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Take a cop to dinner.

Racketeers take cops to dinner with payoffs. Pimps take cops to dinner with free tricks. Dealers take cops to dinner with free highs. Business takes cops to dinner with graft.

Unions and Corporations take cops to dinner with post-retirement jobs.

Schools and Professional Clubs take cops to dinner with free tickets to athletic events and social affairs.

The Catholic Church takes cops to dinner by exempting them from religious duties.

The Justice Department takes cops to dinner with laws

giving them the right to do almost anything.

The Defense Department takes cops to dinner by releasing

them from all military obligations.

Establishment newspapers take cops to dinner by propagating the image of the friendly, uncorrupt, neighborhood policeman.

Places of entertainment take cops to dinner with free booze and admission to shows.

Merchants take cops to dinner with discounts and gifts.

Neighborhood Committees and Social Organizations take cops to dinner with free discussions offering discriminating insights into hipsterism, black militancy and the drug culture.

Cops take cops to dinner by granting each other immunity to prosecu

tion for misdemeanors and anything else they can get away with.Cops take themselves to dinner by inciting riots.

~nd so, if you own anything or yol~ don't, take a cop to dinner this week and feed his power to judge, prosecute and brutalize the streets of your Clty.

n.b. Gourmet George Metesky would remind everyone not to make the same mistake as ~rnold Schuster who served the right course at the wrong time.

the diggers.

These Papers, which only cost $1.50 per thousand, more than aroused the so-called leadership class of the Haight-Ashbury, and they tried to find out who the Diggers were. They were answered with telegrams: REGARDING INQUIRIES CONCERNED WITH THE IDENTITY AND WHEREABOUTS OF THE DIGGERS; HAPPY TO REPORT THE DIGGERS ARE NOT THAT. Emmett and Billy wanted to maintain their anonymity in the hope of achieving the kind of autonomy Gregory Corso [end page 239]

talks about in his poem, "Power." They sought to dramatize that power of autonomy by performing Corso's only play, Standing on a Street Corner, before the morning, lunch, and evening rush-hour crowd of Montgomery Street office workers, without letting on that the performance was a staged event--the point being to lead the white-collars into believing they were witnessing an actuality which thrice repeated itself. However, something happened that made the one-act play seem relatively unimportant, and it never got beyond rehearsal.

Mid-Tuesday afternoon in that last week of September, a sixteenyear-old kid named Johnson was shot three times dead in the back by a fifty-one-year-old, pot-bellied cop named Johnson, who was only a few feet away from him on "the Hill" overlooking Palau Street in Hunter's Point. The boy was black, the cop was white and said, "I did everything I could to avoid doing what I did. I'm sure sorry."

His apology didn't satisfy the black community, which had emerged during World War Two when the white trickle to the outer cities became a tide and the myth of suburbia was built. The black population of San Francisco swelled from four thousand to eighty thousand. They came to work in the war industries, and after the war was over they were deposited in an outer-city slum instead of an inner-city ghetto. Hunter's Point was their outer city. It's a peninsula, and when the insurrection erupted a few hours after the boy had been killed running away from a car, which wasn't reported stolen until the next day, the cops effectively cut off the peninsula from the mainland by blocking off the linking span at Third Street for ten blocks.

As soon as black tempers began to flare, and the young ones started to run through the streets, looting and setting fires, Mayor John Shelly declared that a state of emergency existed in the Bayview-Hunter's Point Area and proclaimed a curfew from 8 P.M. to 6 A.M. He also announced that he wasn't going to permit a repetition of what had occurred "in that other city south of here," and he telephoned Governor Edmund Brown, who was on tour campaigning against Ronald Reagan for reelection in Imperial County, and asked him to order out the national guard.

Many of the two thousand troops were veterans of Watts, and most of them were stashed in a makeshift outpost at Kezar Stadium when they arrived in the city. Police Chief Thomas Cahill ordered the entire S.F. police force, on duty together for the first time since [end page 240]

 

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