Oakland Man Brutally Beaten by Mob

 

Setting: Lawless Thunderdome Oakland, present day.  Last Sunday, in fact.  A single police car sheepishly picks its way through an intersection which has been taken over by a murderous motorthrill cult.  Five-Oh then gets the Hell out of Dodge.  Not a hint of lights or siren.  Outnumbered, just passing through, don’t mind me.

Have you ever seen Mad Max?  No?  Well pop your head out at lunchtime in the third-world craphole of Oakland, California:

This is now commonplace here.  They call it a “sideshow” and I guess now we know why.

One of these subhumans doing donuts in his car collided with an (up until then) uninvolved vehicle.  The passer-by then for some reason got out of his car to confront the other driver.  You know — like we’re supposed to do, at least to exchange insurance info, maybe get a police report.  Wrong answer.  Fatal, actually:

Yovani Aguilar-Mendez lingered for days, and has now died.  I suspect that his fate was sealed before they even propped him up for the astoundingly barbaric ball-crushing soccer kick.  I’ve never seen a man so reduced so quickly in a situation like this, but then I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a situation “like this”.  It’s not like he was shot, or blown up by a mine or IED, or trapped on a burning aircraft; all things which we can at least understand.  The sheer banal brutality of this murder is the real shock.  Words fail me.  Lump-bump, lump-bump — you’re done for.  Nothing fancy, no contest, no back and forth.   He just took an ass-kicking in a public intersection in broad daylight, and you know what they say about fights — they’re over quickly, and they don’t go like in the movies.

You — yes, you — can not afford a fair fight.  I won’t be hauled from my vehicle like Reginald Denny was, and I’m certainly not getting out by choice.  By the time the mob has you surrounded, your car is no longer transportation – it is your last hope for survival.

  • A hostile mob, even a small one, is a deadly threat just due to its size.
  • Push through an ambush no matter what– if you stop, you’re dead.
  • If trapped, use overwhelming force first, not last — you won’t get a second chance.
  • Live long enough to smile through your murder trial.

Heartbreaking.  A little bad judgement and suddenly you’re in worse than a combat zone.  You’re just being killed in an outbreak of savagery.  I’m not going out like that.  Thank God Kyle Rittenhouse was armed and trained, or this would have been him. 

This scenario is what Bernhard Goetz saw coming his way when he looked at the smiles of his tormentors, and decided that he wasn’t going out like that, either.  Here’s his inverview/confession from 1984, marked to start at 19:45.  That gives enough context for the main event, starting at 21:45 and going for about two minutes.  “They were going to have fun with me.”

When Aguilar-Mendez got out of his car, it was probably already too late for him.

 

 

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  1. Nathanael Ferguson Contributor
    Nathanael Ferguson
    @NathanaelFerguson

    Gut wrenching. 

    • #1
  2. James Lileks Contributor
    James Lileks
    @jameslileks

    We’ve had those takeovers here in Minneapolis as well. A swift legislative response would be nice – say, something along the lines of steep fines and driver’s license revocation for six months for the first offense, five years revocation for the second,  along with confiscation of the car. Too steep! And too mean! It’ll negatively impact the driver’s ability to get to work and care for his family.  There should be consequences, yes, but not consequence consequences. 

    One might wish for some penalties for the congregated gawkers as well, but the vague laws once used to move people along have been rescinded, due to disparate impact. You can’t slap people with fines for spectating and encouraging an illegal act, because the fines will accrue penalties for non-payment, which exacerbates their debt, and you certainly can’t make the continued flow of public largesse contingent on paying that debt. That might lead to eviction, or hunger. The debt cannot be converted into a warrant, because if someone later has an encounter with the police, and the police run the name for some reason, that person might become justice-system-involved, which would further complicate their life. 

    The police should not break up these events, because they are “victimless” – well, mostly. The application of police power is an unnecessary escalation that may lead to Harm, since any interaction between the police and a member of the Driver-American community can turn deadly. So it is best not to intercede. 

    It’s like the matter of meth-addled naked men screaming at school buses: there’s nothing we can do. Aside from the things we could do, of course, but they don’t address the Root Causes. It’s all capitalism and billionaires, basically. Also cities are supposed to be weird and if you don’t like sideshows go back to the burbs and your Olive-Garden cul-de-sacs, lol.

    • #2
  3. TBA Coolidge
    TBA
    @RobtGilsdorf

    Generally I am against defunding the police, but if they won’t do the job, what are we paying them for? 

