Category: reason

The Moral Panic Over ‘Stranger Danger’

South Carolina mom Debra Harrell worked at McDonald’s. She couldn’t afford day care for Regina, her 9-year-old daughter, so she took her to work.

But Regina was bored at McDonald’s.

One day, she asked if she could just play in the neighborhood park instead. “I felt safe there,” tells me in my new video, “because I was with my friends and their parents.”

“She had her cellphone, a pocketbook with money in it,” says Debra. “She had everything she needed.”

Regina was happy. Debra was happy.

But one parent asked Regina where her mom was, and then called the police. Officers went to McDonald’s and arrested Debra.

In jail, they berated her.

“You can’t leave a child who is 9 years old in the park by herself!” said one officer. “What if some sex offender came by?”

People interviewed by the media were also outraged.

“What if a man came and just snatched her?” asked one.

“This day and time, you never know who’s around!” said another.

But what are they talking about? Crime in America is way down, half what it was in the ’90s. Reports of missing children are also down.

If kids are kidnapped or molested, it’s almost always by a relative or an acquaintance, not by a stranger in a park.

Nevertheless, prosecutors charged Debra Harrell with “willful abandonment of a child,” a crime that carries up to a 10-year sentence.

They also took Regina away from her mom—for two weeks. “I would cry as night because I was really scared,” Regina told me. “I didn’t know where I was, or what was going on.”

Fortunately, attorney Robert Phillips took Debra’s case for free. He didn’t like the way police and media portrayed her.

“Here was this black female that society gives a hard time. ‘Welfare queens, living at home, not getting a job!’ Well, that’s what she was doing,” he said. “She was out working, trying the best she could to take care of her child. And now we’re beating her up because we didn’t like the way she took care of her child.”

The cops said that Harrell should have sent her daughter to day care. But even if she could have afforded it, it’s not clear that day care is safer. “We found 42 incidents of sexual molestations, rapes in day cares,” said Phillips. “We couldn’t find (in South Carolina in the last 20 years) a single abduction in a park.”

Philips blames people in my business for scaring people about the wrong things. “The media has brought up this ‘stranger danger’ to where, if you’re not under the protective wings of mom and dad 24/7, then you’re exposing your child to some unknown danger.”

That has frightened police and child welfare workers into taking absurd steps when parents leave children alone.

In Maryland, police accused parents of child neglect for letting their kids roam around their neighborhood.

In Kentucky, after police reported a mom who left her kids in the car while she dashed into a store, child welfare workers strip-searched the kids to make sure they weren’t being abused.

This doesn’t protect kids. It mostly scares parents into depriving their kids of chances to learn. “When you don’t let them spread their wings, that’s when they get in trouble!” says Debra.

She was fortunate that her case got enough attention that even Nikki Haley, then South Carolina’s governor, asked that Regina be given back to her mom.

Prosecutors finally dropped the child abandonment charge.

It’s just not right that when stranger kidnappings are increasingly rare, police and child welfare workers are more eager to punish parents who let kids play on their own.

“A Utah law guarantees that giving kids some reasonable independence isn’t ‘neglect,'” says Lenore Skenazy, of the nonprofit Let Grow, “More states need this!”

Of course, some parents are so neglectful that government should intervene.

But as lawyer Phillips put it, they should intervene “only if you are subjecting your child to a real harm. We should not have unreasonable intrusions by the government telling us every little detail how to raise our children.”

COPYRIGHT 2020 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.

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The Moral Panic Over ‘Stranger Danger’

South Carolina mom Debra Harrell worked at McDonald’s. She couldn’t afford day care for Regina, her 9-year-old daughter, so she took her to work.

But Regina was bored at McDonald’s.

One day, she asked if she could just play in the neighborhood park instead. “I felt safe there,” tells me in my new video, “because I was with my friends and their parents.”

“She had her cellphone, a pocketbook with money in it,” says Debra. “She had everything she needed.”

Regina was happy. Debra was happy.

But one parent asked Regina where her mom was, and then called the police. Officers went to McDonald’s and arrested Debra.

In jail, they berated her.

“You can’t leave a child who is 9 years old in the park by herself!” said one officer. “What if some sex offender came by?”

People interviewed by the media were also outraged.

“What if a man came and just snatched her?” asked one.

