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This Sunday, July 5, San Francisco's International Longshore and Warehouse Union will hold a procession to commemorate the 75th Anniversary of Bloody Thursday, the clash between police and striking longshoremen during the city's 1934 General Strike that led to a permanent local rift between cops and stevedores.

The San Francisco Labor Council is also going to be joining in the festivities, and is spreading the word about the event through its e-mail list. When we got one such e-mail, we couldn't help thinking that this landmark anniversary falls at a time when a renewed split between cops and the rest of local labor is deepening.

The new source of tension is the Labor Council's decision to support a group of former Black Liberation Army radicals charged with murdering San Francisco Police Sgt. John V. Young during an attack on the Ingleside police station in 1971. In May, San Francisco Police Officers Association President Gary Delagnes lambasted the council for passing a resolution urging that charges against the men be dropped.

   

Every kid without a license takes dad's car for a joyride. But not every kid's dad calls the cops to teach junior a lesson. Yesterday, that's exactly what one Ingleside father did.

At about 11:38 a.m., he flagged down a patrol car on the 1200 block of Athens St. because his teenage son and nephew, who do not have driver's licenses, had gone for a joyride in a Mazda belonging to another relative. (This might sound confusing but it isn't -- the owner of the car was the brother of the man who called the cops, making him the father and uncle of the joyriders). 

Anyway, as the man flagged police down, the two unlicensed juveniles, who had just parked nearby, took off running but were quickly apprehended. A total of five police officers were involved in the investigation of the incident, according to a report, but in the end, the owner of the car decided that pressing charges against the boys probably wasn't necessary.  

The report doesn't mention whether or not the boys pissed themselves.

Say goodbye to Booger, Kitty, and Mousey

Gregory Pike, San Francisco's renowned "Dog-Cat-Rat Man," was found guilty this afternoon on a misdemeanor charge of public obstruction for drawing large crowds at the corner of Geary and Powell with his beloved animal act.

As a result, he said, he plans to leave San Francisco, where he has sojourned for roughly a year, and return to his hometown of Bisbee, Ariz. "Thank the public for me," Pike said after his verdict. "When I leave here in two weeks, I'm not coming back."

Pike said he was fined $236 by a San Francisco Superior Court judge for the public-obstruction charge, which was filed several months ago. He said he does not plan to pay up. Said Pike after the ruling, "Is it illegal to be so good at what you do that you draw a big crowd?" He added, "That doesn't sound right."

Kaushal Niroula

Four San Franciscan alleged con men accused in Palm Springs of robbing and killing a 74-year-old retiree can breathe easier following a meeting last week with prosecutors, according to City News Service ace Jessica E. Davis.

Riverside County District Attorney Rod Pacheco had filed charges that, in the event of a guilty verdict, could have led to the death penalty for Kaushal Niroula and his on-again, off-again lovers Daniel Garcia and David Replogle, a San Francisco attorney. Also charged was Niroula's friend Miguel Bustamante, a former Castro barkeep who had allegedly been hired to help steal the assets of Clifford Lambert, 74, who disappeared Dec. 6, and is presumed dead.
Following a meeting between Pacheco and the defendant's attorneys, the district attorney's office announced he would not seek the death penalty. If convicted, the men could face life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
 
The case was detailed in the April 1 feature "The Dark Prince," which followed the high-stakes alleged crime career of Niroula, who is believed to have stolen at least $1.3 million in elaborate con operations before he and his friends made their way to Palm Springs, and into Lambert's life and accused death.

Hey, where's the city's cut of that loot?

Cops from the city's central district this week reported busting up a game of three-card monte by Pier 35. Good thing, too -- apparently, the schemer was using a trio of bottle caps to conceal a ball (which he palmed, of course), and that's low-class. It reflects poorly upon our city for purveyors of fraudulent games to use shoddy materials like bottle caps. Are there no cups for this man?

