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| 3/11/2010 Mischief Good hell. We are living in a society that seems to be taking itself way too seriously as of late! Take for example the twelve-year-old girl in New York City who was recently arrested for doodling on her desk at school. Yes, that’s right. She was arrested for doing something that myself and bazillions of other people have done for years in the classroom out of sheer boredom: doodling on a desk in class while no doubt waiting for the bell to ring. She wasn’t writing anything threatening, nor was she marking gang territory or anything edgy like that. There were no depictions of genitalia or threats of shooting up the school. She simply wrote: "I love my friends Abby and Faith. Lex was here 2/1/10 :)" So why was she hauled away to Juvy in handcuffs? Because her old-enough-to-know-better junior high school principal freaked out, overreacted, and called the cops. We aren’t even talking about a troubled teen here. According to reports, she is just a simple girl who liked to draw and dance. For God’s sake, man! She is twelve! The arrest didn’t happen discretely, either. It took place in front of her classmates as she bawled her poor little eyes out. Charges have since been dropped, and apologies have been more abundant than grains of sand in the sea. Needless to say, her parents were unbelievably pissed off and are now in the process of suing the NYPD and the school. I don’t blame them a bit. The once purposeful ‘Zero Tolerance’ mentality has dumbed our society down and reduced it to a ‘Zero Common-Sense’ catastrophe. In another case, also in New York City, a nine-year-old boy was nearly suspended for bringing a two-inch, plastic toy gun to school. The gun belonged to one of his toy Lego policemen. We’re talking about a piece of plastic that is smaller than a toothpick…and no cop in the world is going to shoot you down for pointing something that tiny at him (except for maybe a member of the NYPD or the principal's wife). The word ‘asinine’ doesn’t apply here because it isn’t a harsh enough word. I don’t even know what word to use in the given situations. And why am I getting my panties in a bunch over this stuff anyway? I’ll tell you why: because recently a similar thing happened to one of my own children. I won’t tell you which one; suffice it to say that it involved my fourteen-year-old son, Murphy. Murphy is a typical eighth-grader and has been known to get into equally typical mischief here and there: but nothing so serious that he needed to be charged with a crime or threatened with arrest. But get a rookie cop from the local PD involved and suddenly he’s a hardened criminal. I’ll try to explain this whole thing without pounding a hole through my keyboard. Forgive me if I swear like a sailor under my breath as I type. One fine Friday afternoon, Murphy was walking home from school with his best friend of ten years, a kid named Thomas. The two of them have been an inseparable item since kindergarten. Thomas, by the way, is also a good kid and just mildly more mischievous than Murphy is. Anyway, upon arriving at Thomas’s house after school, the two of them went inside where they thought it would be funny to yell things out of Thomas’s living room window at the little elementary school kids who were walking home in front of the house. They were yelling things like, “help! I’ve been shot!” And “man down!” Whenever a kid would look their direction to see where all of the commotion was coming from, the two deviants would duck behind the couch and giggle like schoolgirls. I’m not saying it was a smart thing to do, but it is typical of kids their age to be…well, to just be dumb kids goofing around. However, society has forgotten what that is like apparently. Send in the cavalry: order must be maintained at any cost. Everything was going fine until it all backfired on the boys. Two little third- grade girls heard their “pleas for help,” rushed over to a nearby crossing guard and borrowed her cell phone to call 911. Murphy and Thomas, realizing what was happening, bolted out of the house and after the girls. They tried to explain that it was all a joke and begged them not to call the police. But the little girls had already dialed: and they weren’t about to hang up because that wasn’t what they were taught to do in school (and so it should be). Soon an emergency dispatcher came on the line, and the girls explained that somebody had been shot and needed help. They gave Thomas’s address to the dispatcher, hung up, handed the cell phone back to the crossing guard, and continued on their merry way home. Before Murphy and Thomas had time to blink, the police department, fire department, and paramedics were at the house with lights flashing and sirens blaring. The confusion that followed seems to be pretty hazy by both boys’ accounts, probably because they were busy being chewed out by every emergency responder at the scene. Poor Thomas’s mother, who was home at the time but didn’t realize what the boys had been up to, was caught completely off guard. And so was I when I was awakened from a very peaceful nap by the sound of the phone ringing and a police officer explaining in my ear that he “has my son, Murphy, in custody” and needed me to come and get him right away. He wouldn’t give me any more details than that. I never got out of bed so fast in my life. The drive from my townhome to Thomas’s house takes about five-to-eight minutes, depending on traffic. I was there in two. By the time I got there, only one police car remained and a uniformed officer was standing in Thomas’s driveway with Murphy who was trying desperately not to bawl his eyes out. Thomas was already in the house hiding under his blankets and crying. Neither of them had been in that kind of trouble before and the shock of it all had sent them plummeting emotionally from teenagers to kindergarteners within minutes. To put it another way, they were scared silly. All kinds of scenarios raced through my mind