I meant to post this yesterday, but forgot. For anyone who hasn’t yet heard about the video of the Monticello, NY Mayors Against Illegal Guns member who was arrested recently, well, you should go check out some of the video at Miguel’s blog.
However, for those of you who don’t have the time to run a video that runs about an hour and a half, I watched it for you. Here are the extra special highlights:
When the first officer comes in, Mayor Gordon Jenkins (who identifies himself several times in the video) reminds the officer that he got the officer his job in the first place and that he knows his family. It’s not really a coherent attempt at intimidation since the Mayor, to me, comes off as quite belligerent at this point.
Then, it gets really weird. He goes on about how he doesn’t care if he dies tomorrow before issuing a warning to the officer: “Be careful how you f***in f*** with people…just be careful how you f***in f*** with people.” That still falls into the belligerent territory in my opinion. However, when it starts getting into what people might interpret as real threats is where it gets interesting: “Down the road, you’re going to say, ‘Why did I do that to that man?’ and you’re going to pay for it.”
After ranting about the time he might serve in jail, he says this about his plans for his release: “Mayor or dog catcher, I’m going to be on your ass.”
The Mayor is held for a long time because they wanted to notify the Police Chief about his arrest so he could handle it. Unfortunate, the Chief was out hunting. When the Mayor is informed that the Chief is unavailable at that very moment, the Mayor’s response is this: “The chief’s got to pay for this.”
After a bit more time talking about how the officers “got to pay for this,” an officer finally asked him if he was issuing a threat. The Mayor claims he was not issuing a threat. However, the next major action in the video is the Mayor getting up out of his chair and using his free arm to rip a clock off the wall and throw it rather violently toward the front desk just outside of the room he’s held in. Seconds later, he kicks the chair he was sitting in across the room. According to an officer who came in to check on him, the clock was broken during the Mayor’s fit.
Keep in mind that this Mayor is actually due in court soon for his 2012 arrest for hitting and injuring a local police officer in an altercation outside of his beauty supply store. And, yet, MAIG still proudly boasts him as an ally as of today on their website.
Then again, this is apparently what Mayor Gordon Jenkins thinks about the importance of his public service as an elected official: “The f***in’ mayorship don’t mean nothing.”
FWIW, there’s actually about 4 hours of video here:
http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjWGi8a3rNDVEFCAVSkenKA/videos
It’s easier to watch if you use keepvid and then fast forward using VLC or something. He spends a lot of time sitting (or laying) around on the floor and talking to himself, and accusing everyone (ie those “honkie cracker MFers” he keeps complaining about) of being racists.
The running tally of MAIG members whose careers end [or continue] in dishonor has been useful. I think we have this assumption that only mayors of a certain type tend to join this cabal, and these stories describe a supporting tend to that narrative. However this is probably the only motivation we’ve had to review a list of mayors so relentlessly. I wonder if the trend is really unique to MAIG mayors, or is more generally representative of the type of people that join the political class, MAIG members or not. In other words, does the population of MAIG mayors getting in trouble exceed the general mayoral population trends?
Based on my email alerts for mayors being arrested, they do tend to find themselves in jail quite often.