    • #3
  4. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    On Gutfeld tonight, they pointed out that San Fran is down over 300 cops over just the past couple years, so it’s also a kind of vicious circle.  And it’s a lot easier – and faster – to screw up a police department than to fix it.

    • #4
  5. Victor Tango Kilo Member
    Victor Tango Kilo
    @VtheK

    Society has gone from “The police should not harass people who are breaking no laws” to “The police must tolerate lawlessness in the name of social justice” with remarkable swiftness.

    • #5
  6. Franco Inactive
    Franco
    @Franco

    It’s not just the lack of police – or lack of police interest – it’s the relentless ginning up of racism and the justification for violence that the media is fostering. They want blacks to absolutely hate whites and they treat them differently in court. But most of this is flat-out racism. 

    As to lack of police interest, I have a theory. I watched a video the other day (I can’t find it now) of a man who was confronted by two cops on a subway platform. apparently he had a boxcutter in a belt holster They confiscated it, and the exchange was staggering. The guy was reasonable, intelligent, mannerly and explained he worked in a restaurant and that was his tool for cutting up boxes, he was on his way home to his wife and kids. The guy did not seem at all like a criminal. Not even close. But they escalated and arrested him anyway.

    So they get to go downtown and book an innocuous ‘criminal’ so they don’t have to deal with the actual criminals who are dangerous. They get an arrest so that’s rewarded.

    I’ve watched so many cops on videos abusing ordinary people’s rights it’s not even funny, but one common thread (and we’ve all seen this ourselves) is they have all the time in the world to ‘process’ the people they stop, more cops show up and stand around. There is ZERO sense of urgency about getting back in the squad car and back on the job. This is true across the country.

    I’m always imagining all the real drunk driving cases that fly under the radar when they spend dozens of man-hours trying to determine if some marginally impaired or not impaired at all driver is arrest-able. 

    And cops have been doing this kind of thing for decades, it’s getting worse now. Cops aren’t heroes. Some men who happen to be cops are heroes or have performed heroic acts, but police per se are not heroes. They are not our ‘friends’ and they are not ‘protecting’ us.

    • #6
  7. Stad Coolidge
    Stad
    @Stad

    TBA (View Comment):

    Generally I am against defunding the police, but if they won’t do the job, what are we paying them for?

    How about defunding leftist Chiefs-of-Police?

    • #7
  8. BDB Coolidge
    BDB
    @BDB

    I don’t directly criticize the cops who drove through in the first clip, at least not based on the scant evidence in the video.  At one point, one of the ATV degenerates simply gets in his way, overtly blocking the progress of the police SUV.  Taunting him trying to provoke a response.  Had the cops then resonded by conducting a “traffic stop” (nobody’s going anywhere), they would likely have been killed, their weapons looted from their bodies and the trunk, and their vehicle set on fire to mark the victory.

    I was never “kinetic” in Afghanistan.  I was a window-licker — armed and wearing armor inside an armored vehicle, awake in the back seat, scanning my sector as we went somewhere to do a thing.  My priorities IIRC were  roadside evidence of an IED, mobs poking from around corners as we passed, and rooftops.  In the first video in this post, the police are already post-scouting — they drove through a developed (but not yet hot) kill zone, and they *clearly* thought of it as just that, from the way they pushed through.  The way Mr. Aguilar-Mendez should have, but he doesn’t have the police training, the discipline to say to himself “push through an ambush,” and the pre-decided action to simply grip the wheel, hit the gas, and worry about consequences later.  He used yesterday’s responses — confront your antagonist, man to man.  He did not recognize that the whole thing was an antagonism machine.

    The provocation that failed against the police worked against the man alone.  A serious police department would have immediately set up a quick response to bust up that intersection.  Apparently, they have “sideshow details,” the purpose of which I do not know, but I presume it is to do exactly that — bust up these lawless zones.  No small task, I understand.

    This seems not to have happened.  It’s noticeably darker in the second video, so at least some time has gone by, and we seem to be in late afternoon, possibly early evening.  Why was this riot still going on?

    It’s obvious.  The police are overmatched.  They get their priorities set by the city, county, and state leadership.  Shall we send every remaining unit currently on-duty of our de-funded (2021) force to deal with a single issue, which may get some of us killed?  Who says yes to that proposal?