as I climbed out of the car observing the stern look on the officer’s face and seeing my usually happy-go- lucky son weep like a newborn next to him. What had my boy done? Did he rob someone? Did he spray paint somebody’s house? Did he get into a fight? Maybe he was caught shoplifting or breaking into somebody’s home! Was he involved in gang activity and I didn’t know it? As I approached the officer, I noted his lack of eye contact with me: and in my world, that is always a sign of weakness and insecurity. He looked to be about twenty-two and was busy writing on some sort of notepad as he asked me if my name was Steven. I acknowledged that I was indeed the father of the criminal in question. The officer then told Murphy, without looking up from his notepad at me or my son, to tell me what he had done. Through sobs and tears, Murphy told me what had happened. Without thinking, I blurted out, “that’s it?!” That was when the cop looked up at me briefly and said sternly (which was very hard to take seriously, considering how young and afraid to look me in the eye he was), “We take these things very seriously. I should take him with me right now. But instead I’m turning him over to you.” Take him away? Are you kidding me? For that? I held my tongue as the officer, who was so young and youthfully inexperienced that he was probably still a fan of the Hannah Montana show and High School Musical, tore a page off of his pad and handed it to me. He tried to tell me that Murphy could be charged with a felony (which I snickered at, which again brought the officer’s eyes to mine briefly), but instead was being charged with a misdemeanor of Disorderly Conduct. Again, I held my tongue knowing full-well that this rookie cop was ticket happy and out to prove how awesome he actually was beneath his little boy persona. I didn’t want a ticket of my own, so I just said ‘okay’ and walked back to the car with Murphy where I acknowledged that what he had done was stupid, but made it clear to him that I wasn’t angry; that I understood that it was merely a prank that had gone wrong. I wish to make it known here that I am not anti-police. I am glad they are around and, in fact, at one point in my life I almost became a cop before I realized that I couldn't be a big enough asshole to fit the job description. But this officer in particular had a lot to learn about kids and how best to handle them. Murphy and Thomas had already learned their lessons. The lectures and tears, the sirens and lights…all were enough to convince them that what they had done was wrong. And I can guarantee you, knowing both boys as I do, that such a thing will never happen again. They didn’t call 911 themselves as a prank, nor did they yell for anyone to call 911. That part was completely out of their hands. After reducing the boys to tears and scaring the hell out of them, the ensuing charges were absolutely unnecessary. And so was the court date. A month later, Murphy, Thomas, Thomas’s mom and I, were sitting at the juvenile district court talking as we waited to sit through an hour-long class meant to educate juveniles regarding the law. The boys were dressed in suits for the ‘appearance.’ Every other kid who walked in the door was dressed in baggy jeans, t-shirts, and some were wearing baseball caps sideways. They not only looked like they belonged there, they acted as if it was their second home. Thankfully, there was no judge, and no lawyers were involved. The ‘court date,’ as the officer had called it, was simply an educational class, after which each kid had to either admit or deny any wrongdoing. Then each was fined according to his or her deeds. Every kid in the room admitted to their specific crime/crimes. And every one of them, save Murphy and Thomas, had committed the very serious offenses that had run through my mind as I climbed from my car and approached the officer the day it all happened. Most of the kids were fined upwards of two-hundred dollars. It seemed no mercy was shown as each of them stepped up to a table and met with a probation officer. When Murphy and Thomas approached their probation officer, he read over the police report and all but laughed. With a big smile on his face, he asked them if they had learned their lesson and both agreed that they indeed had. The officer then knocked their one-hundred dollar fines down to fifty bucks and gave us a smile as we walked away. I never did punish Murphy... other than making him work off the fine after I paid it. I did things as a kid that I was too smart to get caught doing: I once lit a gravel pit and field on fire; I put flasher barricades in the road in the middle of the night and turned out their lights, which caused a car accident; I was truant; I broke curfew; I shoplifted. In later years, I busted shoplifters for a grocery store chain and most of the offenders were teenagers who were completely out of control and on drugs or in gangs. So Thomas and Murphy yelled something out the window and everybody but the SWAT team showed up (that was probably next). There are better ways to spend tax-payer (my) money. And going overboard by arresting a girl for doodling, suspending a kid for bringing a tiny toy gun to school, or charging two boys with a crime that was best handled though clever adult fear-mongering is ridiculous. Kids are mischievous; and it’s about time our society pulled its head out of its self-righteous, politically-correct-zero-tolerance ass and started focusing its attention on keeping that child molester behind bars; or giving the chair to the guy who slaughters his own family, then goes to a strip club to celebrate. Sure, hardened criminals start out small. They shoplift, smoke pot, and maybe steal from their parents before escalating into more serious crimes. Some of them go so far as to torture animals to death before moving onto actual people. But I seriously doubt that Ted Bundy got his start by yelling ‘help’ out of his buddy’s living room window for a laugh. --Steven (c) 2010 Steven Grames |