While the purveyors of this game were taken into custody, this is the wrong approach. Based upon the passage of Mayor Gavin Newsom's transparently opportunistic cigarette fee -- the methodology and rationale are manifestly dishonest; it's simply a chance to wrest much-needed funds from a group of people who are looked down upon and have no political pull here -- three-card monte scammers shouldn't be arrested but deputized by the city. Force them to hand over a certain percentage of their "earnings" to a devoted fund and set them off on their merry way.

In the same way that smokers really can't complain about being asked to cough up an extra 20 cents per pack for a habit even biblical young earthers know will kill you, how can someone naive enough to actually plink money on the table of a three-card monte player operating in a well-known tourist haven have the temerity to complain when he's hustled?

The Guardian would have you believe that stealing this van is a violation of The Raker Act

So SFist is blaming the robbery of the San Francisco Bay Guardian's "Best of the Bay" van on us. Apparently, some miscreant(s) broke into the SFBG's parking lot last night and zoomed off with the easily identifiable van, powering through a chain-link fence during the great escape.

A quick office poll yielded no admissions of guilt. The poll has also turned up the tip that it's more likely this was an inside job; perhaps one of the Guardian's unpaid interns was seeking the transportation that a $0 salary could not support. Or perhaps, suggested another shout from across the newsroom, the van is still actually in the parking lot, merely being eclipsed by Steven T. Jones' ego. (We can rule Jones himself out after recently reading along with the rest of San Francisco that he prefers his bike: "I love my bike, and so do most people who see it," he wrote.)

If none of those suggestions actually turns up a suspect, blame PG&E. 
 

It was Candide's grating mentor Pangloss who opined that our noses are shaped as they are so as to better accommodate our eyeglasses. If Voltaire had been writing American cop shows in the 1970s instead of French social satire in the 1750s, Inspector Pangloss would have put it this way: Car hoods are shaped as they are so as to better accommodate T.J. Hooker.

The sight of William Shatner's stunt double clinging persistently to the hood of a Gran Torino or Chevelle or other appropriately gargantuan American car of the day was a staple of 1970s television viewing -- it was such a cliche that Saturday Night Live even got Shatner to parody it a decade later . But even those of us who don't read police reports every day know that it's not often you see someone desperately dangling off of a moving car while a crime is in progress.

So it came as a bit of a shock to read the Ingleside police bulletin, which documented this straight-out-of-T.J. Hooker instance:

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A 30-year-old man named Harris Fullbright was shot dead early Saturday morning and two other gunshot victims were hospitalized in a 3 a.m. incident at Ellis and Jones Streets. Fulbright apparently had been in a scuffle just outside of the crime-magnet nightclub Pink Diamonds.

Fullbright is the 23rd homicide victim in the city this year and the first since Douglas Johnson was stabbed to death on June 22 in Bayview.

The old neighborhood has really gone to hell...

One of the most sobering things about being a reporter is to read the police department's wrap-up of the prior day's assaults each morning. Do it enough and you start to believe it's darn near a miracle you got home without getting stabbed.

Well, according to a list released by NeighborhoodScout.com, we can all breathe easy. No neighborhood in San Francisco -- not the Bayview, not the Mission, and not the Tenderloin -- ranked as one of the 25 most dangerous in the country. For what it's worth, these folks feel that Cincinnati's Central Parkway/Liberty Street enclave is the nation's armpit.

The Web site estimates both violent and property crimes for every "sub-zip code neighborhood" (whatever that means) in the U.S. based on FBI data for three years. The current findings represent 2005-2007. While Chicago, the Midwest, and the South fare very badly, not one neighborhood in San Francisco -- actually none in California -- shows up.

According to the site, "These data can be used by homebuyers, insurance companies and many other companies to evaluate the true nature of a given neighborhood." High rent, low chance of being shot, it's a trade-off they think we'll accept. Here's the not-Top 25:

Photo: smorg

Busted: Freak Factory smoke shop

Apparently nostalgic for the bad old days of pot paraphernalia raids, our law enforcement friends down in San Diego have taken time off from pursuing what seem to be less pressing matters -- like, you know, murder and rape and stuff -- to bust four smoke shops for selling marijuana pipes.