Message-ID: <00993EE148F65FC0.00000C9A@tmar.com> Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 13:07:54 EST From: "Chuck B. at Ext. 214" <mailto:chuckb@TMAR.COM> Subject: news item (off-topic, but you will see why) To: Multiple recipients of list DEVEL-L <mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU>
On a recent warm night, a certain individual was observed alone
in a parked car with a small child who was shirtless (to a suspicious mind,
it would not have mattered whether the man was bare-chested or wearing a
shirt: either possibility would have seemed abnormal). The "witness"
approached the car, asking the child, "Is this your daddy?" The toddler,
being typically shy with strangers, did not answer; the man smiled and
said "Yes, I'm his father." The "witness" continued, "His features are
different from yours, and he doesn't talk, and he shouldn't be dressed like
that in a car with a man, so I can't stand by knowing that you may have
kidnapped him or be a molester; I am going to flag a police car." The
good samaritan paid no attention to the man's reply.
The police officer who responded stood at the car window, instructing
the man in the car first to produce some ID and then to step out of
the vehicle. Then he said, "Come behind the car." Now, just seconds
before this last instruction, a woman (whose ethnicity was visibly different
from that of the man and who bore a fair resemblance to the child) had
walked up to the car's front window (where the child was sitting), so that
fortunately (it seemed) for the child, the man claiming to be his father
could comply without clearly engaging in and being automatically charged with
child endangerment (in addition to the above); who knows whether the officer
would have made this demand in the woman's absence? At any rate, the woman
said she was the mother and "confirmed" the identity of the "father" (without
being asked to identify herself); the man's license was returned to him
(the officer had not run it or asked him a single question). Then the three
drove off.
The victim in this case was the father. No, he did not lose his child
and car to strangers through substandard police work; and no, his wife had not
just left him with another man, his son and his car. He was the "suspect."
This man prizes his own and his family's privacy, especially after
the event described. He also feels that today's American press are a major
source of the current cultural myth that adults accompanying children are
probably predators (as in the day-care cases). For both reasons, he chooses
not to write a "letter to the editor" about his experience. But can it be we
have become so paranoid about crime that we automatically trust and listen
to some, automatically distrust and dismiss the words of others, and are
convinced that if you come under the most negligible suspicion (through
circumstances, not necessarily through your own conduct) you are probably
a serious criminal?