Wednesday, December 10, 2014

When the Only Tool You Have is a Hammer, All Problems Resemble Nails; Police Edition

The St. Louis Po-Po have a new idea: If they pick up a teenager for doing something wrong, they're going to charge the parents with child neglect or failure to supervise or someother stupid shit charge.

The parents would be charged through the exact same municipal court system which, in Missouri, is now the subject of investigations and calls for reform because they routinely tack on fees, charges, and hold people in jail for weeks at a time for missing a court date for a traffic ticket. It's a problem that has been festering for decades (and is by no means unique to Missouri).

By the time that a kid, especially a male, is sixteen or seventeen, there is really fuck-all that a parent or guardian, especially a woman, is going to be able to force the kid to do. What do the cops expect them to do, lock the kids in a room? And then the kid has to be let out to go to school. The mothers may be working one or more minimum wage jobs to feed their families, and now, to add to the stress of that, the cops are going to show up and hand them tickets if their kids misbehave.

Tickets that are going to require separate court appearances. Court appearances that will have the mother losing a day or more of work over, and maybe their jobs, as well.

Yeah, that's going to solve the problem. [/eyeroll]

4 comments:

  1. You assume the single mothers are working and not (more likely) on welfare or other assistance.

    If they'd raise 'em right instead of letting 'em run the streets like animals then they'd not have the issue, would they?

    ReplyDelete
  2. good. parents need to be held responsible & parent. both of them. they need to raise their children so they don't become criminals.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Interesting that the immediate response is to use terms like "welfare" and "animals". Can you hear the dog whistle, I can. Perhaps a better question is why police partols in the area haven't reduced the problem...or have the police been given/asked for resources?

    Also, please read the story and note that the parents are NOT the ones being ticketed here, it's those standing in for absentee parents and likely in exactly the situation that Comrade outlines. Perhaps a little research into how many of these youths have one or both parents absent because of laws that target young minority men and women rather than the suburbanites doing the same thing (weed, etc).

    This story is more about "the man" trying to keep his boot on the neck of those the system has pinned down than stopping crime and misbehavior. It's another way to ensure the youth in question will have to be tossed out to fend for themselves where they will reoffend so they can be jailed. Thus repeating the same cycle.

    ReplyDelete

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