I read through our own Eli Motycka’s recent story about car break-ins over on the East Side and how upset the community is and how the police are just shrug-emoji-ing about it. And I have lots of questions, like how did a lack of license plate readers or the recent failure of Fusus become the fault of the mayor? Or if these crimes are being committed by young teenagers in residential areas, how would police tech like Fusus or license plate readers have helped solve the crimes? Young teenagers are on foot (or bike), and there aren’t businesses in residential areas whose cameras the police can access.
Residents want harsher penalties for minor criminals, discuss neighborhood patrols
But mostly, I’m very confused about why people are still leaving valuables in cars. We’ve had cars for almost a century-and-a-half, and people have been stealing shit out of them for about that long. Don’t leave your valuables unattended in your vehicles. Don’t leave your guns rattling around in your vehicles. Your vehicle is not a safe with windows. It’s just a box of plastic, glass and metal for hurling yourself around the city.
And then there’s this part:
“What's the threshold before there actually are consequences for a juvenile?” asked one resident midway through the meeting.
“If they’re arrested with a weapon out of a stolen car, they're gonna get — I’ll call it, for lack of a better phrase — a little aggravated sentence,” responded [Lt. Robert] Russell. “They're gonna get maybe a few days, a ‘Don't do it again.’”
This is bullshit. Many kids who commit crimes, at the very least, get entangled in the Department of Children's Services. Back in November, Anita Wadhwani over at the Tennessee Lookout wrote a story about DCS that contained this paragraph:
The funding request made Tuesday is part of an overall $189 million budget increase sought by leaders of the Department of Children’s Services (DCS), which has seen historic investments by the state over the past two years in response to a cascade of reports of children mistreated while in its custody.
A “cascade of reports of children mistreated.” If that doesn’t make you sick to your stomach, how about Ben Hall’s report for NewsChannel 5, also from November, about how hundreds of the kids in DCS custody aren’t even in the state anymore?
Also, if kids are put into what’s referred to as a “hardware secure facility” (i.e., a prison for kids) — well, we’re facing lawsuits for how we mistreat kids in those, too. Action News 5 over in Memphis covered this in June. Here’s a snippet from that story:
John S. Wilder Youth Development Center is mentioned quite a bit in the lawsuit.
It states that young people say the TRU at Wilder has had holes in the walls, mold, roaches, spiders, mosquitoes, and lizards.
The suit also states that youths have seen blood left on the walls of the dorm by others self-injuring themselves during mental health crises.
“They won’t get the transition services before they are just sent out into the community with no follow-up, and bad things can happen,” said [Disability Rights of Tennessee director Jack] Derryberry.
According to court documents, at Wilder, there are reports of a widespread practice called “dorm racking” in which children are forced to fight every member of their dorm to become initiated into the dorm.
Now I’m going to ask you a question: What is in your car that is worth so much that a kid should get pulled out of school, beaten up by strangers, left in medical waste and denied access to his family?
Kids are idiots. They lack impulse control, and they don’t fully understand consequences. They don’t look at the larger picture. That’s why we have a whole thing called “childhood.” It’s a way to say, “These people don’t yet have their shit together, and they still need guidance.” Think of how many times you might say, “Stop picking on your brother or I’ll ground you for a week,” and your daughter still picked on her brother? Even though the consequences are immediate, it still doesn’t stop her. Do you think it’d be somehow more effective if the consequences came months later? Would it somehow be even more effective if you went and told her, “Do it again and at some point way down the line, I’ll ground you for two weeks instead of one?”
Split Metro Council rejects video integration technology by one vote despite plea from mayor
I mean, look at what happened last week at that MNPD community meeting. People are blaming the mayor for what the Metro Council voted against. They seem to think that license plate readers are somehow going to catch kids on foot or that giving police easy access to businesses’ surveillance footage will somehow give them evidence of who broke into their cars (which are not in front of businesses). Hell, you even have a police officer — who surely knows what a nightmare awaits any child who falls into state custody — telling people that kids who break into cars and steal guns only get a few days. Like, this is a room full of grown adults who don’t know how things work. Grown adults who have a vested interest in knowing how things work, and yet they’re still ignorant.
And yet! And yet, we think the solution is getting tougher on juvenile crime? As little as we all know about how things work, kids know even less. They don’t know what penalty awaits them if they get caught breaking into your car, so upping that penalty means nothing to them. It is not a deterrent.
If a kid breaks into your car, that kid has earned some form of punishment/correction. But since they don’t know what the punishment is in the first place, upping it isn’t going to matter. The best deterrent we have to keeping kids from stealing shit out of our cars is to not keep valuables in our cars. That’s it. That’s the deterrent.
If we have to weigh the convenience of keeping valuables in our cars vs. the well-being of a child, how the hell are so many of us coming down on the side of our convenience? What is in your car that could possibly be so valuable that it’s worth putting a kid into a broken system that will harm them — but isn’t valuable enough for you to carry into your house to deter kids from screwing up their lives in ways they’re not yet cognitively capable of understanding?