    The dysfunctional police are the visible and vulnerable edge of a dysfunctional government.  Oakland has the results it voted for.  I have no clue what Mr. Aguilar-Mendez’ politics were, but even if he voted for Stalin, he didn’t deserve what he got.

    At this point, in many cities, only something like the National Guard can really crack the nut.  Society is coming down around us, and we’ll be lucky to dodge the falling masonry.

    I would prefer a few more Kent States, and a few fewer thunderdome murder festivals in the streets.

    • #8
  9. BDB Coolidge
    BDB
    @BDB

    (continued)

    Aye, there’s the rub!  You’ll BEG for oppression by the time this program takes effect!

    What program?  This is the fruit of most proximately the defund movement of a couple of years ago, and in the middle-term, the Obama-Holder DoJ weaponization of federal power against local police forces, and the simultaneous building of a system to indemnify the worst in society from pressure or consequences.  From Ferguson to George Floyd, it’s all the same.  Police departments are being ground down in order to expose decent folk to the indecent, to “afflict the comfortable”.  You don’t have to be rich to be the hated class — any non-thug is fair game.  Even Democrat politicians get caught up from time to time making unwise assumptions about how well their game is received by its supposed beneficiaries.

    Each police department that gets smashed is not the main goal, but the message.  All police departments had better not get in the way of the deep state’s race/class/creed war on Joe Sixpack.  This way crime gets worse, the decent are more frightened, and everybody is herded closer each year to not only accepting, but demanding a dictatorial federal presence.

    It’s a pickle.

    • #9
  10. BDB Coolidge
    BDB
    @BDB

    On the one hand, I support local polities’ freedom to defund their police, as I would like to see the people of those benighted places put their own safety where their mouths are.  The flaw is that this lesson will never be drawn, and will be actively suppressed.  You (as part of the dictator’s media apparatus) don’t even have to convince people that the problem is really federal, really racism, really a lack of tranny representation — nobody believes that — you just need to give them the cover to say these things in public without fear of being argued down from their ridiculous positions.

    On the other hand, somebody here responded to me a couple of years ago, saying that it’s just an invitation to a federal police presence for general purposes (see my #9 above).

    People are not the rational creatures that we hold ourselves out to be.  The first video reminded me of what I least wanted to see out my armored window in Afghanistan.  The second video in the post above reminded me of footage from the (long-suppressed) Gombe chimpanzee war.

     

    • #10
  11. Doug Watt Moderator
    Doug Watt
    @DougWatt

    It’s all about risk vs reward for police officers in some cities. The police officer is on the front line the prosecutors are on the second line. Prosecutors that refuse to prosecute criminals do just as much damage as the criminals that have been arrested. Not every voter wants anarchy, but some do.

    One officer cannot confront a mob, nor should we demand that one officer lose his life or suffer serious injury in doing so.

    Perhaps all this will change when enough residents and businesses leave a dysfunctional city. Competent police officers are already leaving these cities. Business owners and residents might want to join them. 

     

    • #11
  12. BDB Coolidge
    BDB
    @BDB

    Doug Watt (View Comment):

    It’s all about risk vs reward for police officers in some cities. The police officer is on the front line the prosecutors are on the second line. Prosecutors that refuse to prosecute criminals do just as much damage as the criminals that have been arrested. Not every voter wants anarchy, but some do.

    One officer cannot confront a mob, nor should we demand that one officer lose his life or suffer serious injury in doing so.

    Perhaps all this will change when enough residents and businesses leave a dysfunctional city. Competent police officers are already leaving these cities. Business owners and residents might want to join them.

     

    Amen.

    • #12
  13. BDB Coolidge
    BDB
    @BDB

    Publicity shot celebrating the 2021 defunding of Oakland PD:

    That’s the Oakland City Council.

    • #13
  14. Bryan G. Stephens Thatcher
    Bryan G. Stephens
    @BryanGStephens

    I believe what we will see is mass use of force by citizens. When the police come to arrest them, use the same tactics the thugs do.

    If they persist, deal with them where it huts them: Their homes, their schools. Make the lawmakers fear for their lives. 

    In short, it all comes apart in sectarian civil war. 

    • #14
  15. TBA Coolidge
    TBA
    @RobtGilsdorf

    Stad (View Comment):

    TBA (View Comment):

    Generally I am against defunding the police, but if they won’t do the job, what are we paying them for?

    How about defunding leftist Chiefs-of-Police?

    Would love to see that. 

