This Text file is old! In a 🏛️Museum, an unsorted archive of (user-)pages. (Saved from Geocities in Oct-2009. The archival story: oocities.org)
--------------------------------------- (To 🚫report any bad content: archivehelp @ gmail.com)

Chicano Park Day and the San Diego Police Department
By Victor Marrero

        Read very carefully, and don't make conclusions until you've
understood everything that is written here as a whole.

        The dominant society says that there are police to enforce the
laws that people wouldnt obey if there were no police.  Human nature is
bad, and selfish according to that line of thinking.  Adam and Eve bit
the apple.  We are fallen from the Garden of Eden.  We have to be policed.
Those of us who live in barrios and ghettos have to be policed more
because our poverty is the evidence of our lack of talents, initiative,
and hard work.  We are more likely to steal from those that have
talents, and the other qualities, or so wordlessly assumes the predominant
thought of those who have made it. We are also prone to violence.  That's 
why we gangbang.  It's in our genes except for those exceptional few who 
rise above and "succeed."

	I'm writing this because those of us who live in the ghetto or
came from there sometimes internalize the beliefs of the dominant
society against ourselves.

        There is a fallacy, a gap in the logic of this thinking at face
values.  In layman's terms, "Something's not right with this." The gap
is if people cant be trusted if left to themselves without police, than how
should police be any different, and be trusted if theyre people.  People
can be bad. Police are people.  Therefore police can be bad.  A=B B=C
then A=C Hypothetical Syllogism, Logic 120. I knew it had to be good for
something.  And I predict that somebody might try to respond, using
Logic by saying that I'm making the fallacy of composition or generalization.
That's not the case though.  I'm basing what I am saying here on
interviewing people that I know, work with, come into contact with,
reading the accounts of the American Friends Service Committee, and
taking note of the scattered and contradictory half shams of the mainstream
media.

        Sometimes I've been an eyewitness to police harassment.  A few
hours before I typed this into my friend's computer, I witnessed a
parolee at Chicano Park Day get stopped and detained without probable
cause(no legal reason) by uniformed and plain clothes cops.  They did it 
in front of his family.  The parolee and his family thought that they could
enjoy the park as long as the ex-pinto(parolee) stayed out of trouble and
didn't hang out with the homies.  They counted on the promise from the 
police department to the Chicano Park Steering Committee that there would
be no such harassments.

        Somebody reading this might respond that they're thankful to the
police for keeping gang members in line.  It is my conviction though
that the park belongs to the barrio home boys.  It belongs to them for
being virile and young, making them the braves of the Chicano tribe. 
The very young and the very old are also owners of the park because they
were or are going to be Chicano braves. The Park does not belong to Sergeant
Kevin Ammon Badge #1639 who made the statement to the Chicano Park Security
volunteers that this is his "little piece of the world today" when they
challenged his right to stop and pat down anyone he or his officers
judged suspicious or who they say is a profiled gang member.  Sergeant 
Ammons tried to pretend that he knew our Raza, our barrio, and our Chicano 
Park better than we do.  Sergeant Ammons insulted us by telling us he 
"didn't care" regarding our concern with his violations of people's
constitutional rights.  He tried to justify his doctrine by telling us that
the "Mexican Mafia" is over there(pointing at the lowrider car show), that 
he broke up "two fights." However fights usually get people running to the
scene. We didn't see any people running.  I also doubt the police's ability
to intervene and diffuse things so quietly that nobody would notice.

        Ammons said that "if someone gets hurt then it's going to be our
fault that we didn't pat them down."  We didn't discuss with him that if
someone has a weapon, and is determined to use it, his enforcement of a
police state is not going to deter them.   We didn't discuss it with him
because he is a policy enforcer and not a policy maker.
I'll discuss it here in this column though. Look at anywhere that
a police state is enforced and you will find that if people want to
conceal weapons and use them, one way or another they do.

        Chicano Park Day is an open and public event.  Alot of homies
come with their families.  Since they're there with their families, police
should have enough common sense to reason that the possibility of
violence is minimal because gang members are also family members.  Veteran
gang members with families there are going to keep the youngsters in check
from doing anything stupid.

        Sergeant Ammons in his limited logic does not allow for the
possibility with his role as a cop that the "Mexican Mafia" or maybe
just any cholo with tattoos can show a more rationale side of humanity by
knowing when to claim, or throw signs, and when to agree to keep the
peace at least for the present.

