
The Texas Biker Gang Shoot-Out - nkurz
http://www.gq.com/story/untold-story-texas-biker-gang-shoot-out
======
ambiate
I have lived in Waco for 5+ years. Never experienced a 'biker gang' or heard
of biker related violence here.

I had my run with the law that disenchanted me. I saw a city worker stealing
mail. I was laughed at by the police officer and almost charged for wrongfully
calling 911. City worker tried slamming their car door in my face while I was
talking to the officer, and the officer laughed again. I just walked away at
that point.

The head of the grand jury is obvious bias. The imprisonments for 'being
present' are insane. A blanket bail that is an unreasonable amount is odd. The
false propaganda that biker gangs from all over the USA were flooding towards
Waco with terrorist weapons was just a blatant lie.

Tip or not, why was full swat basically waiting in the parking lot before the
event? Any other day, they wouldn't care if a few <insert anything not living
in Hewitt> picked each other off in the parking lot. If they had a feeling
something was going down, why not be proactive instead of reactive?

House taxes rise, school budgets cut, service cuts, and dodgy press release
guy gets a promotion. yay. At least Baylor made a new shiny stadium to
distract the general population.

Edit: Oh yeah, the current 'Waco Warrant Roundup' posted names of everyone
with known warrants in the county. They're pulling over everyone and running
warrant searches. Seems unlawful. I got pulled over and warrant checked
because of 'loose articles in truckbed'. It was a bloody tie down strap that
was hooked to the truck.

~~~
nosuchthing
Police almost seem like sales people on commission.. Except their sales quotas
put people in prison.

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sandworm101
>>Peterson signed all 177 of the so-called cookie-cutter probable-cause
affidavits in bulk, without specifying the evidence against each individual
defendant. Peterson, it turns out, is a former state trooper with no legal
training.

Hate lawyers and law schools if you want, but they have their time and place.
The problem here seams not that officers broke the law, but that they seem not
to have any understanding of the law in the first place. Instead of planning
and deliberation, they were all showboating against each other. The whole
incident reads like a script for Lethal Weapon IV.

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nickbauman
Gangs form around an economy. In the case of OMGs, the economy is drug and
human trafficking, extortion, contract slaying and various other illicit
businesses. Many OMGs are made up of a large percentage of ex military, with
the USMC highly represented. Ditto for police forces, maybe not as much USMC.
Considering how many soldiers we have, it's no surprise that OMGs are on the
rise. You can thank the GWoT for that. They fight over economic power, often
expressed as turf wars. So those are the dots. It's not hard to connect them.

The bottom line is three gangs met that day. Two of them without an official
mandate.

~~~
nosuchthing
Read the article and you'll see it's more about the legal aspects of a
situation where 177 people were indiscriminately sent to jail on rubber
stamped charges.

Imagine being in an IRC channel with a 200 people and 10 of them got into a
fight, presumably hacked each other, and than everyone in the channel is
arrested on felony charges, and sent to jail with $100,000 bonds. Allegedly
there may have been provocation and excessive weapons use by the police posing
as members of rival groups.

~~~
nickbauman
No I saw that. But this is Texas we're talking about. Texas is one of the most
corrupt states when it comes to criminal justice. There have been articles
written about how people end up stuck in the system for years based on only
one charge of vagrancy. Lubbock is one of the worst places to get arrested in
the US, for example.

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joeax
“The city of Waco is looking at paying out hundreds of millions of dollars,”
says Michael White, Wilson's attorney.

This is the real problem. The police operate on a blank check principle and
are held to zero accountability. The taxpayers are the real victims here.

~~~
function_seven
> The police operate on a blank check principle and are held to zero
> accountability. The taxpayers are the real victims here.

It's the taxpayers that are giving them that blank check in the first place.
They're not victims, they're complicit.

~~~
RickHull
Which taxpayers voted for the blank check?

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freditup
How in the world is the head of the Grand Jury a Waco police officer who was
at least a little involved with the incident? Shouldn't he have been recused
from that process?

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kelvin0
Almost as bad as some Agile meetings I've attended :)

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jbob2000
Police say it's the bikers, bikers say it's the police. I don't trust either
of them.

