Streetsblog New York City

Holy shit… really?

Maybe its just me but I’m thinking if it was Prof. Gates it woulda damn sure been murder.

That is so awful. I cannot figure out what they where thinking.

I did get this from a friend in Asheville, if anyone is down that way:

If this upsets you and you wish to demonstrate your feelings about this firefighter being on paid leave and getting his sentence reduced, please join us as we (peacefully) cycle a loop around the Asheville Fire Dept. and courthouse area tomorrow at 5:30 p.m. Meet in front of the Asheville Fire Dept. Keep in mind that we plan to obey traffic laws and be a part of the solution, not to antagonize motorists. Hope to see you there!

How can aiming a firearm at someone’s head & discharging it possibly not be attempted murder? The only possible reason I can recall from law school is death of vic, ie murder, not attempted.
Clearly, people who don’t want to be shot in the head should avoid NC.

i can totally see this although it’s clearly not right. i ride a bike daily in nyc. cyclists are easily dismissed/unnoticed and don’t have the power/weight/prestige that car owners or peds do. ride w/ me and you’ll see peds routinely jaywalk and will give you the ‘tell it to the hand’ sign or worse to justify their jaywalking, cars regularly cut me off cuz after all why is someone on a bike?

As much as I’d have loved to be a fly on the wall, I’ll default to not blaming the government.

I like that prosecutors need permission from grand juries to indict citizens.

Sometimes, citizens are d-bags, and miscarry justice. But far better the occasional grand jury err on the side of caution, than prosecutors be able to bribe the grand jury into indicting whomever they please.

The problem is that people in that part of the country are awful and not like us. We should have as little as possible to do with them.

They probably could not get a conviction for first degree attempted murder, which must be proven pre-meditated or have “special circumstances” (multiple victims, cop victim, torture, etc.) Ironically, in some states, a fireman victim is a special circumstance.

But could second degree attempted murder apply?

What surprises me is that the charge, “assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill”, only gets you 20- to 25-months.

My first experience of Southern pedestrian-friendliness was a motel in Asheville that had no sidewalks connecting it to the restaurants a block away. In most other parts of the country there are sidewalks connecting strip malls, even if they’re unpleasant to walk along. Not North Carolina.

The law is the law, not much you can do about that post facto. But I guess my interest is why would a motherfucker do that? I don’t think the guy was thinking “I won’t get attempted murder for this.” when he licked off that shot.

And, I wasn’t kidding about the racial angle even though it was two white guys (I think) involved in this. In the south, the overwhelming number of bike riders are poor black people who can’t afford cars. (Though I haven’t been down there is five or six years and am not planning any trips off the block) You see little dirt bike trails running along the side of the highway, cutting through the woods and the swamps. Yeah, North Carolina is more civilized (if your standard is Mississippi almost anywhere is civilized), and yeah Obama and all that but still. Black people, families, riding their bikes, even in rural areas, as a way to get to their jobs and the Piggly Wiggly, because they can’t afford cars and are making the right economic choice, are subject to all types of harassment from people not infrequently firing off a shot in their direction but more commonly yahoos winging empty, and half-empty beer cans at them, yelling the old fashioned epithets at them, the whole enchilada.

And why do assholes do that? My theory is that it is the culture of entitlement that carries NASCAR daddies back to old Virginia, but I admit to not really knowing, its just a theory, you tell me. And, because they know they can get away with it and will never have to face that kid in the doo rag or that old man in a flannel shirt in July ever again in their social space of the New South.

While I loved Kendra’s description of how hard Asheville is working for bikes and hope she has lots of success I hope she also includes in their outreach something for poor people. I would love to see the little improvised bike paths improved so rural poor people don’t have to ride on the shoulder or in the ditch. I think they have actually planned an laid out a pretty well thought out grid for important bike commutation routes. I’d love to see some infrastructure money going into that.

NYC cycling suffers from a lot of the same problems. I find it so ironic that cyclists are seen as hated elite bourgeosie when in NYC to my naked eye there appears to be way more poor people, usually Latin American laborers, biking to work than anyone else. Granted, they aren’t very recreational and our culture pretty much invisiblizes them as much as humanly possible but, even in Manhattan, there are a lot of poor people, strivers either too smart or too poor to waste their money on a car (or even a MTA Metro Card) who are on two wheels. Finding a bicycle politics that appeals to these people and motivates them to involve themselves in things, could do a lot to cool the spandex wearing bourgeoise image of NYC Cyclist.

