Jᴀᴄᴜʀᴜᴛᴜ - Tʜᴇ Cᴀsᴛ Oᴜᴛ

A fair warning to all holier-than-thou "artists" who think simple rules and regulations only apply to the "little people": when given simple instructions from a uniformed law enforcement officer, just follow them. You'll be on your way in 15 minutes instead of looking at two years in prison.

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His resistance was pointless, the best approach when dealing with petty officials is generally: yes officer, of course officer. Then taking it up with their superiors if you feel you have a genuine case. i.e. when your blood's had a chance to cool.

wasn't that posted here already?

Just the event not the outcome, iirc.

inhuien wrote:Just the event not the outcome, iirc.

fair fair

I think there's a lot of surprise out there in fanboy-land. Much of the expectation was this could easily be settled, or he could simply be fined, or the whole matter would be dropped, or whatever.

But, holy hell, the guy is looking at prison now.

Good. At another forum that I frequent, Chronicles, which is a UK site, the natives were whipped into a frenzy in their defense of Watts over this one, and how the "evil police state" done another wrong to a solid guy. Even our friend Tanzelaat was spewing off about this, in a most uncharacteristic way.

Screw this wacko Watts. Hope he learned a lesson. Doubt he did.

Watts' own site is the worst (as might be expected).

No one seems capable of acknowledging a fine old saying: "Where there's smoke, there's fire." They'd rather believe that the officers woke up that morning and said, "Hey, let's seek out a pretentious SF author and rough him up."

This was no accident or example of profiling or whatever. This was an above-the-law asshole who wouldn't respond to simple requests and got aggressive. End of story.

At least he'll get lots of nice writing time in prison.

Hell with him.