Ferguson vs FaucetDirect

We needed a new faucet for our laundry room utility sink. I purchased the Elkay 406GN05T4 above. I found this interesting.

• First I searched Ferguson and called their wholesale / retail location. They've got it but it wasn't in stock at their Plymouth location and would have to be shipped in. Price $ 229.44
  
• Then I searched and purchased it from FaucetDirect. Price $ 154.70 with free shipping and no sales tax
  
• When it shipped, I checked out the shipping source and it was a Ferguson warehouse
• Interestingly, digging deeper, FaucetDirect is a Build.com company and Build.com is owned by Ferguson

The ‘Ferguson effect’ and the New Nationwide Crime Wave

The New Nationwide Crime Wave

Excerpt:

Gun violence in particular is spiraling upward in cities across America. In Baltimore, the most pressing question every morning is how many people were shot the previous night. Gun violence is up more than 60% compared with this time last year, according to Baltimore police, with 32 shootings over Memorial Day weekend. May has been the most violent month the city has seen in 15 years. In Milwaukee, homicides were up 180% by May 17 over the same period the previous year. Through April, shootings in St. Louis were up 39%, robberies 43%, and homicides 25%. “Crime is the worst I’ve ever seen it,” said St. Louis Alderman Joe Vacarro at a May 7 City Hall hearing. Murders in Atlanta were up 32% as of mid-May. Shootings in Chicago had increased 24% and homicides 17%. Shootings and other violent felonies in Los Angeles had spiked by 25%; in New York, murder was up nearly 13%, and gun violence 7%.

... The most plausible explanation of the current surge in lawlessness is the intense agitation against American police departments over the past nine months. Since last summer, the airwaves have been dominated by suggestions that the police are the biggest threat facing young black males today. A handful of highly publicized deaths of unarmed black men, often following a resisted arrest—including Eric Garner in Staten Island, N.Y., in July 2014, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in August 2014 and Freddie Gray in Baltimore last month—have led to riots, violent protests and attacks on the police. Murders of officers jumped 89% in 2014, to 51 from 27.

President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, before he stepped down last month, embraced the conceit that law enforcement in black communities is infected by bias. The news media pump out a seemingly constant stream of stories about alleged police mistreatment of blacks, with the reports often buttressed by cellphone videos that rarely capture the behavior that caused an officer to use force. Almost any police shooting of a black person, no matter how threatening the behavior that provoked the shooting, now provokes angry protests, like those that followed the death of Vonderrit Myers in St. Louis last October. The 18-year-old Myers, awaiting trial on gun and resisting-arrest charges, had fired three shots at an officer at close range. Arrests in black communities are even more fraught than usual, with hostile, jeering crowds pressing in on officers and spreading lies about the encounter.

Acquittals of police officers for the use of deadly force against black suspects are now automatically presented as a miscarriage of justice. Proposals aimed at producing more cop convictions abound, but New York state seems especially enthusiastic about the idea.

... This incessant drumbeat against the police has resulted in what St. Louis police chief Sam Dotson last November called the “Ferguson effect.” Cops are disengaging from discretionary enforcement activity and the “criminal element is feeling empowered,” Mr. Dotson reported. Arrests in St. Louis city and county by that point had dropped a third since the shooting of Michael Brown in August. Not surprisingly, homicides in the city surged 47% by early November and robberies in the county were up 82%. Similar “Ferguson effects” are happening across the country as officers scale back on proactive policing under the onslaught of anti-cop rhetoric. Arrests in Baltimore were down 56% in May compared with 2014. “Any cop who uses his gun now has to worry about being indicted and losing his job and family,” a New York City officer tells me. “Everything has the potential to be recorded. A lot of cops feel that the climate for the next couple of years is going to be nonstop protests.”

... “There are no real consequences for committing property crimes anymore,” Los Angeles Police Lt. Armando Munoz told Downtown News earlier this month, “and the criminals know this.” The Milwaukee district attorney, John Chisholm, is diverting many property and drug criminals to rehabilitation programs to reduce the number of blacks in Wisconsin prisons; critics see the rise in Milwaukee crime as one result. If these decriminalization and deincarceration policies backfire, the people most harmed will be their supposed beneficiaries: blacks, since they are disproportionately victimized by crime. The black death-by-homicide rate is six times higher than that of whites and Hispanics combined. The killers of those black homicide victims are overwhelmingly other black civilians, not the police. The police could end all use of lethal force tomorrow and it would have at most a negligible impact on the black death rate. In any case, the strongest predictor of whether a police officer uses force is whether a suspect resists arrest, not the suspect’s race.

Comment: Image source - movie poster from 1954's Crime Wave.

Ferguson: Riot and Ruin

Ferguson home values are plummeting, and residents are feeling the pain

Excerpt:

The average selling price of a home in the city has been on a steady decline since the shooting of Brown last August, according to housing data compiled from MARIS, an information and statistics service for real estate agents. Prior to Brown’s death, the average home sold in 2014 was selling for $66,764. For the last three and a half months of the year, the average home sold for $36,168, a 46 percent decrease. The trend has continued on through this year, with the average home selling for only $22,951 so far in 2015. Another negative indicator: in the eight and a half months leading up to Brown’s death, the average residential square foot in 2014 was selling for $45.82. In the eight and a half months since Brown’s passing, the average residential square foot in the city has sold for $24.11. That’s about a 47 percent downtick in one of real estate’s core indicators. “This is not normal for the region,” says Crista Patton, a local REMAX real estate agent who helped get these numbers for Fusion. “Last time I pulled up numbers like this for a neighborhood around here, we were seeing the market going up,” she says. “In St. Louis in general, the market is going up, and as a whole it’s almost completely recovered from the recession.”

