We had friends visit on Sunday and it all turned into rather a dinner party. I’m not sure I like arranged gatherings, but it was nice. The food was good and teh children were well behaved.
I’m pleased to say that the boy is now into Harry Potter and we’re reading Philosopher’s Stone together at bedtime now. There was no time last night due to dinner guests, but I have promised 2 chapters tonight. Harry Potter books are not ideal bedtime reading material because the chapters are very long. The stories are really good though and I’m enjoying them again.
Mondays are busy days for the boy because he has a guitar lesson, hockey training, and martial arts in the evening. He is usually pretty tired by bedtime. The hockey training is field hockey, not ice hockey, but we got some discounted ice hockey tickets through his school and on Saturday I took him to his first ice hockey match. We have a good local team and I’d forgotten how much fun a match could be. We met some of his school friends there and he was shouting and cheering so loudly, I’m quite surprised he still had a voice the following day. Our team won 4-1. We saw a fight break out, ate junk food, and had a good time.
I want to comment on this story in the Independent, but I’m not exactly sure what I want to say, so I am going to start walking, and see where we end up. It would appear that Hollywood actress Daniele Watts (Django unchained apparently) was handcuffed and thrown roughly into the back of an LAPD police car after she refused to show id when stopped by police as she talked to her father on a mobile phone. She was apparently stopped because she was spotted kissing her husband in public and it was assumed that she was a prostitute. The media are making this a race issue, perhaps with some justification, since Ms Watts is black, and her husband is white.
I have no knowledge of the law in LA, but it would seem that refusing to show id when requested by police is not illegal, but police do have the power to detain people if they have reason to suspect that a law is being broken and the suspect refuses to identify him/herself. There are some unknowns here. We’re told that Ms Watts was sitting on her husband’s lap, and that they were kissing. We’re not told any details and it might have been explicit or inappropriate for a public place. Ms Watts was certainly not dressed in a particularly revealing outfit. Reading the report, I’m not sure who spotted the couple and alerted the police.
No one is suggesting that any law was broken, and the police released Ms Watts soon after the event, without any arrest or caution. As far as I am aware, no direct accusation was made by the police suggesting Ms Watts was a working prostitute. She sustained a cut on her wrist in the process of the handcuffing. These are the facts as I see them.
Since no law was broken, it seems astounding to me that this lady was cuffed and thrown into a police car. My surprise may be heightened because I am British and police here would never restrain anyone with cuffs unless they were using threatening behaviour. More than that, she was humiliated by the police for reasons I simply don’t understand. Even if Ms Watts was a working prostitute, sitting on a man’s lap and kissing him in public is hardly evidence of illegal behaviour. I would suggest that it shouldn’t be grounds for arrest.
Would the police have acted the same way if Ms Watts and her husband had both been white? The suggestion is that Ms Watts looked like a prostitute because she was a black woman kissing a white man. As a white man married to a non-white woman, that bothers me as much as the heavy handed attitude of the police.
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