The Exeter police chief, William Shupe, went criminal on Frese when, if he felt compelled to do anything at all, he could have gone civil.
The Union-Leader: "Frese believes the [criminal] misdemeanor charge is meant to revoke the suspended sentence included in his plea deal, which would land him in prison for 2 to 4 years."
Although the charge against Frese was eventually dropped, cops everywhere surely must applaud Shupe for having sent a strong signal about the risks of criticizing police.
The sentiment in the above meme became reality in the charge against Frese.
The meme was posted by Guardians of the Thin Blue Line, the same group from which another meme, widely described as racist, was recently shared on the Hadley Police Department's official Facebook page by, according to the Gazette, a police admin, Sgt. Ken Hartwright.
The meme was taken down from Hadley PD's page after they were alerted to it by one or more Hadley residents who found it deeply offensive.
While I did not attend the Kumbaya, paper-it-over meeting at the Hadley station (I wasn't exactly invited), I found it hard to accept Hartwright's explanation as described in the Gazette.
Hartwright allegedly said he skipped over the first half of the meme, which was about the Starbucks arrests, and took in only the second half of it, about the Florida assassination of two cops. But somehow he posted the whole thing.
The false equivalency of the entire meme was quickly and emphatically pointed out. I'm just not sure how posting half a meme makes much sense, but that was apparently Hartwright's explanation.
Coincidentally, Hartwright, according to his own personal Facebook page, lives in Vernon CT,
which is a good drive from Hadley. So, naturally, I recalled the "mcsmom" of Topix.
And I wondered whether they share the same-but-different implicit feelings about a Missing White Woman as opposed to, say, a Balkan immigrant left for dead on Triangle Street in the town next to Hadley. Or is that another false equivalency?
I don't think so.
In fact, I think it's becoming increasingly clear, despite claims like those by UMPD's Sgt. Jeffrey Skinner, that there is a troubling convergence of, on one hand, racist authoritarianism within right-wing law enforcement and, on the other hand, a sexist authoritarianism within left-wing social justice movements, a convergence frequently and virulently exemplified in the Vasi/Murray case(s).
This marriage of convenience is maintained, in this instance, by the vigilante swiftness with which Vasi's known plight is contemptuously swept aside in favor of the imagined fate of a young, attractive, and, of course, helpless (thus needing the protection only men can provide, as if women were objects like vintage cars) white woman who is known only to have disappeared after she went to a liquor store.
No matter how much attention is focused on Maura Murray and New Hampshire, nothing changes what BSG saw.
Nothing about the Saturn's Haverhill spinout changes what happened to Petrit Vasi in Amherst, Massachusetts, a case that both right-wing police and left-wing SJWs have consistently gone out of their way to trivialize, dismiss, and ignore.
In this week’s NYT Book Review, Timothy Snyder writes the following about Benjamin Carter Hett’s recent book, The Death of Democracy: “...the Nazis were the great artists of victimhood fiction.”
No one does victimhood fiction in this country, in these times, better than police on the far right and SJWs on the far left. Strange bedfellows indeed, as the Vasi/Murray case(s) continually demonstrate(s).
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