Mom of out-of-control teen thug must share blame for ugly arrest

By David McElroy · October 21, 2018

The headlines made it sound like another ugly case of police brutality. CNN said, “Video shows Florida officer hitting 14-year-old twice during arrest.” The Miami television station which first reported the news said, “Mother, attorney of teen punched by Coral Springs officer at mall speak out.”

The video shows a male and a female officer with a teen on the ground. The male officer hits the girl in her side as she is held on the ground. My first instinct is to think it looks excessive. Why is he hitting her?

The girl’s mother is angry at police and quickly hired an attorney since she wants “justice to be served.”

And then I read about what led to that point shown in the video. What caused two police officers to be violently arresting a 14-year-old outside a shopping mall?

On Thursday, Coral Springs, Fla., police received a call about “unruly teens” who were reported to be harassing and cursing other shoppers at a mall. Among other things, some of the teens were reported to have pushed a 5-year-old child to the ground.

The 14-year-old in the video was one who was seen pushing another teen. Officers gave the teens a trespass warning and were told not to return. Most of the teens left at that point, but some refused to leave, including the one in the video.

Finally, a teen boy was arrested, which caused the girl to start cursing and trying to incite the other teens to fight the cops.

“Officers attempted to take her into custody, at which time she began to fight and resist arrest,” said a statement from Coral Springs Police. “Due to her stature and aggressive behavior, officers took her to the ground attempting to get her to release her fists. As seen in the video, she resisted arrest, and in order to have her comply, she was struck in the side to release her clenched fists.”

So it appears this girl was among a group of out-of-control thugs causing trouble at a mall. When she was cited for trespassing, she refused to leave. When another teen was being arrested, she urged the remaining teens to fight the cops. When she was being arrested, she wouldn’t release her clenched fists to be cuffed and taken in.

I’m frustrated about incidents such as this, partly because crying “police brutality” about this makes a mockery of the real cases of police brutality. There are times when cops mistreat innocent people, especially minorities who’ve done nothing wrong.

I’ve become very angry about such abuse of police powers over the last 15 or 20 years. I’ve seen example after example of it, so I know it’s real. But what we see in this story seems to be something entirely different.

More and more, groups of teens today can act like out-of-control thugs. There’s always been some of that, of course, but I’ve experienced enough of the low-level form of this behavior that I’m afraid to be around some teens.

There are certain places where I’ve learned to stay away from, because I feel unsafe around the groups which congregate there. Just because most of these thugs are not white doesn’t mean it’s racist fear. I would feel the same way if they were thuggish white teens. If you’ve experienced this thuggish and territorial behavior from certain teens, you know what I’m concerned about. If you’re determined to scream “Racism!” any time it involves a non-white thug, I can’t convince you otherwise.

Society can’t function when people feel unsafe walking around in shared spaces. People who don’t respect other people’s right to be in a place without being harassed have to be dealt with. They have to be removed so the rest of us can go about our peaceful lives. That is a legitimate use of police power.

There is no reasonable question anymore about whether police are wrong in how they deal with some confrontations. There can also be no debate about whether minorities are unfairly targeted for brutal treatment.

But the mother of the girl in this case bears a lot of the responsibility for what happened to her daughter. If she had taught her daughter properly and kept control of what she was doing — as a 14-year-old — her daughter wouldn’t have been a harassing thug at a shopping mall.

And when the mother discovered what her daughter had done, a reasonable response would be to say, “I have failed to teach my daughter how to act. I have to start now.”

Instead, this woman wants to enable her daughter’s thuggish behavior by ignoring the fact that the girl created all of these circumstances. She’s teaching her daughter that she can act however she wants — and mom will be here with a lawyer to pretend that poor girl is a victim.

Civil society depends on people obeying mutually responsible rules of behavior. When teens aren’t taught that, they turn into thugs — and then they often turn into adult criminals.

This case isn’t about police brutality. This is a mother who didn’t bother to teach her child how to behave in public. If anybody is responsible for what happened to her daughter, it’s these parents — for not teaching the girl how to act and then for enabling this thuggish behavior by turning a perpetrator into a victim.

We need to call out these sorts of people for what they are, but most people in the media are so terrified of being called racists that they’re scared to call a thug a thug, regardless of the skin color or ethnicity.

Share on Social Networks

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

Related Posts