{"id":1064,"date":"2008-03-02T15:40:35","date_gmt":"2008-03-02T05:40:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/?p=1064"},"modified":"2008-11-01T17:57:36","modified_gmt":"2008-11-01T07:57:36","slug":"fuck-shit-up-friends-stand-united-finance-sector-union","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/?p=1064","title":{"rendered":"Fuck Shit Up \/ Friends Stand United \/ Finance Sector Union"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul><strong>Update<\/strong> (November 1, 2008) : <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pe.com\/localnews\/publicsafety\/stories\/PE_News_Local_N_wverdict28.473ddcc.html\">Three men convicted in 2006 beating death of Corona man<\/a>, Sonja Bjelland, <em>The Press-Enterprise<\/em>, October 27, 2008: Three Corona men were convicted of second-degree murder Monday in a beating death connected to a national gang. Richard James Dugan, 27, Jonathan Richard Morgan, 24, and Travis Daniel Westly, 25, face sentencing Dec. 12 after the jury found all three guilty of second-degree murder for the benefit of a street gang. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=nn_c8jVXN04\">Sean Gardhouse<\/a>, 19, of Corona, was beaten June 23, 2006, in the parking lot of the Jack in the Box <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jackinthebox.com\/locations\/map.php?UID=1025\">on Ontario Avenue in Corona<\/a> and died five days later. His death focused attention on two gangs, Friends Stand United and El Cerrito Boys. Friends Stand United, a national gang, was written about in <em>Rolling Stone<\/em> in 2007. The group attracted attention with a DVD called &#8220;Boston Beatdown,&#8221; featuring footage of fights and music from hard-core punk bands&#8230;<\/ul>\n<p>Yeah so anyway. Anti-racists, thugs, or both, I dunno.<\/p>\n<p>But so much for the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.fsunion.org.au\/\">Finance Sector Union<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>*<a href=\"http:\/\/viv.id.au\/blog\/?p=1411\">boom&#8211;tish<\/a>*<\/p>\n<p><em>FSU is &#8220;a fairly new phenomenon here and we&#8217;re still in the beginning stages of figuring out what these guys are all about,&#8221; Seattle police spokeswoman Debra Brown said.<\/em> I say: following on from a string of other incidents (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.thestranger.com\/seattle\/Content?oid=30929\">Friends Stand Charged: FSU Members Arrested for Weapons, Drugs Outside Local Club<\/a> by Megan Seling, <em>The Stranger<\/em>, March 2&#8211;8, 2006, details one such incident), news that someone, allegedly a member of FSU, was charged with manslaughter back in January last year triggered a small amount of reflection on the gang&#8217;s (crew&#8217;s) past and present. Its past is fairly clear: the crew (gang) emerged as a response to the desire to rid Boston hardcore of boneheads and other racists; presently, the name has been adopted by a large range of others, in and outside of Boston, whether affiliated in some way to the original crew or not. Despite the overtly-hostile title, <a href=\"http:\/\/seattletimes.nwsource.com\/html\/localnews\/2002848946_fsu07m.html\">&#8216;Violent group spoils party for segment of music scene&#8217;<\/a> by Sara Jean Green (<em>Seattle Times<\/em>, March 7, 2006) provides a useful overview of the history of FSU, noting that the handful of arrests detailed in Seling&#8217;s report was more likely to have been of SHARPs than it was the Seattle FSU crew. Interestingly, Green notes that some of the friction in the scene is:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>A matter of economics<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The schism that&#8217;s occurring in the hardcore scene is at least partially due to economics, with a growing number of middle-class suburban kids getting involved in hardcore&#8230; Many don&#8217;t understand the etiquette or history of the scene, which has always had violent undercurrents, Collins said.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I grew up in a trailer park with no money. A lot of guys in my crew, we grew up hard,&#8221; said Collins, originally from a rural area near Bremerton. Kids who grew up in places like Bellevue or Redmond &#8220;had to deal with tennis practice \u2014 we had to deal with not getting beat up on the way home from the [school] bus,&#8221; he said.<\/p>\n<p>Though police have characterized FSU assaults as &#8220;random acts of violence,&#8221; Collins said that&#8217;s not the case. If FSU gets into a fight, there&#8217;s always a reason, he said.