Had me a bit of a run in with Louisville's thin blue line of heros this morning while volunteering downtown. While I managed to avoid directly interacting with them, (I'd had about 3 hours of sleep, as surly as that makes me it wouldn't have ended well) several of my comrades weren't so lucky. As infuriating as it was to stand there and have to watch cops get in my friends' faces carrying on about 'You can't do that!', it was also kinda funny. Used to, the Kentucky Revised Statutes (what they call the state laws around here) was one of my favorite sources for new bad ideas and I made something of a habit of reading them.
Listening to the cop, it quickly became obvious that she hadn't spent nearly as much time reading the K.R.S. and was spouting off bullshit. To give you some idea of the nonsense coming out of her mouth, we were told that we couldn't raise our arm to gesture or direct someone, that would count as assault.
After last year I can't hardly look at a cop without wondering if they were one of the ones shooting pepper balls and tear gas and chucking flashbangs at me or if they were the ones that hurt my friends or arrested my pandemic partner. As the cop continued to spout nonsense that all went through my head and then I got to wondering if I had any photos of her from the protests. When I got home I had to dig out my photos from last year and go through them to see.
I still don't know if I do, I came across these photos from the third day of protests here last year and couldn't pass them up without editing a few. That day I'd tried to join a march by getting ahead of it on its route and then heading towards it (it'd already started when I found out about it) but LMPD completely blocked the street to intercept it before I could join. That day the sun seemed to be shining directly at my camera as I was shooting, as I was editing these I decided to have fun with that and edit a little differently.
That's enough ranting about LMPD, time to go enjoy what's left of this weekend. Y'all don't do anything I wouldn't do!
