Sunday, May 2, 2010

Crime of the Century (Emergency Ride Divison)

NEW HAVEN, Conn. - Plainly, Quandria Bailey is a woman of monumental resourcefulness, a fact that evidently escaped New Haven authorities recently, if an April 25 report on the Web site of WSFB-TV Eyewitness News 3 is credible, and why wouldn't it be? A station with that many letters and numbers and words in its name must do its homework. 
  Ms. Bailey, who is twenty-eight, apparently was having trouble getting to Meridian, the town in which she lives, from the Van Dome Night Club, at 102 Hamilton Street, in New Haven, late one night, and so, showing remarkable ingenuity, she phoned 911 and asked for a ride home. 
   (We do not know which night it was, because the report on the WSFB Web site does not say. This is an appalling journalistic oversight for which the many-named, -numbered and -lettered station should be roundly rebuked. Is it really that difficult to report fully and factually? The answer for First of All, who worked at a mainstream daily for some years, is yes indeed; we made so many errors that we should have been fired countless times. This is why we now write a blog in which, with a disquieting lack of empathy, we decry others' fallible reporting. We are, in short, idiots. Rather, an idiot - who is rather an idiot.)
  That Ms. Bailey called 911 not once but six times suggests that emergency operators were, figuratively if not literally, asleep at the switch. If someone called to ask you for a ride home, wouldn't you give her one? After all, being stuck outside of a night club on an early morning unnamed by WSFB is, in essence, torturous. By that point in the party, one just wants to return home, soak one's feet, and lose oneself in serial episodes of, say, "Whale Wars." 
  Alas, New Haven police, as police will, saw things differently. They arrested Ms. Bailey on six counts of misuse of the emergency 911 system, according to the by-now suspect reporting on the WSFB site. She was sprung from the can after posting a thousand dollars in bail, and is slated to appear in court on May 5. 
  Incidentally, the Van Dome nightclub (WSFB calls it "Vandome"; really, the mainstream media are just coming apart at the seams), according to its Web site (which we would link here, except that links keep disappearing from this blog, something that those, and we mean this with love, motherfuckers at Google are going to get an earful about), boasts theme nights that include "In Those Jeans (The $500 Blue Jean Party)," a Thursday night party sensibly called "Thursday Nights (Music by DJ Cocoa Chanelle)," and "Reggaeton Fridays," as well as performances by various no-doubt skilled DJs. 
  It is possible that New Haven 911 operators knew this, and therefore it was, for them, an act of kindness to refuse Ms. Bailey a ride. Why, they were probably thinking, would anyone want to leave such a blazing hot spot before it had gone cold for the night?

No comments:

Post a Comment