        Chicano Park Day is supposed to be a day when the Chicano
community internally declares a truce between the different barrios, and
on its own looks after the observance of that truce, ideally without the
paternalism of the police.  This Chicano Park Day April 24, 1998 that
didn't happen.  If Chicano Park Day were a concert, or something with a
controlled entrance I could almost understand making everybody go
through a line and search them for weapons like nightclubs do.  At least
then it would seem unbiased.   Even in such a case it should still be left
up to security personnel who are in more intimate contact with the Mexican
community.

        What Sergeant Ammons is not saying is that young virile barrio
home boys are a political threat to his establishment because if ever
they united with some direction he would have a situation on his hands worse
than the militant rises of the late 60s and early 70s.  Sergeant Ammons
and the department carry out their role of policy enforcer, enforcing
unofficial or official policies that contradict their United States
Constitution and the California Penal Code.  Their unconstitutional
practices establish a norm of making barrio youth and their community
believe that it is normal, legal, and moral to be stopped, detained,
frisked, handcuffed, profiled, arrested, incarcerated, and sometimes
physically abused, especially if there are no cameras around.

        If you think this is "conspiracy thinking" objectively think in
political terms. James Madison, founding father of the United States
said in Federalist 10 that "Those that have not or are without property have
interests against, and form factions against those that have property."
James Madison would probably agree with keeping the Chicano and Mexican
community disunited into barrios fighting each other. He would also
probably agree with making it subtle like was done with writing and
endorsing the Constitution he justified in Federalist 10 behind closed
doors.

        Unity of the barrios would equal a revolution, or at least a
political force to reckon with.The system and the police do not want a
revolution.  Therefore the system and the police do
not want unity.  Gang banging between different barrios means no unity.
Therefore the system either deliberately or undelibretly benefits from
gang banging just like the system benefited from the Crow and the Sioux
fighting each other.   David Contreras, the uniform cop harassing the
parolee was of Mexican descent.  He is an example of using a Brown face
to win over "hearts and minds"(Vietnam War, counterguerilla warfare, and
counterinsurgency).  He further confuses already confused people by
making them believe that because of his Brown face, he is not working for
greed and power.

        Conteras is also an example of a local and current version of
the United States's "Hamlet" program in Vietnam by acting as a counselor to
the youth that he helped profile and crimminalize.  His role is along
the same line as Hispanic Border Patrolmen who go through downtown San Diego
and San Ysidro looking for people of their own genetic makeup to detain,
and deport, but then show up at campus career fairs specially targetting
the same people they harrass on the streets for recruitment into their
ranks.  It fits the theme of the Apache Scouts who worked for General
Crook chasing Gerenimo, the Sioux police who killed Sitting Bull, Jewish
Police, and concentration camp guards who worked for the Nazis, and even
Ghengis Khan's conquered whose first order as the conquered was to go to
the next city and kill everyone.

        The most effective way to oppress a people is to use their own
against them.  There is no shortage of people among the oppressed who
want to wear the colors of the conqueror and disassoiciate themselves
from being conquered.  It fits in with barrios claiming and fighting against
each other instead of uniting against the real enemy, David Contreras's
employer.

        Chicano Park was founded on community members who refused to be
bought off, who chained themselves to the pillars of the Coronado
Bridge, who lead marches for a park, and an end to the Vietnam War
where so many who could be fighting poverty here were instead used to
deny somebody else's democratic self-determination in another place.

        They took a stand so that for once they would control the
resource of their own piece of the Earth as a community. They took a
stand against the outside alien force of the San Diego City Council and
everything behind it, from Sacramento to Washington to Arnold Smith's, 
Maureen O'Connor's millionaire, 80 year old husband who owned the Jack in
the Box Chain.

        Kevin Ammons, in response to your statement that police
harassment is "crap" you are crap.  It is insensitivity, and repression
like yours employed by a system that lacks any real democracy that causes
us to call those in your standing, pigs just like in George Orwell's Animal
Farm. People with your cultural conditioning would be the reason that an 
equal and democratic society without rich and poor(Communism) could never
happen as it didn't in Animal Farm. For all future reference you, the SDPD,
and any other law enforcement personnel are unwelcome, alien intruders at
Chicano Park.