Thursday, June 5, 2008

CAID and the Information Age

Such a rabble-rousing, cluster-fuck of information - be it credible or factual or just heated hearsay and angry rants...One thing's for sure, this whole CAID "incident" and the blog storm that followed has sufficiently impressed upon me the new re-definition of journalism in this personal-computer-age. Blogs, essentially, are still treated (even forgiven) as being mostly diary-type declarations...so they are held to no standards. If someone really wanted to, they could have left the CAID that night/morning and posted something at 5 a.m.

It could simply be venom for the police response, toward the SWAT team storming in, angrily questioning the fairness of towing 44 cars at expense of $900. But it might be short on other facts - but...then, I'll save my blog indictments for another day, (yes, I know, this is also technically a blog.)

2nd Deptuy Chief James Tate, with the Detroit Police Department's Office of Public Information said that though this raid must have certainly been shocking to a lot of those in attendance (50 of the 130 were age 18-21) that it was standard procedure. "In the state of Michigan," said Tate, "the limit for serving alcohol is 2 o'clock, that's the law and there's nothing we can do. As far as making people get on the ground, that's how raids go. You don't know go in and say please, excuse me, you don't know out of those 130 people who has the gun, who has the knife."

Tate said he had been on raids before, and as it was described to him, he echoed that it sounded standard. Those patrons in attendance still take issue with how smoothly it was handled. Also, no guns, or knives were found on the patrons.

Tate said, thankfully, that no one was hurt. "Unfortunately, a lot of good kids just came to have fun and got caught up."

The issue is still pending, and out of respect for my friends involved - for specific legal reasons, I won't be saying much more on the subject. (For now, anyway.) Check the Free Press for more updates and go to http://www.thecaid.org/ for more information regarding the gallery and upcoming events.

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