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"The woman being interviewed, Vicki Gardner, executive director of the Smith Mountain Lake Regional Chamber of Commerce, was shot in the back and is in surgery, said Barb Nocera, the chamber's special projects manager."
The Stauton, Va., area News Leader is reporting:
He was a few blocks from home, waiting for a bus in the cold, checking emails on his phone, when Coun.
Matthew Green was stopped and questioned for several minutes by a Hamilton Police officer who seemed not to realize who he was.
"What are you doing there?"
was the first thing Green said he heard the officer say, just after 3 p.m. on Tuesday.
You don't forget being stopped.
- Desmond Cole, writer and activist He felt like a suspect in his own neighbourhood, he said.
He felt intimidated, frustrated and angry.
Green's story brings up the emotional and psychological impact that police activity in a diverse city can have on people on the receiving end of that activity.
Activist and journalist Desmond Cole wrote a Toronto Life article about the dozens of times he’s been stopped by police.
(CBC) Being asked random questions by police when you're minding your own business – and having it happen more than once – sticks with a person.
That's an impact that people who oppose carding and street checks have cited as a reason for reform.
"After years of being stopped by police, I've started to internalize their scrutiny," wrote Desmond Cole, a writer and activist whose story of being stopped and questioned dozens of times by Ontario police officers was published last year in Toronto.
"I've doubted myself, wondered if I've actually done something to provoke them."
Green had to stay to wait for the bus, but even the idea of walking away from the officer didn't cross his mind.
"In theory my Charter rights allow me to walk away," he said.
"I know in that particular situation it was somewhat of a psychological detainment."
The officer was "obviously in control enough" of the situation that he was content holding up a handful of cars to have the conversation, Green said.
"As an elected official, you know, I wanted to try to cooperate with him and answer the questions as fully as I possibly could, and I think walking away at that time would've escalated the situation," Green said.
Incidents like these may be something an officer quickly forgets as part of his or her day, Cole said in an address to the Ontario Bar Association.
But the person who was questioned?
"You don't forget being stopped," Cole said.
'What would it have been if I was younger?'
Green, who has thousands of Twitter followers and a public platform as an elected official, can talk publicly about what happened, get it off his chest, hope for change or at least increased awareness.
Coun.
Matthew Green of Ward 3 and Julia Horton, equity vice president of CUPE Local 5167, listen to a police services board discussion about street checks.
(Samantha Craggs/CBC) But he wonders what would've happened if an officer had found another black man leaning against the wall on Tuesday afternoon, maybe one who's not as used to talking with police for his job.
"What would it have been if I was younger?
I'm not sure how I would've responded to that as a younger man," Green said in an interview on Bill Kelly's CHML talk show.
"It's a dehumanizing process when you have to justify yourself to somebody for being where you are."
'Even if you're innocent' Raheem Aman is a 23-year-old McMaster student who plans to be a lawyer and ran for the Green Party on the Mountain in last year's federal election.
When he was about 17, he and his two brothers and their father were playing basketball down the street from their home in Brampton.
On their walk home, a police car rolled up and stopped them and asked them where they were going and what they were doing, despite how obvious the answer was, Aman said.
Raheem Aman, 23, ran for the Green Party on the Mountain in the last federal election.
They were still sweating from their game on the walk down the street, Aman said.
"In basketball clothes.
Nothing even in our pockets," he said.
"My dad was angry about the situation – to be disrespected in front of his children," Aman said.
In the heated exchange that followed, the officer drew his gun and threatened his dad, Aman said.
Now, Aman gets nervous every time he sees a police officer.
"Sometimes even if you're innocent you can still get a little nervous based on previous experiences especially if they were negative," he said.
"I'll never be the same again."
'Living in Ancaster, water my garden every morning' Aman said the people who've reacted to what happened to Green with "why didn't he just politely comply with the cops?"
missed the point.
"They're talking from a position who've never been asked by the police random questions," he said.
"[Police are] trying to incriminate you."
"If I was 45 years old, say, a European woman who's never been asked random questions by police, living in Ancaster, water my garden every morning, it's a totally different context," he said.
"To any … black man especially, it's tough."
The incident with Green, whom Aman knows and considers a "brother," angered him, he said.
"Matthew Green, who pours his heart and blood into Hamilton -- he's still treated like any one of us," he said.
"It's not as simple as 'Just answer the questions.'"
[email protected] | @kellyrbennett
The view from Mount Sunflower, Kansas’s highest elevation.
(Image: CC0) Geographer Jerry Dobson had barely started his new job at the University of Kansas when a realization hit.
Whenever he told friends and colleagues about his gig, people would smile, congratulate him, the works.
But then, almost inevitably, they’d make some crack about his new home state: specifically, how flat it was.
Over his years-long tenure, this did not change.
“Everytime you meet someone, they say it—and it’s not true,” he says.