“This day and time, you never know who’s around!” said another.

But what are they talking about? Crime in America is way down, half what it was in the ’90s. Reports of missing children are also down.

If kids are kidnapped or molested, it’s almost always by a relative or an acquaintance, not by a stranger in a park.

Nevertheless, prosecutors charged Debra Harrell with “willful abandonment of a child,” a crime that carries up to a 10-year sentence.

They also took Regina away from her mom—for two weeks. “I would cry as night because I was really scared,” Regina told me. “I didn’t know where I was, or what was going on.”

Fortunately, attorney Robert Phillips took Debra’s case for free. He didn’t like the way police and media portrayed her.

“Here was this black female that society gives a hard time. ‘Welfare queens, living at home, not getting a job!’ Well, that’s what she was doing,” he said. “She was out working, trying the best she could to take care of her child. And now we’re beating her up because we didn’t like the way she took care of her child.”

The cops said that Harrell should have sent her daughter to day care. But even if she could have afforded it, it’s not clear that day care is safer. “We found 42 incidents of sexual molestations, rapes in day cares,” said Phillips. “We couldn’t find (in South Carolina in the last 20 years) a single abduction in a park.”

Philips blames people in my business for scaring people about the wrong things. “The media has brought up this ‘stranger danger’ to where, if you’re not under the protective wings of mom and dad 24/7, then you’re exposing your child to some unknown danger.”

That has frightened police and child welfare workers into taking absurd steps when parents leave children alone.

In Maryland, police accused parents of child neglect for letting their kids roam around their neighborhood.

In Kentucky, after police reported a mom who left her kids in the car while she dashed into a store, child welfare workers strip-searched the kids to make sure they weren’t being abused.

This doesn’t protect kids. It mostly scares parents into depriving their kids of chances to learn. “When you don’t let them spread their wings, that’s when they get in trouble!” says Debra.

She was fortunate that her case got enough attention that even Nikki Haley, then South Carolina’s governor, asked that Regina be given back to her mom.

Prosecutors finally dropped the child abandonment charge.

It’s just not right that when stranger kidnappings are increasingly rare, police and child welfare workers are more eager to punish parents who let kids play on their own.

“A Utah law guarantees that giving kids some reasonable independence isn’t ‘neglect,'” says Lenore Skenazy, of the nonprofit Let Grow, “More states need this!”

Of course, some parents are so neglectful that government should intervene.

But as lawyer Phillips put it, they should intervene “only if you are subjecting your child to a real harm. We should not have unreasonable intrusions by the government telling us every little detail how to raise our children.”

COPYRIGHT 2020 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.

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Brickbat: Just a Girl Who Can’t Say No

Alicia Hobson says her daughter Azlyn came home from a middle school dance in Laketown, Utah, excited that she got to dance with a boy she liked. But she was also upset that she had to dance with a boy she hates. Azlyn, 11, tried to politely turn the boy she doesn’t like down, but her mother says the principal came over and reminded the girl that school policy is to dance with anyone who asks. Principal Kip Motta told a TV station that no one is forced to dance with anyone they don’t want to, but he said the school requests that students dance with anyone who asks. In an email to Hobson, Motta said Azlyn should tell him before a dance whom she does not want to dance with and he’ll try to stop any embarrassing situations or, he added, Azlyn could just stay home on dance days. School officials say the policy is aimed at making sure everyone feels included at a dance.

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Brickbat: Just a Girl Who Can’t Say No

Alicia Hobson says her daughter Azlyn came home from a middle school dance in Laketown, Utah, excited that she got to dance with a boy she liked. But she was also upset that she had to dance with a boy she hates. Azlyn, 11, tried to politely turn the boy she doesn’t like down, but her mother says the principal came over and reminded the girl that school policy is to dance with anyone who asks. Principal Kip Motta told a TV station that no one is forced to dance with anyone they don’t want to, but he said the school requests that students dance with anyone who asks. In an email to Hobson, Motta said Azlyn should tell him before a dance whom she does not want to dance with and he’ll try to stop any embarrassing situations or, he added, Azlyn could just stay home on dance days. School officials say the policy is aimed at making sure everyone feels included at a dance.

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Losers Bloomberg and Steyer Spent Millions. Stop Freaking Out About Money in Politics

Michael Bloomberg spent $500 million in his bid for a Super Tuesday blitz.

