{"id":3119,"date":"2009-02-10T09:47:43","date_gmt":"2009-02-10T14:47:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/?p=3119"},"modified":"2009-02-10T13:11:38","modified_gmt":"2009-02-10T18:11:38","slug":"mischief","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/3119","title":{"rendered":"Mischief"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Some time ago the Bay Shore Gay and Lesbian Center for Youths was vandalized.&nbsp; Its front door was broken and its van had its tires slashed, its windows busted out, and its sideview mirrors mangled.<\/p>\n<p>Today I read that arrests in the case have been made and&#8230;surprise, surprise, the police have in their impartial wisdom determined that the vandals had not a prejudiced bone in their bodies after all&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.newsday.com\/news\/local\/suffolk\/ny-livand0211,0,1851169.story\">Cops: Vandalism at gay center not hate crime<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy called the vandalism at a Bay Shore gay and lesbian center for youths an &quot;attack against the gay community.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Gov. David A. Paterson dispatched the state&#8217;s commissioner of human rights to visit the site and deliver a message calling for acceptance.<\/p>\n<p>And the Suffolk County Police Hate Crimes Unit investigated last week&#8217;s incident as a hate crime.<\/p>\n<p>It turns out the vandalism at the Long Island Gay and Lesbian Youth Center was not a hate crime after all, police said Tuesday.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>What a relief to know that!&nbsp; Because&#8230;er&#8230;because&#8230;&nbsp; Well because the police just say so&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Police declined to say what led them to determine the crime was not bias-related.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>I see.&nbsp; Three men and a woman, two of them 21 years old, one 20 and one 19, decided to slash a van&#8217;s tires completely at random.&nbsp; And then they broke out all its windows.&nbsp; And then they mangled the sideview mirrors.&nbsp; And then&#8230;again completely at random, they decided to break out a door that only happened to belong to the same group that owned the van.&nbsp; Just&#8230;on a lark&#8230;&nbsp; It had nothing to do with the fact that the van had the Long Island LGBT Youth center logo on it.&nbsp; And that door&#8230;it was just a coincidence that it also happened to be the door to the Long Island LGBT Youth center.&nbsp; There was no anti-gay animus involved here.&nbsp; Take our word for it.&nbsp; Because we insist you take our word for it.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Police arrested three men and a woman, all from Bay Shore, Monday in connection with the vandalism and charged each of them with second-degree criminal mischief. None of the four was charged with a hate crime.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Mischief&#8230;<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" alt=\" \" src=\"\/images\/bay_shore_glbt_center_attack-2.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p align=\"left\">Mischief&#8230;<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"500\" height=\"400\" alt=\" \" src=\"\/images\/bay_shore_glbt_center_attack.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p align=\"left\">&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=\"left\">But seriously&#8230;what more could attacking homosexuals amount to anyway, other then mischief?&nbsp; You say &quot;hate crime&quot; like its a bad thing&#8230;\n<\/p>\n<p align=\"left\"><em>[Update&#8230;]<\/em>&nbsp; Reports are coming out now that two of the suspects were former clients of the center, who had been asked to leave for an as yet unspecified disruptive behavior&#8230;more then three years ago.<\/p>\n<p align=\"left\">&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some time ago the Bay Shore Gay and Lesbian Center for Youths was vandalized.&nbsp; Its front door was broken and its van had its tires slashed, its windows busted out, and its sideview mirrors mangled. Today I read that arrests in the case have been made and&#8230;surprise, surprise, the police have in their impartial wisdom [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[10,34,32,41,20,26],"class_list":["post-3119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-anti-gay-violence","tag-george-bushs-america","tag-hate","tag-prejudice","tag-the-american-gutter","tag-the-bully-mindset"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3119\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}