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.

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We are ruled by the dumbest and most incompetent people among us — and we have a system which allows stupid and irresponsible people to force the costs of their idiocy onto smarter and wiser people. Can we get away with that? Yes, for quite some time. But we eventually reach a point at which the dumbest of the dumb — who are habitual liars and mentally ill fools — lead us to the disasters and destruction that some of us have seen coming for years. We are approaching that point. And yet most of the idiots around us still wave their rhetorical banners of support for the evil people who are leading us to ruin — and all of them point their fingers at someone else, never noticing that their own enthusiastic support of evil is to blame. When things finally fall apart, blame yourself for your blindness to the evil, not whoever happens to be in power when it happens.

I’ve been making some changes to the site lately and there are more changes coming in the days ahead, so don’t be surprised if you some small differences. This is not a wholesale redesign, but rather the addition of some features. Since they’re smarter than I am, I’ve put Oliver and Alex in charge of the technical work, which you can see in this action photo from the control room of our media complex. I recently added a series of landing pages for readers who randomly discover the site from an Internet search. I’ve also changed the YouTube link at the top of the page to go to the new YouTube channel for video essays that reflect things I’ve already published here. (Here’s a little bit about both of the YouTube channels I’m working on.) In addition, I’m trying to move away from using Instagram, so I’m experimenting with photo plug-ins that will eventually allow me to host the pictures — cats, dogs, sunsets, whatever — that I often take. So don’t be surprised to see more changes. Thanks for your patience. Let’s hope Alex and Oliver know what they’re doing.

I have no use for the theocratic and repressive government of Iran. The people who run the country are cruel at best and evil at worst. The Iranian people deserve freedom. But I have no personal quarrel with anybody in Iran. While I’m not thrilled about a future Iranian government having nuclear weapons, I’m just as concerned about nukes in the hands of politicians in Israel, Pakistan, India, China and Russia. I’m not even thrilled with the U.S., Britain and France having them, either, because I don’t trust any politicians to be responsible with such terrible weapons. All I can say with certainty is that American taxpayers have no business attacking Iran, especially since we’re being forced to pay for this attack in order to benefit the politicians of Israel — and nobody else. If Middle Eastern countries want to fight among themselves, that’s none of my business. It’s not the business of the U.S. government, either. I have no quarrel with anybody in Iran — and having the government which claims to represent me launch an unprovoked attack against a sovereign country will only make all Americans less safe in the near future. This attack is poorly conceived and morally unjustified. Remember that when the Iranians launch attacks that we will then condemn as “terrorism.” What the U.S. is doing right now looks like terrorism to me. And let’s not forget that the attack is the latest in a long line of unconstitutional wars by various U.S. presidents — who have no legal power to declare war on their own, according to the U.S. Constitution.

A child having a tantrum understands only one thing: Did I get my way or not? He doesn’t understand the issues involved. He doesn’t understand the reasons that went into a decision. He doesn’t understand any of the things that mature and reasonable adults have to understand in order to live healthy lives. By his reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling to strike down his disastrous tariff scheme, Donald Trump shows himself to be — once more — a screaming child having a tantrum. Outside the world of mob bosses who expect to get their way every time, normal adults don’t act this way, but Trump isn’t normal. He’s an angry and vengeful man who has narcissistic personality disorder. And we are in danger as a result. Trump doesn’t understand the legal issues involved in this ruling. He doesn’t understand economics. He doesn’t understand rule of law. He doesn’t understand that he can ever be wrong. All he understands is that he didn’t get his way. And he is now a narcissistic and raging little boy who also happens to hold life-and-death power over most humans on this planet. He’s dangerous — and the system which gives him that power is even more dangerous.

Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

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