He came away with…American Samoa.

Not all the results are reported yet, but the former New York City mayor appears on track to finish first in exactly zero of the 14 states that held primaries and caucuses on Tuesday night. He did win the caucuses in American Samoa (getting four delegates), and he appears to have picked up a few delegates in Colorado (and he may get a few more in California or Texas). Still, it is impossible to view Tuesday’s results as anything other than a major disappointment for the billionaire who dumped nine figures of his personal fortune into the race.

He saturated the airwaves with his ads. He hired more than 2,500 people to work on his campaign. He skipped the first few states of the nominating process, apparently believing that his air support would do what other candidates’ ground troops could not.

For a little while, it looked like it might have been working. But his debate performances partially deflated his rise, and Tuesday’s expensive failure may force Bloomberg out of the race.

Oh, and the other billionaire in the Democratic primary? That would be Tom Steyer, the guy dropped out three days ago after spending more than $250 million and winning exactly zero delegates.

It’s fashionable for Democrats—and, if polls are to be believed, many Republicans too—to believe about the supposedly intolerable influence of money in American politics.

Indeed, there is a lot of money in American politics, as the ongoing Democratic primary (and every election in recent memory) makes clear. But after Super Tuesday, it seems clear that candidates cannot buy their way into the White House.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, who appears to have been the big winner on Tuesday, had fundraising issues during the primary campaign. He was outspent not only by Bloomberg and Steyer, but by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.). Biden won Tuesday’s primaries in Minnesota and Massachusetts while spending hardly any money in either place.

“We believe in old-fashioned democracy: one person, one vote, not billionaires buying elections,” Sanders said at a rally in mid-February.

Well, good news for Sanders. Billionaires aren’t buying this election.

Money, at best, buys you a ticket to the dance. It cannot make you the prom king.

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Police Abuse Breeds Disrespect

The day before Attorney General William Barr complained about disrespect for the police, Harris County, Texas, District Attorney Kim Ogg announced that her office had identified 69 more convicted drug offenders who may have been framed by a veteran Houston narcotics officer. The skepticism that Barr decries cannot be understood without taking into account the sort of corruption that Ogg is investigating.

Speaking to police officers in Miami last Friday, Barr condemned “a deeply troubling attitude” toward police. “Far from respecting the men and women who put their lives on the line to protect us,” he said, overzealous critics “scapegoat and disrespect police officers and disparage the vital role you play in society.”

While Barr may prefer to believe that attitude has no basis in fact, every day brings news of police officers who foster such disrespect by lying, using excessive force, and abusing their power for personal gain. Although it is unfair to portray those cases as an indictment of the entire profession, the way police officials respond to such revelations often invites that conclusion.

The former officer at the center of Ogg’s inquiry, Gerald Goines, was employed by the Houston Police Department (HPD) for 34 years. He faces state murder charges and federal civil rights charges because he invented a heroin purchase by a nonexistent confidential informant to obtain a no-knock warrant for a 2019 raid that killed a middle-aged couple, Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas, in their home on Harding Street.

As a result of that disastrous operation, which discovered no evidence of drug dealing, Ogg’s office is reviewing thousands of cases handled by Goines and his colleagues in the HPD’s Narcotics Division. So far prosecutors have dismissed dozens of pending cases and backed the claims of two men arrested by Goines in 2008 who were recently declared innocent.

“We need to clear people convicted solely on the word of a police officer whom we can no longer trust,” Ogg said last week. But the HPD’s problems clearly go beyond the crimes of one rogue cop.

Another narcotics officer, Steven Bryant, faces state and federal charges in connection with the deadly Harding Street raid because he backed up Goines’ fictional story. If Goines falsely implicated people in drug crimes for a dozen years or more, it seems likely that other officers actively helped him or looked the other way, which would make their testimony suspect as well.

Goines’ supervisors also deserve a share of the blame for failing to properly monitor his use of warrants, informants, and department money. Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo, who initially hailed Goines as a hero while posthumously tarring Tuttle and Nicholas as dangerous heroin dealers, has announced several belated reforms, including limits on no-knock warrants, using body cameras during drug raids, and a new commitment to the oversight that HPD supervisors were supposed to provide.

