Debra
Harrell, the South Carolina mom who was jailed for letting her
9-year-old play at a popular park while she worked her shift at
McDonalds is now suing WJBF-TV, the station that aired
a tape of her police interrogation.
On its Facebook page, WJBF-TV originally included footage of
Harrell giving her name, address, and social security
number. This
outraged viewers as much as it did Harrell’s pro bono
lawyer, Robert Phillips, who filed the suit. Even more outrageous
is the
interrogation itself, which included these exchanges:
OFFICER (talking about Harrell’s daughter): “So you leave
her at the park unsupervised?”HARRELL: “Yeah, but you know — everybody’s there. I didn’t feel
I needed to be up there, sitting up there.”OFFICER: “You’re her mother, right?”
HARRELL: “Yes sir.”
OFFICER: “You understand that you’re in charge of her well
being?”HARRELL: “Yes sir.”
OFFICER: “It’s not other people’s job to do so.”
Could the officer be any more patronizing, cruel, or wrong? It
is not a crime to let a child of 9 play at a park during
the summer. In fact, it is a time-honored tradition.
Moreover, it isn’t insane to think that a sunny playground
teeming with kids, parents, and park workers is a safe place for a
child to spend some glorious time. Children don’t need constant
supervision, and for the law to insist they do is to make a
criminal out of anyone who lets her kids walk to school, run an
errand, or deliver papers. It is outlawing independence and
trust.
Even so, the officer insists to Harrell that leaving a child
alone at all constitutes “willful abandonment,” a crime.
As a parent in charge of my own kids’ well-being, I believe that
it is healthy for them to be on their own sometimes, and good for
them to be out in public without me—dependent on their own wits and
the help of strangers, should they need it. They are teens now, but
I also believed that when they were in the single digits.
There’s one more clip from this extremely sad and disturbing
interview in which Harrell is trying to explain to a second
interrogator what happened to her daughter after their home was
burglarized:
“They broke in my house. She don’t have no TV, no
nothing to look at no more. I thought that [the park] would be the
safest place for her.”
It was. It is! A place to get exercise. A place to make friends.
A place to play: that most crucial of childhood activities. It
was better than safe, it was a smart place that
a good mom would bring her child, except for one problem: The
authorities are at war with common sense, an autonomous childhood,
and moms.
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