Lagniappe Mobile Blog

I don’t know if anyone saw Channel 10 tonight, but they ran a story prefaced with all the anger and disgust Bob and the new gal could muster. The story, about a guy in Florida who got his 85-year-old granny suffering from dementia to pretend to be a gangsta for a video he was doing, was run despite the anchor’s warnings that it was disturbing, or disgusting or some other such thing.

Number one, the story’s from Florida, so what the hell do we care about it? Number two, if it’s so damn disgusting and horrific, why run it? Number three, it’s not like the kid hurt granny, all he did was have her dress funny, wave a pistol and curse. My grandmother did that all the time. Elder abuse? Not quite. Stupid? Perhaps. Funny? Well, SOME people might think so.

But I get so tired of the local stations scouring the world for outrageous stories, then breathlessly telling us how awful what they’re about to show us is. Wouldn’t the space be better used for doing some more in-depth reporting? Letting the meteorologist develop a weather boner over light rain and humidity every night for 10 minutes, then hitting us with some supposedly disgusting video from WeeWaw, Wisconsin just doesn’t make sense to me.

We’ve got plenty of perverts right here in River City. Get out there and find them! Then the anchors can tsk, tsk our local pervs at least. Really, most of the time watching more than the first five minutes of the local news seems superfluous. WPMI often leads with this stuff, too, or features it as their second story. Certainly there’s a story on the guy who was walking down Spring Hill Ave. in a housecoat yesterday. I bet he’s abused someone recently, or been abused.

Get local and stay local, guys. And please cut back on the weather unless something’s actually happening.

By now, everyone is familiar with the increase of police roadblocks in the area.

The evening of Saturday, March 8, I saw six police cars, a greater number of officers, a generator and high-intensity light in the lot on the northeast corner of Broad and Government. One officer was checking licenses and insurance on all westbound traffic while his compatriots milled about the vacant lot.

A similar operation was set-up just beyond the exit of the Bankhead Tunnel catching eastbound traffic on the Causeway.

The next day, I saw eight officers with an equal number of cruisers engaged in the same operation at the intersection of Upham and Old Shell in Midtown. Fifteen minutes later, I spied a line of police cruisers headed east on Government, no doubt in route to a similar operation elsewhere in town.

I appreciate the argument in favor of such activities but have to wonder if this is the best use of manpower while Mobile is currently undergoing a spike in violent crimes and robberies. Is there nothing else these officers could be doing to make their presence more well known and widespread throughout the community, especially in regard to curtailing more dangerous activity?

I know of one business owner in the Loop who bent my ear last week about the anxiety caused from the recent rash of robberies in that area. I feel she would be none-too-pleased to pass through one of these roadblocks while she spends every night wondering if she is going to be next up on the “armed robbery hit parade.”