Last week a story in the Denver Post reported that a police officer in the Denver suburb of Westminster was fired after being involved in an investigation about high school students passing around a naughty video of a couple of their classmates.
The article said that restrictions surrounding personnel matters prohibit the Police Department from releasing any details about why the officer was fired, but it is odd that we were able to learn everything but the names of the students involved where it concerns the incident the officer was investigating.
Apparently, the District Attorney has decided to be an overbearing idiot and make a name for himself by pursuing felony charges against the 16 and 17-year-old boys who shared the video with their classmates.
Now I understand why there are laws in place to prevent adults from preying on young kids. I still think it is fuzzy, and that we paint the lines too harshly – I mean, truly, by the time kids are 16 they have been exposed to so much sex, crime and violence that none of them are unwise about such matters. Why does the passage of a birthday event make a 17-year-old a kid one day and an adult the next.
In any event, these two boys have been charged with 3rd degree felony charges, which, for adults, can mean years in prison. Even if the D.A. grows a set and decides to be “nice”, it could result in these two kids having to register as sex offenders.
District Attorneys have wide latitude on which crimes they choose to prosecute. Despite their hands in the air, woe-is-me-I-have-to-follow-the-letter-of-the-law appearances on television, if the DA decides not to take up a case, it dies.
Should we really be punishing our children for their bad judgement? In a way that can scar their lives forever? Aren’t we just making their problems far worse by treating them as adults when they screw up, but still defining them as children?
I’m sure that if it was my daughter portrayed in the video that was circulated around, I’d be madder than hell, probably would want to have a word with the father of the boys who took the video, issued the challenge – whatever. At the very least, my daughter would be grounded, with no phone, internet or TV privileges until her 45th birthday. But, I seriously doubt that I would want some stupid 16 or 17-year-old kid to rot in jail, or have any chance of a decent job taken away from him because of his bad judgement.
If it were my son who was involved in this mess, I would also insist he apologize personally to the parents of the girl involved, ground him for life with no phone, TV or internet, but I’d be desperately pleading with the authorities to be humane and exercise their power in an intelligent way and recognize these teenaged pranks for what they are – serious, but nothing to ruin a bunch of kids lives over.
When our legislators write laws, we need to make sure that we do not take away the exercise of independent judgement from those we charge with enforcing those laws. We need to examine the ones we have on the books, and make sure that they are not so carved in stone that individual circumstances of each incident are ignored. We need to remain a humane and just people.