~~~
freditup
Who can tell? Although I bet both groups have some amount of culpability in
this one. We'll probably never know for sure what really happened, except
possibly if there's video available.

~~~
caseysoftware
Supposedly there _is_ video footage and there are ballistics reports. So far -
as noted in the article - the Waco police have suppressed it.

Since we're over 4 months later, I'm not sure how they're still being held
without trial. Criminal thugs or not, they MUST have their day in court and
the opportunity to defend themselves.

Or the system is all a sham after all..

------
WorkingDead
There was also a shooting at a Twin Peaks in Webster a few months later. Maybe
'Bike Night' doesn't promote a family friendly crowd. If breasteraunts want to
gather these gangs up and feed them alcohol, they should be held partially
responsible.

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metatr0n
"In November 2013, two Cossacks were stabbed in a roadhouse parking lot in
Abilene;"

Roadhouse? As in Logan's Roadhouse? As in the Chili's of the great plains?
That stabbing happened in a Logan's Roadhouse parking lot, not the Road House
where James Dalton bounced. This is a fascinating story, but it loses some
credibility (to me) with a purposeful omission like that.

------
douche
Are biker gangs on the rise following Sons of Anarchy, which depicted outlaw
biker gangs in a semi-glorious(?) light, or are they just getting more media
attention?

The Hell's Angels and such have been around forever, but I never much heard
about them until a couple of years ago.

~~~
mikestew
I think you answered your own question. The Hells Angels _have_ been around
for-...well, since just after WWII. Hunter S. Thompson wrote a book about
them. Made somewhat famous when they provided security for a Rolling Stones
concert in Altamont, CA and a concert-goer ended up getting stabbed. Much like
Sons of Anarchy, the bikes are just a prop; they're really just organized
crime. But they've been around, occasionally making news. I probably run in
different circles than you do, but Hells Angels have always been popping up in
the news from time to time over the years.

Are people watching _Sons of Anarchy_ and saying, "I want to join an outlaw
biker gang?", and hence "on the rise" as you put it? I dunno, when
_Goodfellas_ or _The Sopranos_ came out, did the mafia start to be "on the
rise"? No. Such things might get more attention by the media when the topic
comes out in popular media, which might sell more ads, so more stories are
produced.

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meatysnapper
I'd be very interested in the bullets recovered from the scene, but it sounds
like that's not happening. The whole talk of long guns and a police trap
sounds sadly totally expected with American police.

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anentropic
what a bunch of stupid children

------
junto
Drugs, prostitution, money laundering, violence and protection rackets. I
really don't think that we should have a problem with the removal of such
people from our society.

~~~
ctdonath
Some of us have a VERY big problem with such removal without review by judge &
jury. Seems the police were already there and prepared for a battle, and
there's a viable theory they were just waiting for an excuse (not the first
time such has happened in Waco, with comparably bad results). We have a
judicial process for a reason, and bad things happen when "removal of such
people" is taken lightly.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
The police could well have been there because they had good reason to suspect
that there was going to be trouble.

> and there's a viable theory they were just waiting for an excuse

But is there a viable theory that the police started the shooting?

If you're going to start a shootout in town, and the police are there in force
to try to stop that from happening, and you start a shootout _anyway_ , and
the police shoot you to get you to stop shooting other people, well... I don't
have much room for feeling like the police are out of control there.

If you have evidence that says that I misunderstood the way events happened,
feel free to correct my understanding...

~~~
kelvin0
Police acting as agent provocateurs is not new:
[http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/quebec-police-admit-they-
went-...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/quebec-police-admit-they-went-
undercover-at-montebello-protest-1.656171)

~~~
AnimalMuppet
I get that. Is there _evidence_ that the police were doing so _in this case?_

~~~
ctdonath
Such evidence is rarely obvious. Police are refusing to provide what evidence
they do have (videos etc), judges have offered "we'll drop charges if you
don't counter-charge", sweeping million-dollar bonds imposed on 177 people
present are being seriously reduced or dropped, and other highly suspect
actions are raising red flags.

What we do have is narratives from bikers present, and some photographic
evidence that raises doubts about who started it. There's a lot to
discuss/research, so I'll just give you a couple links as major starting
points. I'm not saying whether I agree/accept the theories or not, just that
we don't have enough definitive evidence to support or deny the conspiracy
theory.

Short version: police snipers were already positioned, an undercover agent
either started something or was "made", a fight was provoked and police were
strangely quick to start firing.

[http://www.breitbart.com/texas/2015/05/19/biker-truthers-
eme...](http://www.breitbart.com/texas/2015/05/19/biker-truthers-emerge-
calling-waco-shootout-a-police-massacre/)
[http://theconservativetreehouse.com/2015/05/27/waco-twin-
pea...](http://theconservativetreehouse.com/2015/05/27/waco-twin-peaks-
shooting-the-crossfire/comment-page-1/)

(Please don't launch into criticizing the messengers; this is about the
message.)