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We&#8217;re civil people \u2014 we just don&#8217;t beat people &#8217;til we can&#8217;t beat them anymore,&#8221; he said. &#8220;If I fight them, I&#8217;m going to fight them &#8217;til I think they got what they deserved.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>But others worry that violence associated with FSU members could have a lasting impact beyond bruises and bloodied noses.<\/p>\n<p>David Meinert, a former president of the Northwest chapter of the Recording Academy who manages the Seattle band Presidents of the United States of America, said FSU&#8217;s propensity for violence &#8220;is a negative black mark&#8221; on Seattle&#8217;s otherwise healthy hardcore scene. Meinert, who spent 10 years working to have the city&#8217;s Teen Dance Ordinance rescinded, worries that FSU&#8217;s reputation could prompt more police attention at all all-ages shows.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Speaking of economics, the producers of hardcore DVD <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.bostonbeatdown.com\/\">Boston Breakdown<\/a><\/em> offer an unnecessarily laboured response to accusations they unfairly profit from violence associated with the scene in Boston on their website. A not very posi <a href=\"http:\/\/www.citizinemag.com\/music\/music-0411_bostonbeatdown.htm\">review<\/a> of the documentary is here; David King reflects on some hardcore issues <a href=\"http:\/\/www.metroland.net\/back_issues\/vol29_no02\/features.html\">here<\/a>. Good, bad or indifferent, Alexander J. Franklin, the person charged with committing manslaughter in January 2007, has been acquitted.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.app.com\/apps\/pbcs.dll\/article?AID=\/20080229\/NEWS01\/802290398\/1004\/NEWS01\">Charges dropped in fatal fight at Asbury club<\/a><br \/>\nAPP.com<br \/>\nFebruary 29, 2008<\/p>\n<p>FREEHOLD \u2014 A Monmouth County grand jury on Wednesday refused to indict a Brooklyn man on manslaughter charges that had been lodged against him in the death of a Bass River man last year, the Prosecutor&#8217;s Office said.<\/p>\n<p>Alexander J. Franklin, 34, a tattoo artist with reputed gang affiliations, had been accused in the beating death of James Morrison, 25, on Jan. 14, 2007.<\/p>\n<p>Morrison died of blunt force trauma after an altercation at Club Deep, an Asbury Park nightclub, where he was allegedly punched in the head and later died of his injuries.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;A very thorough investigation was conducted at the time this crime occurred,&#8221; Monmouth County First Assistant Prosecutor Peter E. Warshaw said. &#8220;That information was presented to the grand jury in a thorough and comprehensive manner, and the grand jury declined to return any indictments.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The grand jury&#8217;s vote means the police charges against Franklin are now dismissed, prosecutors said.<\/p>\n<p>Franklin was initially arrested three weeks after the fight. At the time, police said Morrison hit his head on concrete after being felled by a blow to the head.<\/p>\n<p>Morrison and his friends had allegedly been involved in an altercation inside the club over a T-shirt worn by one of Morrison&#8217;s friends. Show attendees said someone took offense that the shirt depicted a Confederate flag.<\/p>\n<p>Prosecutors said Franklin was associated with the FSU gang \u2014 an acronym standing for Friends Stand United or two profanities followed by the word &#8220;up.&#8221; The group is reported to be responsible for driving neo-Nazi elements out of the Boston hard-core punk scene in the mid-1980s.<\/p>\n<p>Warshaw said he could not comment further on the matter because of court rules that require grand jury proceedings to be kept secret.<\/p>\n<p>Staff writer Matt Pais contributed to this story.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Update (November 1, 2008) : Three men convicted in 2006 beating death of Corona man, Sonja Bjelland, The Press-Enterprise, October 27, 2008: Three Corona men were convicted of second-degree murder Monday in a beating death connected to a national gang. &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/?p=1064\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,11,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1064","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anti-fascism","category-music","category-state"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6AyE-ha","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1064"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1064\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}