So right now I see it as, entitled white guy, usually angry at poor people who dare ride their bikes, is outraged when he sees a guy riding his kid and comes up with an outrageous act of sociopathy.

I hate to gow Sharpton on you guys and I even hope Kendra and the bicycle activists in Asheville turn out to be black and maybe I have an activism flaw that always wants to draw more issues into a situation than are supported by the raw facts. And, as usual, I apologize if my opinions offend anyone. Nonetheless, if a culture of entitlement and privelege made this asshole think (though I’m thinking there is maybe not a lot of thought going on there) that he could get away with it, I know from personal experience what a lot of these guys think they can get away with, and how often race and ethnicity is at the root.

Could happen any place else. Hasn’t. I’m not going there. Shame on them. The DA shouldn’t have given the grand jury a choice. Should have gone all in on the attempted murder.

This is incredible. If this case is going to trial, it would behoove the bicycling community in Asheville to treat this as an organizing opportunity and attend the trial, demonstrate outside the courthouse during the trial, do media events etc. Riding around the firehouse isn’t enough… and it’s not like the Fire Dept. suggested to the guy that he go shoot a bicyclist.

P.S. fred, you completely miss the importance and relevance of all of Innocent Bystander’s excellent comments. s/he is writing about how s/he sees bicyclists as typically perceived by “everybody else” (a/k/a non-bicyclists). Your (and others) failure to see this makes it that much harder to understand what is going on and how to address it.

It’s why this kind of thing happens as the rule, rather than the exception:

http://www.thewashcycle.com/2009/05/more-on-why-the-virginia-beach-homicide-was-not-a-crime.html

Read this set of articles from Bicycling Magazine from 2008, “Broken”. This is an organizing opportunity in Asheville, just as it became one in California due to all the deaths there:

http://www.bicycling.com/article/1,6610,s-3-12-16637-1,00.html

There is no question that laws with regard to bicycling as well as “accidents” resulting in fatalities, between cars and bicyclists and pedestrians need serious revision.

I’d expect that of all people in North Carolina, a liveable steets advocate would be most able to relate to why a New Yorker would be appalled. Or maybe I just have Steinberg syndrome and my world stops at the Hudson.

Though isn’t the venue to explain why most of America is a trashed wasteland I wouldn’t want to live in, Zeno, nor how living in stunts your moral and aesthetic senses, you might start with these bits of canon:

http://www.amazon.com/Suburban-Nation-Sprawl-Decline-American/dp/0865476063

http://www.amazon.com/Getting-There-Struggle-American-Mathematics/dp/0226300439

As for the illumination possible via my advocacy of parochialism: Is it not only natural that people are separated by culture, language, and geography?

You suggest I’m an enlightened genius for writing you off as different and therefore avoidable. But I see precious little evidence that universalism is the enlightened stance.

Incidentally I do think the story about Asheville’s failure to prosecute for murder, belongs on the NYC Streetsblog, because we _are_ in union with North Carolina, we’re paying lots of their bills, and their votes affect us. Hence the Streetsblog Network. But man, do I wish this all weren’t the case.

http://www.qando.net/?p=3931

“most of America is a trashed wasteland” – is NYC somehow exempt from this? I love it, but it’s one of the dirtiest cities in America. You can look over the Hudson and see swaths of the NJ coastal wetland literally on fire. You want to compare air quality between NYC and *any* city or town in NC? Sprawl is only one of the myriad ways we disrespect the earth. NYC is no stranger to violent crime and injustice as well, but I’m sure you know that, right?

“we’re paying lots of their bills” – hunh, and I thought it was Wall Street that got that $800 billion bailout a few months ago. Granted, some of that money went to Charlotte, the new de facto banking capital of the US, but NYC is still home to the Goldman Sachs of the world. Maybe *we* are tired of sending billions of welfare for the wealthy to your island.

I’m glad you’re proud of where you live. Maybe if you weren’t such a dickhead you could see that others can be proud of where they live as well.

This is the DA’s fault. The crime is not first-degree murder (it was not premeditated), and the prosecutor did not submit second-degree murder as an option to the grand jury. The grand jury therefore had no choice but to choose assault with a deadly weapon instead. Based on what we know, it seems highly likely that a second degree murder charge would have stuck, had the prosecutor offered that as an option.

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