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Balko Visits Rack & Roll
By Greg L | 3 January 2007 | Rack & Roll Scandal | 4 Comments
Radley Balko has a fascinating first-person account of police harassment at Rack & Roll up this evening that those following the Ruttenberg scandal won’t want to miss. In Manassas Park’s quest to destroy the livelihood of Dave Ruttenberg the city has directed the police department to conduct intensive enforcement operations against Ruttenberg’s customers with the obvious intent of scaring his clientèle away from patronizing his business. Radley writes:
Over the next three hours I watched in awe as one after another after another Manassas Park squad car pulled over Rack n’ Roll customers as they left the bar. They were stopped, searched, and sent on their way. I saw at least six different people get pulled over, and that was just within a few blocks of the place. Other customers told me they’d regularly get stopped another mile or so out.
This, Ruttenberg and his customers assured me, happened nearly every weekend. The harassment had its intended effect. Ruttenberg’s clientele had dwindled to a handful of regulars and a significant number of Hispanics, the latter because Ruttenberg’s is one of the few bars in the area that not only isn’t hostile to them, but actually welcomes their business.
He continues with these observations:
I was surprised at how blatant, brazen, and systematic the harassment was. I’d seen Ruttenberg’s security videos, but I expected to see one, maybe two or three customers harassed. Not continual harassment for the better part of three hours. A few customers told me that when they’d been pulled over in the past, the officers flat out told them that if they’d continued to get pulled over for as long as they continued to patronize Rack n’ Roll.
And the conclusion wraps this up in a nice compact package:
Even more absurd is that — as I mentioned before — Ruttenberg has good reason to believe that some of the people he hired for the specific purpose of keeping drug activity out of the bar were working with the police to initiate drug activity in it. Ruttenberg’s evidence is pretty sound, including affidavits from friends, family members, and former employers of the alleged informants (and in one case, from the alleged informant himself). Ruttenberg also has affidavit or taped conversations with ex-girlfriends, friends, and patrons of the bar who say they either did or were asked by Manassas Park police to serve as an informant to help get Ruttenberg. In some cases, these people were promised leniency on other charges in exchange for their help entrapping Ruttenberg. I talked to one of them.
There is a wealth of evidence to document all of this. There are the videos and audio of what Radley describes in this post. There are videos of about half of the on-duty Manassas Park Police force descending on someone for public urination in the parking lot while it apparently takes only two officers to handle open cocaine use when reported by Ruttenberg, and it takes those officers twenty minutes or more to arrive. When Ruttenberg understood that he was the target of official harassment by the city, he got smart and started recording in some fashion everything that he could. And he has a lot of evidence to share.
Keep watching this.
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4 Comments
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This is very very scary in a day when certain words have just about been lost in our vocabulary that when mentioned we thought of NYC or Moscow…MP seems to be making them make a comeback.
This is absolutely outrageous! Shouldn’t the State Police or FBI be brought into this?
Sorry to do this as anonymous again, but please look at my comment posted Jan 2, 2007 at 2:07 pm under “Let’s Go to the Videotape #1″ archived in the Manassas Park category Dec . 31, 2006
its terrible when it seems the police can act like a**holes seemingly without any consequences. can anything be done? who do you report the police to if it seems to be the whole damn dept. good luck in your struggles my friend and hopefully this will end with some corrupt cops and politicians losing theyre jobs so your business can go on unmolested.