What’s a cop on a horse to do on a sunny Friday afternoon in OB – besides hasslin’ teenagers?

In a spectacularly superfluous display of power, four horsemen of the San Diego Police Equestrian Squad rode through the streets of Ocean Beach for hours on the Friday afternoon before this year’s OB Oktoberfest, October 12th.

Undaunted by the typical lack of crime in sleepy Ocean Beach on an autumn weekday afternoon, the armed posse surrounded a group of clear eyed Anarchist kids passing the time on the seawall by the pier. As the officers approached one youngster took to his heels, racing up the wooden steps next to the Silver Spray and down the alley behind the cottages. The police were stymied, their enormous mounts were ridiculously ill prepared to give chase on the slippery veneer of sand covering the pavement. One officer dismounted and pursued on foot, but the child eluded him.

Apparently the officers called for back-up assistance as three or four black and white units quickly appeared in the neighborhood. Meanwhile the rest of the horse force went about interrogating the remaining teenagers, demanding names, addresses and tattoos. One of the young men had a visible tattoo, which the harassing officer noted in his field book, another boy admitted to having a tattoo, which the officers demanded to see, and again duly noted in their book, perhaps to be added to a data base at a later time.

After about an hour of pointless questioning the mounted troops dismissed their captives and slowly and carefully set off to join the hunt for the one who had escaped. The horses and black and whites scoured the alleys for another hour or two until finally giving up and retreating to the horse vans they had left at Robb Field.

 The reason for this gratuitous extension of raw power onto the streets of Ocean Beach remains somewhat murky until one considers the party pooping effect that a bunch of unwashed, drum beating, long-haired, tofu eating hippies might have on the law abiding, beer drinking, sausage snarfling burghers who were scheduled to turn out next day for that most American of German celebrations – Oktoberfest. Seen from here the charge of the Dark Brigade can be understood in its true light – as a thinly coded message to the dread-locked local harbingers of a more human future. The message read: we own this joint – not you, and if you fuck with us, or even if we don’t like the way you look, we will take your constitutional rights, along with your civil liberties and whatever notions of universal human freedoms you may have, and roll them up together into a baton long enough to reach down from our symbolic perches of dominance and crack your multiply pierced and purple tinted heads wide open with them. Now move along please, decent people want to enjoy the beach.

For an excellent video run down on your rights and obligations in a police search please visit this site sponsored by the ACLU.

http://www.flexyourrights.com/

Contributed by Rudy the Red, cub reporter at large.