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Comment by jbroson | Hacker News Reader

"Sounds to me like those legitimate criticisms are exactly what the "insane Weaver residents" are complaining about."

Really, the white dude who complained to the cops to do something about the black and latino car club because they are "scary" is just genuinely concerned about law and order and the imperative that all minor violations of local codes must always be enforced?

Color me skeptical.

Calling the cops on scary black people for minor infractions of ticky-tack laws is how Eric Garner and many others have ended up killed at the hands of law enforcement.

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Calling the cops for a sustained and recurrent noise, environmental and traffic disturbance that means you can't reasonably enjoy your home or its immediate environment at the weekend... Seems fair, not racist or even bizarrely NIMBY.

"This is a tradition" isn't good enough. It has to remain a tradition that people want in their back yards. If they don't, find somewhere else to do your noisy car things.

Clearly the police here disagree, and feel that anyone can be as disruptive as they like.

The article literally has people saying they complained to the police because the black and brown men are "scary"

And here you are claiming there's NOTHING AT ALL wrong with that.

Sure let's just ignore decades of selective enforcement of law to discriminate against black and brown people, I guess "racism is over" because it makes you uncomfortable

That's not even an honest reading of the text. It does not report that a white person says brown people are scary, it says they complained about a "celebration".

Leave your baggage at the door. These things are objectively noisy, objectively disruptive and leave a whole heap of very real mess in their wake. Those are my problems, skin colour is yours.

Talk about a strawman. Are there some people who might have complained for dumb reasons? Sure. Are there more people would would have complained because they don't want their residential neighborhood to:

- be filled with thrash

- smell like burning rubber

- violate noise ordinances

every single Sunday? Yes. Most middle-aged people do not want to live in such an environment, and neither do I. This is exactly why residential zoning laws exist, and most people support some form of restrictions in residential neighborhoods. Not sure what there is to be skeptical about.

Then they should have done some research about the neighborhood they were moving into.

Is that a law?

In all of America there are actual laws against littering, noise and pollution and wherever I move I expect them to be enforced.

Also I wonder if these lawbreakers were respectful of the culture that existed prior to them arriving? I doubt it and with that I will conclude that they probably don't deserve the same respect. It's a free country you know? If they don't like it they can move somewhere else (and probably disrupt wherever they move to).

I've been on the receiving end of car heads moving into my neighborhood. I ended up having to move out. What goes around, comes around I guess.

Maybe you should have just told them about the laws.

I did. I also told the cops and other regulators numerous times. Unfortunately it's hard to catch someone running a professional mechanics garage out of their house. You have to setup 24/7 audio/video surveillance with expensive equipment to measure decibels, review it daily and eventually bring them to court (and win). Furthermore, even if you do get the laws enforced, you still have to put up with them doing legal things like running machinery in their garage every day up until 10pm (in that town) while they work on "their own/family" vehicles which would still be annoying.

If a bunch of people like me moved into town and started complaining, we probably could have gotten rid of those lowly pests that moved next door to me.

Since that wasn't happening anytime soon, I figured the next best thing is to just use some of my high income to move to a place where these kinds of lower class people can't afford to live and that's exactly what I did. I saved plenty of money living in a lower class neighborhood for a long time and the market conditions were totally right for a move so in the end, I actually won.

"Talk about a strawman"

...YOU are the one who claimed everyone that was complaining had a legitimate complaint about law and order and enforcement of local codes.

I mean it's literally in the first few paragraphs of the piece that some dude thought the black and brown guys at the car club were "scary" so he reported them.

"Are there some people who might have complained for dumb reasons?"

"dumb reasons"?

I think the term you should be looking for is "bigoted" reasons.

> ...YOU are the one who claimed everyone that was complaining had a legitimate complaint about law and order and enforcement of local codes.

Read again. I never claimed that 100% of complainers had legitimate motivations or complaints. And YOU responded by cherry-picking a single person who had dumb motivations, and acting as though he is representative of everyone else, and the point I am making. This is the definition of a cherry-picking and a strawman.

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