The Police.
On Saturday April 3rd I received by certified mail a letter from the Recreation Manager informing me that I was banned from attending the Senior Center for one week. You can read the letter here .
(If the typeface is a bit too small to read comfortably, just click on the '100%' button in the bottom right corner of your browser, and choose an increased size).
As you may note from the letter, which was dated April 2nd, the ban was 'effective today', for seven days, which meant up to and including April 8th.
This ban did not concern me in the least – there was no way that I was going to risk injury by attending a facility where my attacker was still permitted to lurk. It was like banning a kid from eating broccoli and tidying his room for a week. It was a torment I could happily endure. The audience for the weekly Thursday sing-song were not pleased that it was being cancelled, though, and started a petition to get me back. This news made it into the local paper, the Mountain View Voice, and you can read about it right at the end of the article here.
A week later, at around 7:15 a.m. on Friday April 9th my wife and I played our customary three sets of goodminton (our version of badminton which uses no net) in the parking lot between the Senior Center and the Children's Center, and then rested on a park bench to check our emails on a laptop computer before setting off to walk back to our apartment in the adjacent complex. We play on most fine mornings when the breeze is not too strong, before the parking lot begins to fill with cars when the Center opens at 8:30 am. We have been doing this for over a year, ever since we came to live in Mountain View.
As we walked around the north west corner of the Senior Center on our way towards the gate to our complex, I became aware of a commotion behind me, and stopped to see what was going on. As I did so, a police officer came around from our left hand side and took up a position in front of us. He struck me forcibly in the chest with the heel of his hand, and shouted, 'STOP!', though we were no longer moving. He then melodramatically made a gesture of reaching for a firearm or other such weapon on his right hip. We had quite a large audience for this pantomime, since there was a line of our friends and acquaintances from the Senior Center standing nearby waiting for it to open. A squad car driven by another officer had pulled up off the road and onto the unpaved area, no doubt in order to cut off our escape and to prevent us from making a run for it. Actually, 'making a hobble for it' might be a more accurate description, in our case.
I was puzzled, because we play in the parking lot on most fine mornings and have never had a problem. When I asked the officer why we had been stopped he did not give a reason. I was holding the laptop with both my hands clasped in front of me, and he struck me on the hands with an envelope and instructed me to take it. I did so, and opened it to read it. In its contents I could find nothing which threw any light on what crime we had been stopped for. At first glance, the letter seemed to be a long, rambling screed about a gerbil, and strange body movements. Honestly! I'm not kidding. A gerbil!
Then the officer warned me that if I were caught anywhere in the parking lot again, I would be arrested. Again, no explanation was given as to what crime I would be arrested for.
Why were two officers of Mountain View Police Department, at enormous expense, attending a location where no crime had taken place, was not currently taking place, and was not likely to take place in the immediate future? And why were two peaceful, law-abiding elderly people forcibly stopped on their way home, in a manner which involved the use of violence?
