Tuesday, February 3

When Did We Start to Expect Criminals to be Treated with Kid Gloves?


I have been baffled several times in recent months to read news stories about parents wailing and lamenting the treatment of their children by the Police… their violent, criminal children in the aftermath of a crime.

For example, a woman whose son held up a gas station and was shot and killed by a cop in the ensuing confrontation was beside herself because they left his body on the pavement where it fell for several hours. She kept insisting to the news reporter following the case that “he was just on his way to his girlfriend’s house” and terribly offended that his body stayed where fell was while the Police went through the standard post-incident procedures and documentation of evidence.  

(I’m not sure which part bothered me more – the fact that she wasn’t horrified that her “boy” had held an had to leave the body there while they did a lengthy investigative and documenting process specifically because so many crazy people just like her insist that there was foul play, corruption, etc. if every t isn’t crossed and every i isn’t dotted.)
innocent person at gunpoint, and then gotten into a shootout, or the ugly irony that Police

Another mother brushed off her daughter’s attempt to run over two cops with a stolen car (!!) with a breezy “okay, so she shouldn’t have taken the car”. In the same breath she railed at the cops for firing on the vehicle (which subsequently crashed), pulling her injured daughter out, and handcuffing her instead of immediately summoning an ambulance to get her medical attention. Attempting to run someone over is a violent crime.

The first thing you do with violent criminals for the safety of everyone – law enforcement and innocent bystanders alike – is subdue and confine violent criminals to ensure they can’t hurt anyone else! Every other consideration comes after that. When did this stop being common sense, and become open for debate? Why are news organizations even publishing these people’s rants instead of politely pointing them toward psychiatric help for having such a clearly limited grasp on reality?

I appreciate that losing a child is horrific, no matter what the circumstances, and I’m sure it is both terrifying and mortifying to have someone so close to you turn to violent crime – particularly if you are the parent, and you can expect some of the blame to fall on you for raising someone capable of such a thing. But if you become a criminal, you get treated like a criminal, and I have a hard time understanding why even in the midst of such horror and mortification people think the rules shouldn’t apply to their “baby”.

Is Law Enforcement always right? Of course not. They’re human, just like the rest of us.

Is this about race? No, the same laws apply to everyone – and if you break them, you’re still a criminal, whether you’re black, white, or purple.

What it is about is common sense: if you don’t want your child to end up dead in the street, then raise them to understand the difference between right and wrong. Make it clear early on in life that bad choices have consequences. It won’t make you popular, but it will prevent you from standing on a sidewalk whining to the media about how “unfair” life is while their twenty-something body rots in the street because of their own ignorance and arrogance. 

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