2006-11-28

shootin' @ 10:32 p.m.

Now, some years ago, I worked collecting data for a CDC firearms project which entailed a team of us going down to Detroit to sift through the gunshot case files. Not pretty. But I realized that there are several things which one should NOT do if one wants to avoid getting shot in Detroit or anywhere for that matter, really. This may be a reprint but I've not time to go back and find the entry if it's here.

1) If someone has said to you very recently "I'M GOING TO SHOOT/KILL YOU IF/WHEN I SEE YOU AGAIN" and you run home, for god's sake, STAY PUT. Don't come out. Don't wander up and down the street, for you will most certainly be SHOT.

2) Stay away from the strip clubs, especially if you've been incarcerated in the not-too-distant past. In more than half the case files I read, the shootings took place in or outside of strip clubs and dealt with gang beefs when someone got out of prison.

So. What one paragraph stands out from the Sean Bell articles for me? This one:

However, Trini Wright, a dancer at the strip club where Bell's bachelor party was held, told the Daily News she was going to a diner with the men and was putting her makeup bag in the trunk of their car when the police minivan appeared.

I ain't got nothin' against strip clubs. I ain't got nothin' against bachelor parties. Hell, AS and his brother went to one a few nights before the wedding. But that was a strip club in Lansing, not Detroit or NY. I'm not sayin' it couldn't have happened there, either.

I'm just sayin'. Obey the rules of non-engagement. Al Sharpton said: We've got to understand that all of us were in that car."

No, sir. I was NOT in that car.