oh, well, where to start? the sonshine managed to get in a bit of a mess a coupla weeks ago. despite having $67 in earnings from his stint at the local disc golf park, he decided to shoplift a $10 money clip for a father's day gift -- encouraged by a friend who's a little older. oiy. so, the store prosecutes hard.
it looks like we're going to get some sort of first time offender prog. attendance at weekly 'scare the crap out of 'em' meetings. if there are fines, i've told him he's going to pay them thru community service, if they offer the option. otherwise, he can work it off and pay his debt to momma!
today i get a letter from the store's attorneys. they want a few hundred bucks in 20 days or else they take me to civil court. i guess this is how they recoup their costs, right?
i take it this is perfectly legal. but it really SUX! i feel like i'm being blackmailed. i pay/he pays in criminal and civil court. so, this is not a hill to die on, right? they'll go after me, right? i can't see the sense in fighting it; the kid did break the rules. wrong hill to die on, if you ask me. but i wanted to know if this is "normal". i know state laws differ, but...thought i'd ask anyway.
racism: when it happened, i got a call at work. i couldn't get there in rush hour traffic, so the sizzlean take him and his friend to the juvenile justice center. they really roughed the kids around. cuffed 'em and tossed 'em in a cruiser. cut the kid's leg open on the door. brought 'em in and frisked 'em down and basically talked to them in ways that are demeaning, mocking and humiliating (mom verifies: i stood outside waiting to pick him up and watched two kids get this treatment from the fsckers).
but my son was just horrified. his friend, we'll call him Alex, is Columbian and the other kid they were with was black, tho he didn't steal anything. WELL! when i was talking to the cops on the phone, they were already saying crap to me that indicated that they had a bad attitude about Alex's mother. She'd been shopping in another store, so she was on the scene. But, she doesn't speak English yet! i should know better, but i'm always revolted. the cop says: "Well, she doesn't have a license and they take cabs everywhere."
the porker thinks that it's a horrible thing, a sign of moral inferiority, that she doesn't drive. I said: "Well, her husband's from the US. he met her in Columbia on business trip. They married not too long ago. Just moved here about a year ago. She doesn't speak English well enough to take the driver's exam." Didn't matter. the Sizzlean Porkpie thinks that, since I'm white, I'm gonna be sympathetic to his assumptions that people who don't drive and don't speak English are somehow guilty of something from the get go.
anyway, they frisked my son down and were pissy enough. With alex, however, they mocked him and questioned him about _everything_. As my kid said, "mom, they didn't even care about the stuff i had in my pockets or the necklace or watch i was wearing. i had the mean cop, alex had the nice cop. they treated alex like crap. they were racist"
the kid's a little upset by this stuff. he almost got kicked out of school not too long ago because he decided to take on this kid in school who was running around talking about "killing n-words". my kid got fed up b/c this other kid was mocking him b/c my kid's friends are black and hispanic. so, my kid popped him one finally.
Sizzlean: "Where'd you get this gum? Did you steal this too?" What about this necklace, where'd you get that? got a receipt." etc.
then they called him a dirty spic and told him to shut up because they didn't want to hear his "greasy accent." alex doesn't even have much of an accent. he's shy and has a hard time getting it all out! criminy!
i hate this fucking limp dick police state with a passion.
oh well, i needed to dump. thanks. try talking to your small town white mother. she thinks cops are Officer Friendly! and, worse, she tends to think that if they treat you badly it's your fault. no amount of tales about what goes on around here gets her to see that's it not me or my neighbors, it's the fscking sizzlean and classism/racism. well, she can sorta get it, but her response is that i should move out of FL.
to which i generally find a reason to cut the conversation short or change the topic.
heh. conversation with my mother: a microcosmic illustration of this fucking country's sorry ass state.