Comment:If experience is any guide, it will take decades to recover. See Zillow search

Escape from "the mob"

Police: Driver who lurched into crowd was 'attempting to flee from the mob'

Excerpt:

The driver who lurched into a south Minneapolis intersection packed with Ferguson protesters was “attempting to flee from the mob” when he ran over and slightly injured a 16-year-old girl as others were atop the hood of his car, police said Wednesday. The driver, a 40-year-old man from St. Paul, was questioned moments after the incident late Tuesday afternoon on eastbound E. Lake Street at Minnehaha Avenue S., and Minneapolis police said Wednesday that the case “remains under investigation.” The man was not arrested, and no charges have been filed. A few hours later, the man’s mother said in an interview that he was coming home from work and “didn’t even know what was going on” when he encountered the crowd of several hundred blocking the intersection. The girl who was run over by the horn-blaring Subaru station wagon was taken by emergency responders to Regions Hospital for treatment of minor injuries, police said. “The victim’s vehicle was damaged by a large group of people,” reads the report released Wednesday by police. “While [the driver] was attempting to flee from the mob, he struck a pedestrian. State accident report filed.” The report lists the driver as a “victim” and the injured girl under the “other” category. Much of the scene, unfolding within a few steps of the Police Department’s Third Precinct headquarters, was captured on a Star Tribune video. Additional aerial video from KSTP-TV, Channel 5, shows that the driver had paused behind a vehicle stopped in front of it, and then steered to the right around that vehicle and drove slowly into the crowd that was blocking the intersection. There were three people on the hood of his car as he knocked down the girl.

Comment: Our own drive home yesterday - a police presence was on our route. Re the girl being "other" ... you could have said "stupid"

Black Leadership needed in Ferguson case

Obama's Split-Screen Appeal Lost in Ferguson's Anger

Excerpt:

It will be an image that may endure beyond Barack Obama's tenure: The president calling for calm on one side of the TV screen; the scene in Ferguson, Mo. escalating with sirens, smoke, flash grenades, and furious residents on the other. Obama emerged into the White House Briefing Room shortly after 10 pm ET, a little more than 90 minutes after prosecutors in St. Louis County announced that a grand jury had voted to not indict Officer Darren Wilson in the summer shooting death of Michael Brown.

Comment: More: Ferguson grand jury decision: Brown's death should be call to action not violence

Where is the black leadership now that a grand jury has decided not to indict the police officer that killed Michael Brown? Where is Al Sharpton? He advertises himself as a spokesman for the best interests of black America. But he is absent. Where is Jesse Jackson, another popular media personality who says he speaks for black America? He’s missing in action, too.

Example of incendiary speech: "Michael Brown's Stepfather Urged Protesters To "Burn This Bitch Down" After Grand Jury Announcement".

Helpful leadership: "A sunrise prayer vigil and dozens of clergy marching in the streets here Tuesday was a stark counterpoint to the destruction and looting that took place Monday night just miles away in Ferguson. Pastors in bright orange vests led a calm protest with more than 100 people here, blocking a few intersections and ending up in front of the building where the county prosecutor announced Monday evening that a grand jury wouldn’t indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old on, Aug. 9."

Riot Time?

Ferguson Steels for More Unrest
Excerpt:

Walk down West Florissant Avenue, and the scars of the summer are still there. The door and display window of a beauty supply store remain covered with plywood; a glued-up poster, “Beauty Town Is Back,” is the one hopeful sign of the life inside. A cellphone store, too, still has the plywood up from when riots and confrontations with the police shook this neighborhood. And the Family of Faith Baptist Church uses its billboard to proclaim, “Join us as we pray for peace.” But few are expecting peace as this St. Louis suburb prepares for a grand jury decision, expected in the next few weeks, on whether to indict the police officer who fatally shot an unarmed black man in August, inciting months of protests and putting Ferguson at the center of a national debate over the police and race. Here, where heavily fortified police officers faced the demonstrators and the nights sometimes turned violent, even those shopkeepers who put in new windows are boarding up again.

Comments: Image source. Seems predictable. One group doesn't get their own way ... violence and destruction is resorted to.

When Al Sharpton came to town

Lots of rhetoric, no problem-solving from Sharpton and other leaders
Excerpt:

So Al Sharpton came to town. Didn't see him when the grandmother was killed in the crossfire. Or when little Antonio Johnson died while doing homework. Or on any weekend when violence seems to be an ordinary occurrence. Why? Well you don't need a Harvard degree to figure it out. He calls himself a "shining light" but the truth is, he and many leaders are dim bulbs in a dysfunctional society. There's lots of rhetoric, gesturing and catchy phrases but no positive, productive problem-solving. No looking inward. Does anybody really think those involved with looting, vandalism, civil disobedience care what these leaders say? They understand a totally different kind of language. My thoughts are with the good people of Ferguson. May your community start to heal and become unified.

Justice will be served in Brown's killing
Excerpt:

I'm a black man, born and raised in the city of St. Louis. I went to public schools, graduated from Beaumont High. I served my country in the Navy. This behavior in Ferguson makes no sense. We need to look in the mirror. This killing of Michael Brown is a tragedy. Justice will be served, but not like this. All of this is taking away from what happened to this young man. He was trying to better himself; we should be remembering all of his wonderful qualities. The person that did this will be brought to justice. When given time, the justice system will work. In closing, why is it that nobody sees or knows anything when it is a black killing a black? We kill each other everyday, and nobody in the neighborhood sees anything. Why is that?

Comment: Two common sense letters to the editor. Re the first letter - I hyperlinked to the Antonio Johnson story. Not sure what the "grandmother" story is about. Image source