Acevedo nevertheless insists that Goines’ crimes did not reveal a “systemic” problem, and he wants credit for not sweeping them under the rug. “What would have been more tragic for this community, and for this department, than the incident itself is for the department to have failed to investigate it to the extent that we did,” he said in a recent Texas Monthly interview.

At the same time, Acevedo wants the public to accept the inevitability of outrages such as the senseless deaths of Tuttle and Nicholas. “I don’t think there’s a policy or a process that can guarantee 100 percent that something like this would not happen,” he said. That’s the message Acevedo is sending Houstonians looking for reassurance that they can trust police to respect their constitutional rights.

After three interview questions about the biggest scandal to hit his department in decades, Acevedo lost his patience. “This is the last I want to talk about it,” he said. “We need to move on to something else.” That attitude is at least as troubling as the one that bothers Barr.

© Copyright 2020 by Creators Syndicate Inc.

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Joe Biden Deals a Blow to Bernie Sanders’ Socialist Revolution on Super Tuesday

Joe Biden is the comeback kid tonight, winning at least 8 of the 14 states that were in play tonight on Super Tuesday. That’s a major rebound for a campaign that until just a few days ago seemed to be sliding into irrelevance.

The former vice president capitalized on his strengths in the South to win outright majorities in Alabama and Virginia, as well as commanding pluralities in North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Tennessee. He also scored surprise victories in Minnesota and Massachusetts, where his main rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) was favored to win.

“We were told when we got to Super Tuesday it would be over. Well it may be over for the other guy,” said Biden in a victory speech in Los Angeles, making a veiled swipe at Sanders. “People are talking about a revolution. We started a movement. We increased turnout. We increased turnout for us!”

Sanders, the presumptive frontrunner coming into tonight, picked up his home state of Vermont as well as Colorado and Utah. The Associated Press called California (which awards 415 of the 1,357 delegates up for grabs tonight) just before midnight for Sanders, but it will be a while before we have final vote and delegate counts from the Golden State.

With under 50 percent of the vote in, Biden is expected to win Texas too, according to Cook Political Report.

Even without California, Biden is expected to come out of tonight with as much as a 90 delegate lead.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), who is still running for president, won no states, not even the one she represents in the U.S. Senate. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg also won no states, and only one territory (American Samoa).

After months of turmoil, the race is back to where it started: Biden in the lead with Sanders in a strong second.

The more things change, the more things stay the same.

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Losers Bloomberg and Steyer Spent Millions. Stop Freaking Out About Money in Politics

Michael Bloomberg spent $500 million in his bid for a Super Tuesday blitz.

He came away with…American Samoa.

Not all the results are reported yet, but the former New York City mayor appears on track to finish first in exactly zero of the 14 states that held primaries and caucuses on Tuesday night. He did win the caucuses in American Samoa (getting four delegates), and he appears to have picked up a few delegates in Colorado (and he may get a few more in California or Texas). Still, it is impossible to view Tuesday’s results as anything other than a major disappointment for the billionaire who dumped nine figures of his personal fortune into the race.

He saturated the airwaves with his ads. He hired more than 2,500 people to work on his campaign. He skipped the first few states of the nominating process, apparently believing that his air support would do what other candidates’ ground troops could not.

For a little while, it looked like it might have been working. But his debate performances partially deflated his rise, and Tuesday’s expensive failure may force Bloomberg out of the race.

Oh, and the other billionaire in the Democratic primary? That would be Tom Steyer, the guy dropped out three days ago after spending more than $250 million and winning exactly zero delegates.

It’s fashionable for Democrats—and, if polls are to be believed, many Republicans too—to believe about the supposedly intolerable influence of money in American politics.

Indeed, there is a lot of money in American politics, as the ongoing Democratic primary (and every election in recent memory) makes clear. But after Super Tuesday, it seems clear that candidates cannot buy their way into the White House.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, who appears to have been the big winner on Tuesday, had fundraising issues during the primary campaign. He was outspent not only by Bloomberg and Steyer, but by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.). Biden won Tuesday’s primaries in Minnesota and Massachusetts while spending hardly any money in either place.

“We believe in old-fashioned democracy: one person, one vote, not billionaires buying elections,” Sanders said at a rally in mid-February.

Well, good news for Sanders. Billionaires aren’t buying this election.

Money, at best, buys you a ticket to the dance. It cannot make you the prom king.

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