Park Slope Panthers: Woke NYC liberals start VIGILANTE group after homeless man killed dog
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK CITY: Last month on August 3, a homeless man cruelly attacked a dog near Brooklyn's Prospect Park. Following the attack, the golden retriever named Moose did not get through surgery and died. This prompted Park Slope residents to form a vigilante group called the Park Slope Panthers to patrol the neighborhood.
Modeled after NYC's famous Guardian Angels, a volunteer organization with the goal of unarmed crime prevention, Kristian Nammack, a financial consultant, formed the Park Slope Panthers with the aim to "organize a community safety patrol."
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Nammack initially made a post on Nextdoor, a hyperlocal social networking service for neighborhoods. In it, he called for the assembling of residents and the organization of a group on August 20. "Do we want to organize a community safety patrol, and take our park back? Think what the Guardian Angels did to take back the subways in the 70s/early 80s," he wrote, adding, "We may also get to wear cool berets. I'm being serious." This was in reference to the red berets worn by the Guardian Angels as they patrolled the New York City subway system.
"How about PARK SLOPE PANTHERS as a group name?" was his additional suggestion. Further, taking to MeetUp, Nammack wrote "In light of people feeling unsafe to use Prospect Park due to recent attacks of both people and dogs, in one case resulting in the death of a dog; and in light of the epidemic of packages being stolen from stoops and lobbies, we want to form a neighborhood watch. The goal is to be eyes and ears and to take our neighborhood back."
Following the post, several residents of the neighborhood decided to meet up at Prospect Park, close to the spot where the dog and its owner had been attacked. According to the Daily Mail, the first meeting of the group sounds "less like a group of residents rallying around defending their neighborhood, and more like a wokeness workshop too timid about offending anyone to get anything done." Merely fifteen minutes into the meeting, three people in their twenties came up, adding that they were not "super into abiding by the structure that you're setting up."
Someone else raised the question as to why the group seemed to be appropriating the name of the 'Black Panthers,' a Marxist-Leninist and black power political organization founded in 1966. In answer, Nammack pointed to the two statues of black panthers at the entrance of Prospect Park. However, another woman, also white, said, "Using the Panthers as your group's name is kind of abhorrent to me. It feels antithetical to what the Black Panthers would stand for."
Speaking to Common Sense, one member of the group, Emily, said, "It's about finding a way that's non-biased to report these things and have people feel like it's safe here," adding, "You don't want to fall into that stereotype of privilege." In addition to the confusion and disagreement over the name of the vigilante group, there also seemed to be no consensus over what would be done to the dog's murderer who is still at large. In fact, the source reports that the same homeless man was recently spotted chasing another woman and dog, screaming, "Let's see some action here!"
The inaugural meeting of the group saw one person remark about the murderer, "It sounds like this person has been pushed out of an unimaginable amount of systems," adding that he was possibly "neurodivergent". At the same time, one woman named Sky even took offense at the very definition of crime. She said, "Crime is an abstract term that means nothing in a lot of ways. The construct of crime has been so socially constructed to target black and poor people."
The only black man present at the meeting, Damien, spoke up, "Just to level set the room, we’re not here to cause harm or be vigilantes to anyone. Maybe we could work together to find a solution because I don’t f*****g know what the solution is, but we all want the same thing." However, what that "solution" is, one cannot really conclude as the meetup ended with woke jargon tossed around without any conclusive outcome.