    Also evicting mayors and governors from provided houses/mansions. 

    Add’ly cancelling paid everything for senators and the like. 

    • #15
  16. Raxxalan Member
    Raxxalan
    @Raxxalan

    This is why I won’t allow myself to be disarmed.  The same people calling for “sensible gun control” are also calling for defunding the police and seem to support violence against people who look like me by people who don’t look like me.  Now is not the time to allow my means of self defense to be confiscated. 

    • #16
  17. BDB Coolidge
    BDB
    @BDB

    Raxxalan (View Comment):

    This is why I won’t allow myself to be disarmed. The same people calling for “sensible gun control” are also calling for defunding the police and seem to support violence against people who look like me by people who don’t look like me. Now is not the time to allow my means of self defense to be confiscated.

    Damn Skippy.

    • #17
  18. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    BDB (View Comment):

    On the one hand, I support local polities’ freedom to defund their police, as I would like to see the people of those benighted places put their own safety where their mouths are. The flaw is that this lesson will never be drawn, and will be actively suppressed. You (as part of the dictator’s media apparatus) don’t even have to convince people that the problem is really federal, really racism, really a lack of tranny representation — nobody believes that — you just need to give them the cover to say these things in public without fear of being argued down from their ridiculous positions.

    On the other hand, somebody here responded to me a couple of years ago, saying that it’s just an invitation to a federal police presence for general purposes (see my #9 above).

    People are not the rational creatures that we hold ourselves out to be. The first video reminded me of what I least wanted to see out my armored window in Afghanistan. The second video in the post above reminded me of footage from the (long-suppressed) Gombe chimpanzee war.

     

     

    • #18
  19. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    TBA (View Comment):

    Stad (View Comment):

    TBA (View Comment):

    Generally I am against defunding the police, but if they won’t do the job, what are we paying them for?

    How about defunding leftist Chiefs-of-Police?

    Would love to see that.

    Also evicting mayors and governors from provided houses/mansions.

    Add’ly cancelling paid everything for senators and the like.

    Democrat legislatures and city councils would have to vote for that.  Good luck!

    • #19
  20. Stad Coolidge
    Stad
    @Stad

    BDB (View Comment):

    Publicity shot celebrating the 2021 defunding of Oakland PD:

    That’s the Oakland City Council.

    The guy standing to the right of everyone is wearing a “racist” Cleveland Indians ball cap.  I wonder if the others noticed . . .

    • #20
  21. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    Stad (View Comment):

    BDB (View Comment):

    Publicity shot celebrating the 2021 defunding of Oakland PD:

    That’s the Oakland City Council.

    The guy standing to the right of everyone is wearing a “racist” Cleveland Indians ball cap. I wonder if the others noticed . . .

    “Teams should not have racist names!” says NCAA, headquartered in INDIANapolis, INDIANa.

    • #21
  22. Franco Inactive
    Franco
    @Franco

    kedavis (View Comment):

    Stad (View Comment):

    BDB (View Comment):

    Publicity shot celebrating the 2021 defunding of Oakland PD:

    That’s the Oakland City Council.

    The guy standing to the right of everyone is wearing a “racist” Cleveland Indians ball cap. I wonder if the others noticed . . .

    “Teams should not have racist names!” says NCAA, headquartered in INDIANapolis, INDIANa.

    Watching the Celtics Sixers game last night I couldn’t help but see the Irish leprechaun logo wearing shamrocks at center court, and given that all the players and coaches (almost) are black, isn’t it cultural appropriation? And ‘racism’? 

    And another thing… Notre Dame a fake Catholic University calls their teams “The Fighting Irish” . That’s definitely a slur! As an ethnic Irishman I say someone should give the Dean a punch in the nose, or even knock his block off! 

    • #22
  23. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    Franco (View Comment):

    Watching the Celtics Sixers game last night I couldn’t help but see the Irish leprechaun logo wearing shamrocks at center court, and given that all the players and coaches (almost) are black, isn’t it cultural appropriation? And ‘racism’? 

    And another thing… Notre Dame a fake Catholic University calls their teams “The Fighting Irish” . That’s definitely a slur! As an ethnic Irishman I say someone should give the Dean a punch in the nose, or even knock his block off! 

    You should definitely share this wisdom with the masses. An excellent venue would be any Irish pub in Chicago. Shoot for March 17th.

