✅ Printed in the USA
✅ High-quality
✅ Order at amazon.com
BUY THIS PRODUCTS FROM AMAZON.COM HERE
People are So Ungrateful No One Ever Thanks Me for Having The Patience Not to Kill Them Shirt
———————————————————————
People are So Ungrateful No One Ever Thanks Me for Having The Patience Not to Kill Them Shirt
A couple of stray dogs were running loose in the parking lot of the Linn County fairgrounds just after 8 a.M. On Oct. 23, 2019, and Gerry Morris, a community service officer with the Albany Police Department in Oregon, was on his way to help round them up. Morris turned onto a street that snakes past the blank-looking backs of stores and homes wedged next to railroad tracks. He noticed a beat-up silver Nissan Sentra stranded in the bike lane, partially blocking the road. A man with salt-and-pepper hair, who was wearing baggy gray sweatpants and a sleeveless blue shirt, was struggling to push it out of the way, but he didn’t appear to be making much progress. The dogs could wait. Morris pulled over and got out. As a service officer, he is one of four unarmed officers employed by the small police department in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. As he described it, CSOs are tasked with handling “livability-type issues”: abandoned vehicles, municipal code violations, fender benders. “I don’t even carry handcuffs,” Morris would tell a detective from the Oregon State Police six days later. And, unlike the department’s armed officers, CSOs don’t wear body cameras. By the fall of 2019, Morris had been working in law enforcement in the Willamette Valley for nearly 40 years, first with the Eugene Police and then for 17 years as an armed officer for Albany PD. He’d been a CSO in Albany for the past 16. He received all of his police training in the Willamette Valley, and evidence of his long career there is scattered across local news: In 1994, his promotion to the narcotics team made the paper; in 2006, as a CSO, Morris appeared on the front page after he tased an aggressive pit bull. Later, in one August 2010 photo, Morris is shown flipping burgers at a community barbecue. On the Albany Police Department’s Facebook page are photos of him snuggling rescued puppies and baby goats. “Can I help you push it off the road?” Morris asked the man. “I ran out of gas,” the man responded. But they might have trouble, he added:
He had a back injury. Morris said they could still give it a try. Morris, who later told the Oregon State Police detective that he didn’t recognize the man, had in fact encountered him at least four times before. His name was James Plymell III. Plymell initially said that he didn’t have the car keys, but then, moments later, he patted his pockets and found them. Morris thought that was odd. He looked into the car and saw boxes piled high with clothing and belongings in the front seat, suggesting that Plymell was living in it. And Plymell seemed nervous. “His verbiage — it wasn’t making sense,” Morris told the state police. “I could see the front of his pants were wet. Getting closer to him, you could smell a sweet odor of … something.” Morris later told the detective that once he saw Plymell’s wet pants, he decided to call for backup. “Station one, code two,” Morris radioed in, a non-emergency request for assistance. This seemed to make Plymell even more anxious — “amped up,” Morris said. Plymell rifled through the boxes in the passenger seat; Morris, worried that he was looking for a weapon, told Plymell to keep his hands where he could see them. “Step it up,” Morris said into his radio. In Albany, a town of 53,000 people, local police knew Plymell well: who he was, who he wasn’t, and how he acted around law enforcement. Between 2012 and 2019, the department ticketed, cited or arrested him about once per month on average.
High Country News reviewed a list of 103 incidents during that time and found no mention of weapons, no record of violence. Plymell’s crimes involved sleeping in public parks, littering, drinking in public or being intoxicated — the kind of infractions that housing advocates and legal experts say cities and towns use to criminalize homelessness, poverty, addiction and the behavior of people with mental health issues. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic crippled the U.S. Economy and forced an estimated 30 million people to face potential eviction, homelessness was on the rise. In 2019, an estimated 568,000 people in the U.S. Experienced homelessness. And the issue is particularly severe on the West Coast: In California, Oregon and Washington, in 2019, 29 to 38 people per 10,000 were homeless; those three states, along with the District of Columbia, New York and Hawaii, had the highest rates of homelessness nationwide. (Alaska, Nevada and Colorado had only slightly lower rates.) “There is not one city in the entire United States where there is enough shelter for people that are homeless,” Donald Whitehead, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, said. “That’s rural, that’s urban, that’s suburban. That’s across the board. … This isn’t just a big-city problem.” It’s a problem in Albany, too — and, in this case, it would contribute to James Plymell’s death, lying on the pavement on a cut-through street, next to a bright yellow-painted Battery X-Change store, across from a line of old houses, near a PetCo, and a Goodwill, and a strip mall. A place between places.
Visit our Social Network: Pinterest, Blogger, and see more at our collection.
