How the Taliban is winning in Winchester, Virginia
One of terrorism’s goals is to change the way people operate by making the public fear common, everyday things. But who ever dreamed they would make the police scared of eggs?
Police shut down Winchester’s downtown mall for almost two hours in order to summon bomb experts when an egg was found ‘with a threatening message’ the police insisted they couldn’t ignore.
Eggs had been placed around the mall. In planters, resting on statues, from one end of the mall to the other. One of the eggs had ‘asian porn made me do it’ written on it. A mall store-owner found an egg on their store’s doorknob threw it out without incident. But none of that mattered to police as they irrationally closed the area.
“It was the egg that specifically said ‘this is a pipe bomb’ which raised or heightened our senses to take all necessary precautions and to treat it as if it was actually a pipe bomb.” –Sgt. Lahman
Sorry to disappoint, but it was an egg, not a pipe, and therefore not a bomb. But Winchester police —already unable to use common sense— were also unable to use logic either. They roped off the area.
Winchester used to have a great police department. They had one of the greatest interrogators in the state; a guy so empathetic that criminals literally looked him up to confess. Winchester PD boasted having one of the only pre-1980 terrorism experts in the nation.
Now the department is reduced to the idiocy of acting like eggs are pipes and pranks are terrorism. Heads should roll for this stupidity. While they cut into shop hours and scared off some shoppers, they also were wasting taxpayers and not protecting the rest of the city. Just as bad, with the wasted time spent on the scary egg, now there will have to be an investigation to justify the police department’s security theatre, and some pranksters might face felony charges.
Until some officers are punished and policies changed, the real terrorists are winning in Winchester, Virginia.
Hatip to the Northern Virginia Daily
PS – Yes, the flag at the courthouse was flying upside down too. It may have been the pranksters, but more probably local citizens hoping to be saved from a police force gone brain-dead.