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Even Brooklyn juries are getting gentrified now

“OK we need lunch…who here is vegan?”

Should you find yourself suddenly wrapped up by the long arms of the law and facing a jury of your peers, you might take solace in the fact that at least you live in knee-jerk liberal Brooklyn. We hate cops and we hate authority, right? That’s what Greg Gutfeld and Glenn Beck are always saying about us anyway.

Apparently those dudes are wrong though, because defense attorneys are telling the Post that Brooklyn’s juries are trending whiter, more pro-cop, anti-plaintiff and generally lamer. Are the attorneys blaming vague ideas of “hipsters” and calling the phenomenon the “Williamsburg Effect”? Hell fucking yeah they are.

According to attorneys the Post talked to, next time you’re facing 3 to 5 years because a cop mistook your Jolly Ranchers for meth and then just planted some actual meth on you out of embarrassment, you’ll be facing a jury that couldn’t possibly believe in police misconduct. This is because the more affluent, educated and white demographic moving into Brooklyn can’t fathom the idea of police misconduct, because they’ve never experienced it themselves. That in and of itself is inconceivable to those of us who were raised by a public defender, but then everyone can’t have that luxury.

Of course, just in case you were worried this was a Post story that had the word “Williamsburg” without the word “hipster” in it, don’t worry. The trend towards more law-and-order juries is being called the “Williamsburg Effect” by…someone we guess, because it’s the first line of the story. Defense attorney John Paul DeVerna summed things up as such:

A contrarian-minded person — and Billyburg has them in spades — can cause discord in the jury room. And if the hipster gets along with everyone, that can even be more dangerous because they are confident and educated, which means they have the potential to hijack the jury.

What that possibly has to do with hipsters god only knows, since we thought that hipsters were supposed to be lazily anti-authority and so guilt-ridden by white privilege that they voted “Red” Bill de Blasio into office to make up for their oppression of non-whites. It’s almost like the Post‘s idea of who lives in Williamsburg is five years behind the times.

David Colon :

View Comments (1)

  • I think they're blurring the hipster/yuppy line a bit more than it's actually blurred.