I saw the article below that details some young kids running amok in downtown Boston including assaulting people.
The article says Boston police cannot arrest or detain anyone under the age of 12. Why? I mean, I get they passed a law that says that but…why? Kids can obviously commit crimes as this shows. I assume there was a rationale for that but I cannot figure out what it is.
Oh, it’s the same here. Murders, attacks, carjackings, robberies…They aren’t sitting at home, home-schooled, doing arts and crafts, doing good works for the church… They aren’t getting any supervision at all, just let loose on the streets.
“We’re not good at arresting people without beating or killing them, and it’s harder to do that shit under the radar when our victim is a ten year old.”
Where is “here?”
Do you want the name of my city? It’s in Upstate NY. All over up here in the cities, suburbs, and exburbs. Just like everywhere else. Our big mall is going right down the shitter with carjackings, robberies, purse snatchings, stabbings.
Times have changed since back when the cops were happy to arrest us (rotten) kids before we were twelve. Some of us were roughed up in the process.
Back in Tacoma in the 90’s there was a gang of peewees who’d swarm mugging victims like the Ducky Boys in The Wanderers, until they killed a guy (by Frisko Freeze, BTW). Of course there was at least one adult involved. There always is IME.
And cops roughing up minors “to teach 'em a lesson”/“it’ll be good for 'em” is part of why certain laws have been passed.
“The good old days” weren’t always so good.
I’m certainly not advocating police abuse. Just arrest them. Or, at least, detain them.
Are parents civilly liable for any damage their kid does? (I really do not know)
Could it be that the police are deliberately refusing to arrest, and letting the kids run amok, in order to make some sort of protest to get the law changed?
This kind of thing has been going on in my area for quite a while, and other areas have reported the same thing (juveniles stealing cars, and deliberately crashing them). We actually had to build a new juvenile facility just for this.
It’s a standard “youth of today” story, which does the rounds every few years somewhere.
No doubt there is some gang of youths who’ve gone somewhat rogue and made some trouble. This gets blown up into a panic. Soon the leaders will get dragged into line or otherwise sanctioned and it will blow over.
Whether parents are liable depends on multiple factors, one of them being if the parents were complicit in any way (and they often are).
Right before I read this thread NPR was airing a story about that incident a few years ago when a cop arrested a 6 year old basically because she was having a tantrum. Remember all the outrage about that? The reason NPR was revisiting that story was because it prompted Florida to pass a law specifying a minimum age at which one can be arrested.
Yeah why can’t we have a happy medium behind “Don’t arrest children at elementary schools for acting out” and “Maybe arrest 10 year olds waving guns at cops”
I know nothing about Massachusetts laws, but I work in juvenile detention in Illinois. There might be some nitpicky differences between “arresting” and “holding in custody” that news media is not communicating well, either due to lack of knowledge of how the system is supposed to work or because they are putting a deliberate spin on the issue. I would suspect that despite not being able to “arrest” or “detain” a juvenile (which is the starting point for a youth to be eventually brought to trial/adjudication on delinquency charges and potentially sentenced/disposed), it would still be possible for a youth to be taken into custody, be under the jurisdiction of the juvenile court system, be psychiatrically hospitalized, be made a ward of the court or a ward of family services, be placed in an emergency foster placement, be placed in a residential treatment facility, etc. There could still be actions taken to deal with these youthful offenders that don’t involve being “arrested”, “charged”, or “jailed”.
Too late to add to my previous post. It looks like Massachusetts refers to their alternatives to arrest and detention for minors as “diversion options”.
That’s a huge part of it, but probably not all of it. The minute you give a kid a record, you’re shunting them into the school-to-prison pipeline. Defaulting to diversion programs is a way to fight that.
The law in question raised the age of criminal responsibility from 7 to 12, and decriminalized certain minor offenses. It doesn’t mean police officers have to stand by and chuckle and and say “kids will be kids” if crimes are happening. It just means those kids will default to programs designed to help them rather than kick them into the “out of sight, out of mind” hole.
Link to a rundown of the law. The page has a pdf with a more comprehensive summary.
So, is this just cops throwing a fit about the new law?
I have no idea. If the linked article is accurate (and it’s a bit of a mess so I have doubts), then the Boston court system isn’t following the law. A girl who beats a woman up and destroys her property shouldn’t be given a “tsk tsk be good until you’re 13” by the court. That’s not what the law says.
Question: As a private citizen who is in real danger during one of these very threatening attacks, can I “beat or kill” my assailant(s) in an act of self-defense? If there is a weapon involved in the attack, I should have every right to do so.