Good People With a Bad Reputation

Hi, my name is Jesse Hoffman, Iam a skater from Bothell, Washington. I am going to send this to every city in Washington and try to make something happen. Please take time and read this, its not much but at least I am trying to make something happen. Please send this message to everyone you know.

Before anyone reads this I just want to say that skaters don't mean to act rude to people in any way and that we are sorry for our wrong actions of being kicked out of wherever. We are good people trying to have a good time just like anyone else. We are truely sorry.

Today, skaters around the world are treated with no respect from the public, there are "No Skateboarding" signs everywhere you look. We gave ourselves the reputation we have today. Back when skateboarding was first born, skaters were known as druggies, bums and criminals. Today we are looked at the same way even though we have changed. One day me and my friends went to this new weekly gathering in a parking garage that we called skate church, it brought many skaters, who didn't know Jesus to Him through skateboarding. We just started getting into our service and some cop comes in and spoils the whole thing. He came in with his car and interupted someone praying and told us we couldn't be there, [we had total permission from the guy that owned the building]so he took us outside. He then called two of his buddies to get there. We waited for about fifteen minutes for them to come. They were going to arrest us because they didn't believe that we had permission to be in the parking garage. My friend asked why we were going to be arrested and he said that skateboarding is the same as a burglery in progress, and that pretty much made us all angry, but I guess we convinced them not to arrest us, so they took our names and addresses to put on file and told us if we went there again, he would put us in jail and have a fine or comunity service in Bellevue. Me and my friends now have our names on file in Bellevue, Redmond, Woodinville, Smokey Point in Marysville, and a couple places in California. Skaters are not bad people, we just want a place where we can have fun and hangout like any other sport. You don't see cops give a fine to someone dribbling a basketball on a sidewalk.

So far we have convinced many people to believe that it is unfair to treat skaters the way that the public does, and now they are finally building us skateparks to go have fun and hangout with our friends. There is still a problem though, the skateparks they build us are really poor, there always crowded and its not very fun to skate them. We need something bigger, more fun and something just for skaters, something built by skaters, not by someone who dosn't know what hes doing. That causes a problem too, the money cant be budgeted to build a good skatepark. So now what? I guess we just have to live with what we've got and since the skateparks won't do it for us, we will still skate the good spots, where there are signs that say "No skateboarding for the protection of our customers".

Put yourself in our position, say you're a basketball player looking for a place to shoot and there is only one basket in the whole city with 70 guys shooting on it, now there is a basketball hoop on the side of a store and there is a sign that says "Basketball is prohibited for the protection of our customers". What would you do? Would you see the sign and say to yourself "oh well, I just wasted my whole life playing basketball to be the best there is, I guess I' ll just give it up", or would you say "I need to shoot or I will never make the NBA. I guess I' ll just wait untill all of the stores close and then I wont be in anyones way". Now thats the one I would choose and thats what we do choose and that sucks because we are still breaking the law and the people give us no choice, they are the criminals. There are places that dont have signs but they aren't the best places to skate in the world. Me and my friends look for those places and skate those places most of the time. I know that we skate at places we shouldn't but give us somewhere we can, not just a skatepark but an abondanded school or something.

Here is what all skaters love to skate. We love skating stairs, from a curb to a 13 stair, we love rails, from square to round, from 1ft to 5ft high, we love ledges, from ledges down stairs, to ledges on flat ground, we love launch ramps, we love drop gaps, we love banks and most of all we love dry areas.

As soon as skateboarding is known around the world, it will be the most popular sport there ever was.