“I always looked around and saw hills.” But Dobson is a geographer, able to translate this frustration into motivation.
A few years ago, he and his colleague Joshua Campbell—a born and raised Kansan—undertook a project.
They set out to measure the flatness of every state in the union, using an algorithm designed to calculate how flat each one looks from different points in its interior—what Campbell calls “that feeling of total flatness.” When they got the results back, Kansas was in a respectable seventh, behind Delaware, North Dakota, and the clear winner, Florida.
Since then, Dobson and Campbell have toured their results around, using them to argue against the flat-Kansas mythology.
Bluff along the Salt Fork of the Arkansas River.
#gyphills Photo by @flinthillsboy Use #kansasaintflat to be featured A photo posted by Kansas (@kansasaintflat) on May 31, 2016 at 7:25pm PDT So how did Kansas get this reputation?
Andy Stuhl, a musician who recently moved there by car, bets it comes from East Coast road-trippers, who spill out onto the plain after miles and miles of woods.
Sam Huneke, a historian who grew up in Lawrence, points to a lack of particularly large hills, but insists that “the day-to-day experience is not one of flatness.” What is clear is that, like Dobson, they don’t much like it.
“Of course it affects our reputation,” says Kelli Hilliard of the Kansas Tourism Board, pointing towards efforts to change that, like a set of scenic, rolling byways, and an Instagram account called “kansasaintflat.” But Branden Rishel, a Washington-based cartographer, has a different, more radical idea: If everyone already thinks Kansas is flat, why not lean in?
Why not just make it flat—totally, completely flat?
Rishel is very familiar with the Kansas flatness question.
He was a student of Mark Fonstad, a Texas State geographer who, in 2003, set out with some colleagues and a laser microscope to determine which was flatter: Kansas or an IHOP pancake.
The resulting study, titled “Kansas Is Flatter Than a Pancake,” likely added to the public misconceptions that rankle Dobson and Campbell.
(They also point out that, if you use the particular mathematical approach of Fonstad et al, “there is no place on Earth that is not flatter than a pancake.”) Despite his academic parentage, Rishel doesn’t disagree with Dobson and Campbell—“if Kansas is a sloped and hummocky lawn, Florida is a parking lot,” he says.
He also agrees that perceived flatness is probably bad for the state’s reputation.
He just thinks the best solution involves less fact-checking and more literal digging.
“Kansans should reclaim and celebrate flatness,” Rishel says.
“Kansas should become more flat than flat.” Kansas, in Rishel’s ideal future.
(Image: Branden Rishel) About a year ago, Rishel posted a mocked-up map of Totally Flat Kansas on his blog, Cartographers Without Borders, along with a skeleton of his plan.
The image, in which a smooth, sleek Kansas sits embedded in the bumpy continent like a tooth in a gum, is immediately appealing.
It gives the sense of a state that has taken charge of its own destiny and has ended up several thousand years ahead of the rest of us, in a state of David Bowie-esque aesthetic precision.
It makes Kansas look cool.
The plan, which he elaborated for me, goes as follows: Start in the middle of the state and dig west, towards Colorado.
Send that excavated dirt due east, and lay it out as you go, filling in all possible nooks, crannies, valleys, etc.
By the end, you will have moved 5,501 cubic miles of soil—over 9 billion Olympic swimming pools’ worth, Rishel points out.
To even begin to do this, you’d need a whole lot of technology that hasn’t been invented yet (moveable pipelines, huge nuclear-powered mining machines, all that jazz).
But the state would end up flat enough to test a level on, separated from its neighbors by enormous cliffs.
Rishel is a great evangelist for this plan.
Besides the obvious recreational benefits—interstate cliff diving, endless ice skating in wet winters—total flatness would make Kansas a geographically fascinating spot, he says.
There would be new plant life under the giant cliffs, which wouldn’t see the sun until noon.
The Arkansas River would plunge down from Colorado, free-falling into the western edge of the state.
“Tourists could take an elevator into Kansas and play bocce,” Rishel imagines, his enthusiasm palpable.
“The region would turn into a giant puddle after storms… Visitors would discover that flat is never boring.” A northeast view of Lawrence from the top of Mt.
Oread.
(Image: New York Public Library/Public Domain) I’m sold.
But I’m not from Kansas—and, like so many aspirational developers, neither is Rishel.
Even if flattening is the sincerest form of flattery, Dobson, Campbell, and the other real Kansans I talked to would be sad to lose their hills, which help them take advantage of the good parts of being on the level.
From the top of Lawrence’s Mount Oread, for example, “the view reaches far enough to fade away,” says Stuhl.
“It’s awe-inspiring to stand on top of one of our hills and see a squall line moving in,” adds Sam Huneke, a history student who grew up in the state.
That is, until the mining machines roll by, bringing the future with them.
Then, you’ll just want to get out of the way.