Think back to David Klotz, who last year was murdered by a couple of grossly overweight bouncers at that place on Yanonali where naked sluts dance on poles, The Spearmint Rhino. While it was the fat-assed bouncers that called the police in the first place, to respond to a minor altercation at their den of debauchery, it took over 20 minutes for Santa Barbara's finest to respond. It was around three o'clock in the morning and Winchell's wasn't open, so I don't know where the coppers were or what they were doing, but I'm sure they weren't busy fighting gang violence. You know the end of the story. When they finally did arrive they found Klotz underneath 800 pounds of blubber and possessing a weak pulse. EMTs arrived and carted him off to the hospital, where he laid unconscious for a day before his parents could come down from the Bay area to make the call to take him off of life support. He was brain dead, and then he was dead. It's a sad story, but one that the SBPD doesn't want you to think about anymore, since they swept it all under the rug very neatly. No charges were filed against the club, its owners, or the two obese thugs, primarily because to do so would be to keep in the spotlight the PD's failure to arrive before the bouncers could effectively squeeze the life out of an innocent kid. Protect and Serve my ass.
Fast forward to yesterday. I work in the Community Development building on Garden Street, across from where they are constructing a giant, brand new mental health facility. Right next door is the Alano Club, which is where you go if you've been drunk most of your life and you'd like to make the change from suicide by alcohol to suicide by smoking nine packs of cigarettes a day right next to a massive, dust generating construction site that spews dirt out of its 30 foot hole for ten hours a day. My parents and brother are visiting from the east coast this week and they came by in the afternoon to check out my office digs and to meet my supervisor and co-workers. It was a nice enough visit that ended with a 50 yard stroll back out to the visitors parking lot. On our way out there I noticed a guy sprawled out on the edge of the parking lot with his head on the curb and his body looking like he just got dropped from an airplane.
I thought for sure he was dead, but upon further inspection I noticed his chest moving up and down, a sure sign of breathing function. He did have a half eaten piece of bread near his head and some brown vomitous looking fluid trailing from his mouth, but otherwise he looked like your regular, run of the mill homeless drunk passed out in a park, except he was here, in the city building parking lot! My Mother mentioned that the guy was there when they walked in and looked as if he hadn't moved an inch since they saw him 30 minutes prior. So let's call it about four o'clock the first time the police were called to come and rouse this vagrant.
Come 4:25 still no units of Santa Barbara's finest had arrived on the scene. A second call revealed that indeed the boys and girls in blue were on a shift change. Good thing there were no gang stabbings between four and five yesterday!
A resourceful employee of the city of SB then decided to call a contact she had in the Fire Department. In about four minutes we had a representative of the boys and girls in the red trucks on scene to rouse the bum from his deep, puke filled slumber. Thank you to the Santa Barbara Fire Department for your service!
The police showed up at about 4:45, but of course they didn't find anything because the guy was long gone by the time they made the four block journey from headquarters on Figueroa. So much for Mayor Blum's latest set of declarations about what a good job she's doing with the homeless problem.
The moral of the story is the same as the title, with respect to Flava Flav. Don't count on the PD to get to your emergency in a shorter amount of time than it would take any normal quadriplegic to complete the Boston Marathon.
1 comment:
The cops were all off making sure the 30% extra pension benefits were invested well. And besides, with the quantitative measures used to judge their effectiveness, not answering reports makes them look better!
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