers, reducing the charges against them, firing dedicated Assistant DAs, and blaming violent crime, not on sociopathic behavior, but on “systemic racism.”
Finally, Uncle Bobby X taps into one of the most pernicious memes on the woke left: the notion that enforcing our laws “criminalizes” those who break them. We heard the same nonsense from pro-encampment types like Fife and Brooks, who said that enforcing laws against campers in parks and public places was “criminalizing homelessness.” That is such B.S. If someone is breaking the law, then they are by definition a criminal! It’s not “criminalizing” the person whose tent is in Lakeside Park; the person already is a criminal because they’ve violated the city ordinance against camping in parks. Cracking down on people who terrorize BART is not criminalizing them: they have made the decision to be criminals by their aberrant behavior.
Uncle Bobby X apparently doesn’t understand any of this, so we have to remind him of the old saying: Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time. Nothing “escalates into conflict” unless and until a wrongdoer chooses to disobey instructions from a cop. It’s not the cop who’s escalating; it’s the twerp whose testosterone makes him think he has the right to challenge a peace officer.
Steve Heimoff