    • #23
  24. DaveSchmidt Coolidge
    DaveSchmidt
    @DaveSchmidt

    kedavis (View Comment):

    On Gutfeld tonight, they pointed out that San Fran is down over 300 cops over just the past couple years, so it’s also a kind of vicious circle. And it’s a lot easier – and faster – to screw up a police department than to fix it.

    The same can be said for the Armed Forces. 

    • #24
  25. DaveSchmidt Coolidge
    DaveSchmidt
    @DaveSchmidt

    I believe that Yonani Aguilar-Mendez died because he looked too white. 

    • #25
  26. DaveSchmidt Coolidge
    DaveSchmidt
    @DaveSchmidt

    Franco (View Comment):

    It’s not just the lack of police – or lack of police interest – it’s the relentless ginning up of racism and the justification for violence that the media is fostering. They want blacks to absolutely hate whites and they treat them differently in court. But most of this is flat-out racism.

    As to lack of police interest, I have a theory. I watched a video the other day (I can’t find it now) of a man who was confronted by two cops on a subway platform. apparently he had a boxcutter in a belt holster They confiscated it, and the exchange was staggering. The guy was reasonable, intelligent, mannerly and explained he worked in a restaurant and that was his tool for cutting up boxes, he was on his way home to his wife and kids. The guy did not seem at all like a criminal. Not even close. But they escalated and arrested him anyway.

    So they get to go downtown and book an innocuous ‘criminal’ so they don’t have to deal with the actual criminals who are dangerous. They get an arrest so that’s rewarded.

    I’ve watched so many cops on videos abusing ordinary people’s rights it’s not even funny, but one common thread (and we’ve all seen this ourselves) is they have all the time in the world to ‘process’ the people they stop, more cops show up and stand around. There is ZERO sense of urgency about getting back in the squad car and back on the job. This is true across the country.

    I’m always imagining all the real drunk driving cases that fly under the radar when they spend dozens of man-hours trying to determine if some marginally impaired or not impaired at all driver is arrest-able.

    And cops have been doing this kind of thing for decades, it’s getting worse now. Cops aren’t heroes. Some men who happen to be cops are heroes or have performed heroic acts, but police per se are not heroes. They are not our ‘friends’ and they are not ‘protecting’ us.

    We have relied on a significant percentage of new officers being veterans.  That was a good thing.  Given the current state of our military, maybe not. 

    • #26
  27. Raxxalan Member
    Raxxalan
    @Raxxalan

    DaveSchmidt (View Comment):

    kedavis (View Comment):

    On Gutfeld tonight, they pointed out that San Fran is down over 300 cops over just the past couple years, so it’s also a kind of vicious circle. And it’s a lot easier – and faster – to screw up a police department than to fix it.

    The same can be said for the Armed Forces.

    It is strange that the left simultaneously wants to control more and more of the everyday lives of people, but has fewer and fewer people to effectuate that control.  One wonders what their strategy is going to be to overcome this.

      

    • #27
  28. BDB Coolidge
    BDB
    @BDB

    DaveSchmidt (View Comment):

    I believe that Yonani Aguilar-Mendez died because he looked too white.

    Among other things.  There was a similarly pale fellow perpetrating the kick-him-when-he’s-down murder ritual.

    Not disagreeing at all.  Just acknowledging overlaps.  Multiple issues, of which I am sure race is a large one.

    • #28
  29. BDB Coolidge
    BDB
    @BDB

    Raxxalan (View Comment):

    DaveSchmidt (View Comment):

    kedavis (View Comment):

    On Gutfeld tonight, they pointed out that San Fran is down over 300 cops over just the past couple years, so it’s also a kind of vicious circle. And it’s a lot easier – and faster – to screw up a police department than to fix it.

    The same can be said for the Armed Forces.

    It is strange that the left simultaneously wants to control more and more of the everyday lives of people, but has fewer and fewer people to effectuate that control. One wonders what their strategy is going to be to overcome this.

     

    Waivers to get their felons and peasants int the service.  Ignorant conscripts (eventually) with no loyalty to this country, culture, or constitution will get the job done.

    • #29
  30. DaveSchmidt Coolidge
    DaveSchmidt
    @DaveSchmidt

    Doug Watt (View Comment):

     

    Perhaps all this will change when enough residents and businesses leave a dysfunctional city. Competent police officers are already leaving these cities. Business owners and residents might want to join them.

     

    And for all that is holy and honorable, such refugees should leave their politics behind. 

    • #30
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