Private profanity police

Is this command state day? This is the second consecutive entry here about localized anti-people programs (as opposed to national economic stories).

Cincinnati has the hated CCCDC, but Memphis has the Center City Commission. They're similar in that they're committees that represent right-wing private downtown business interests but insource control over public spaces.

What it boils down to is that they're private entities that try to exercise police powers on public property.

In February, the Center City Commission decided to hire a private security firm to harass Memphis's homeless and other poor on the public right-of-way. The security force was to be armed with batons and stun guns. This meanness was driven by the desire to turn the city into what the director of the Mid-South Peace and Justice Center called "a private playground for the wealthy."

Private security aren't police. They can't make arrests on public property. Even police can't arrest someone for being homeless, because being homeless is not a crime. (Vagrancy laws were voided decades ago.) So I guarantee that if I was a homeless citizen of Memphis, the Center City Commission would face a lawsuit the moment their private patrols put their hands on me.

Now the situation has gone a step further in the Disney World for the very rich that the Center City Commission wants downtown Memphis to be. The committee's private security firm has set up bike patrols to arrest folks for uttering profane language on the public streets. The firm is doing this as part of its enforcement of a "disorderly conduct code" on downtown.

Grow up, will ya?

I don't think there's a single one of the "7 dirty words" or any of their common derivatives that I didn't hear being spoken fluently by schoolmates in first grade almost 30 years ago. The real obscenity isn't words, but actions: Why should the homeless be subjected to the obscenity of being arrested by the Center City Commission just for being homeless? Why should other members of the public be force-fed the obscenity of having to witness this sickening spectacle?

Someone can get cuffed now for saying "damn" on a downtown street, but no action is taken at all against right-wing bigots who commit terroristic threatening against a rally? Isn't that the dumbest thing you've ever heard of?

I'd hate to disappoint Big Business, but America's downtowns aren't here to be corporate fiefdoms to cater to elites who seek to monopolize the city's amenities.

(Source: http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2008/feb/27/ccc-plan-caters-to-elite-hurts-poor;
http://www.wmctv.com/global/story.asp?s=9331356)