City Council Interested in Power to Arrest 5-Year-Olds for Serial Bullying
You can't really make things like this up. The city council in Carson, California, voted, unanimously but tentatively, to approve an ordinance that would criminalize anyone between the ages of 5 and 18 who makes someone else feel "terrorized, frightened, intimidated, threatened, harassed or molested" with "no legitimate purpose." Here's one of the brains behind the ordinance, via The Daily Breeze:
Councilwoman Lula Davis-Holmes supported the anti-bullying ordinance after the council agreed to reduce the severity of the penalty to an infraction for the first and second violations by children.
"I'm a mother, and I think I'm in favor of this but I would not want to go to court for a 5- or 10-year-old and say: 'You're charged with a misdemeanor,' " Davis-Holmes said. "We're creating another problem here by saying it's a misdemeanor. Then we're saying it's at the discretion of an enforcing officer (to charge the child criminally), but he might be wearing a (white extremist) hood. I want to pass it, but I don't want to put this label on young people."
She was there to vote tentatively in favor of the ordinance. A first infraction would cost $100 and a second one $200, then misdemeanor charges. Those fines are a lot of money for a lot of people, and can cause lots of problems. About David-Holmes' "hoods," The Breeze again:
It's not clear how the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department would enforce the law, since infractions and misdemeanors are rarely doled out unless the crime is witnessed by a law enforcement officer, officials said.
"When you talk about who can commit a crime, there's three basic categories of people who cannot commit crimes: lunatics and idiots, children of a certain age and elderly," said Carson sheriff's Lt. Arthur Escamillas. "A fitness hearing would be required to try a child as a criminal. But if you see a 4-year-old riding a bike down the street without a helmet, are you going to give a 4-year-old a ticket? It's discretionary."
That doesn't sound like the thinking or feeling of someone wearing a hood, although feeling that you want to pass a law against children who might threaten you kind of does.
Check out The Independents' segment on bullying the bullies from earlier this week:
