Negligent parents, lawbreaking kids

[Teh One Who Knocks]

By LZ Granderson, CNN Contributor


http://i.imgur.com/YhgS0o8.jpg

Editor's note: LZ Granderson is a CNN contributor who writes a weekly column for CNN.com. The former Hechinger Institute Fellow has had his commentary recognized by the Online News Association, the National Association of Black Journalists and the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. He is also a senior writer for ESPN. Follow him on Twitter @locs_n_laughs.

(CNN) -- A detail in the fatal shooting of 14-year-old Shaaliver Douse by a New York Police Department officer earlier this month has been stopping me from grieving his death.

The tragedy happened around 3 a.m.

Why was a 14-year-old boy out that late without his mother, Shanise Farrar, who called the shooting an assassination? Or his aunt, Quwana Barcene, who said the bloody gun police say was found near his body was part of a coverup? Where was the supervising adult who should have been with a 14-year-old boy walking the streets of New York at 3 o'clock in the morning?

"I'm not saying that he's the best one, but he's my angel," his grieving mother said.

Her "angel" was a suspected gang member who police say was chasing and shooting at an unidentified man when they encountered him. Her "angel" was arrested last month for attempted murder of a 15-year-old. Her "angel" left their apartment around 8 p.m. and she had no idea where he was until the next morning when detectives informed her that her son was dead.

I want to mourn for her loss, I really do.

But as callous and as heartless as this sounds, I just can't get past what awful parents she and the boy's father were. Children may be born angels, but with all the temptations out there in the world, it takes work to try to keep them that way.

I'm sure the three teenagers suspected in the death of 23-year-old Christopher Lane -- killed because they allegedly were bored -- started off as angels. But who, besides their parents, would call them angels now?

"I know my son. He's a good kid," said Jennifer Luna, the mother of the boy prosecutor Jason Hicks said pulled the trigger.

As a newspaper reporter, I covered and was around a fair number of crime scenes involving juvenile delinquents and few things bothered me more than listening to their parents. Crying, ranting, proclaiming how great their children were despite being kicked out of school or previous run-ins with the law.

That's not to say kids won't be kids. Of course they will be.

Which is why it is vitally important that parents be parents.

So when kids get bored, they don't think they should go "f**k with some n**gers," as then-18-year-old Deryl Dedmon Jr. suggested before he and his buddies ran over and killed 49-year-old auto worker James Craig Anderson, the first black person he saw, with his pickup truck back in 2011. Or randomly shoot a college student jogging down the street as entertainment -- though it seems the shooting may not have been as random as previously thought considering one of the suspects, who is black, tweeted that he hated white people back in April.

Parents are supposed to instill a sense of right and wrong in their children and then keep up the due diligence necessary to make sure they don't veer off that path. When parents don't do that, we end up with three 15-year-olds assaulting and breaking the arm of a 13-year-old on a school bus in Florida.

"This is life. I am sorry what happened to the victim," Julian McKnight Sr., whose son Julian was one of the boys accused in the attack, said after a court appearance. A second appearance is scheduled later this month.

"It's just the way it is. My son ain't never been no bad person, he just got mixed with bad people, that's all ... he sorry."

I am not a perfect parent with all the answers. But I do know that it was the father, and not the son, who was apologizing -- and that, my friends, is our problem in a nutshell.

We don't teach accountability, we don't expect accountability and I'm not even sure we even know what accountability looks like anymore. Some of us have become so addicted to pointing fingers at others for all the wrong that happens in our lives that self-assessment has become synonymous with blaming the victim.

Yes, there are cultural factors that make parenting difficult. And sometimes a bad seed is just that. But none of this excuses us from taking personal responsibility where we can.

I am tired of seeing "sorry" being used to cloak negligent parents.

Sorry won't bring back Christopher Lane or James Craig Anderson.

And they, too, were each somebody's "angel."

If sorry is not good enough to protect a bartender who serves alcohol to a visibly intoxicated person who drives and kills someone, why is sorry good enough for parents who, through negligence, are culpable for the crimes their undisciplined children commit?

If my son goes out and breaks the neighbor's window, I have to pay for it. Why is a window more sacred than another human life?

We need to hold parents more accountable, both culturally and legally, for the actions of their children. Maybe then more parents will be more engaged in the lives of their children on the front end, rather than the back end, in front of a judge. Society has avenues for juveniles who refuse to obey their parents. But where are the safeguards for society when parents decide not to use those avenues?

I'm tired of hearing how good the kids who commit heinous crimes are. Maybe we should start putting parents on the witness stand so they can tell us exactly what they did to raise such perfect children.

[RBP]

Amen.

[KevinD]

To an extent, I can agree with this. He does touch on my reservations about it when he says:


And sometimes a bad seed is just that

Because of the fact that yes Margaret, there ARE bad people in the world, I'm hesitant to completely hold the parents responsible.

[KevinD]

As a parent of two girls, I can tell you that the oldest girl, with all the support I had in the community (I was a firefighter, knew ALL the local cops, and many, many other people) was hard to keep track of. You can't lock them down 24/7. The oldest girl got into trouble, yes she did, but, just as I had to when I was young, she had to pay the penalties. Thankfully, the youngest girl is much more levelheaded at this point. On the other hand, that juts means she's gonna go apeshit when she gets out of the house. :lol:

I think what it boils down to, is instilling in your children a sense of right and wrong, and the consequences/rewards thereof.
That said, how can you hold responsible parents that honestly try to raise their children right, but whose children go down the wrong path due to circumstances beyond the parents control? After all, it's illegal to beat your kids now.

[RBP]

As a parent of two girls, I can tell you that the oldest girl, with all the support I had in the community (I was a firefighter, knew ALL the local cops, and many, many other people) was hard to keep track of. You can't lock them down 24/7. The oldest girl got into trouble, yes she did, but, just as I had to when I was young, she had to pay the penalties. Thankfully, the youngest girl is much more levelheaded at this point. On the other hand, that juts means she's gonna go apeshit when she gets out of the house. :lol:

I think what it boils down to, is instilling in your children a sense of right and wrong, and the consequences/rewards thereof.
That said, how can you hold responsible parents that honestly try to raise their children right, but whose children go down the wrong path due to circumstances beyond the parents control? After all, it's illegal to beat your kids now.

However, I don't think you would try to absolve responsibility by defending the child as a "good kid."

[KevinD]

No, I would not. If my kid(s) were arrested for something, I would wait until I talked to them, and the police/judge. I also don't actually believe "parents" should be on TV in situations like this. To me, it's nothing more than the "news" pandering for viewers.
I promise, if something like this were to ever happen around here, y'all would never hears about it from me until it was over. Juts like the other morning with the trespasser. Had I actually shot him, nothing at all would have been said here until trial was over.

[KevinD]

Don't get me wrong, as a parent, it IS my responsibility to teach morals, self determination and self sufficiency. I do not, nor never will depend on other so do so for me or mine.
You may or may not agree with my views on some things, and that's great. We don't actually all have to agree on everything. What no one has the right to do though, is if I am not harming my children, to tell me how to raise them Period.

[RBP]

Australian Christopher Lane was killed on Monday in Oklahoma by three teens, one of whom has said they were just “bored.” The right is complaining that the media is making nothing of the fact that two of the teens were black whereas Lane was white, as opposed to the massive alarm sounded in cases such as white (or white-ish) George Zimmerman killing black Trayvon Martin. And again the cry was heard that there is more “black-on-black” or “black-on-white” crime than “white-on-black,” and that young black men are in fact more of a problem than people like Zimmerman.

The numbers don’t lie: young black men do commit about 50% of the murders in the U.S. We don’t yet know whether the attack on Lane was racially motivated, nor can we know whether the three black boys who attacked a white boy on a Florida school bus recently would not have done the same to a black kid. (Critics took Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson to task for not condemning the violence.) But hardly uncommon are cases such as the two black guys who doused a white 13-year-old with gasoline and lit him on fire, saying “You get what you deserve, white boy” (Kansas City, Mo.) or 20 black kids who beat up white Matthew Owens on his porch “for Trayvon” (Mobile, Ala.).

So, it’s just fake to pretend that the association of young black men with violence comes out of thin air. Young black men murder 14 times more than young white men. If the kinds of things I just mentioned were regularly done by whites, it’d be trumpeted as justification for being scared to death of them.

It’s not that black communities are in complete denial about these statistics — Stop the Violence events are a staple of high-crime areas. But let’s face it: black America isn’t nearly as indignant about black boys killing one another or whites as about the occasional white cop killing one black boy, even though the former wreaks much more havoc in black communities. There is no coordinated nationwide movement equivalent to the one Martin galvanized. There are no thoughtful films “exploring” black-on-black crime the way Fruitvale Station treats the death of Oscar Grant, a young black man who was killed by transit police in Oakland, Calif.

And recent example illustrates how many blacks feel about who is murdering whom. Two weeks ago, an NYPD cop killed 14-year-old Shaaliver Douse. Douse was in the process of shooting other people, and had been charged with shooting someone else in May — and yet his aunt compared him to Martin. In her mind, the main sin was the white cop’s.

Granted, it seems a lot easier to do something about the Zimmermans than the black thugs. Protest profiling and police departments institute new programs. But black thugs aren’t moved by protests, so it can seem like we’re just stuck with them.

But who’s to say what would happen if black America exerted even half of the emotional fervor and brainpower it does over cases like Martin’s to thinking about how to keep black boys from going wrong? Annette John-Hall had some wise words on this last year. What kind of self-image do we have to assume we can only change others, but not ourselves?

For the time being, though, it’s time for the media to stop proudly emblazoning the race of white cops who kill black boys while cagily describing black teens as, say, “from the grittier part of town,” as has been the case regarding Lane’s killers. The media needs to be as honest with black people as we need to be with ourselves. No group gets ahead by turning away from its real problems.

[KevinD]

What we need is an equal opportunity killer, :lol: J/K!!!!

[Richard Cranium]

If O'Bama had triplets they would look like,

http://theconservativetreehouse.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/chris-lane.jpg?w=640



President Obama’s spokesman described the murder of Australian baseball player Christopher Lane in Oklahoma as a “pretty tragic case,” saying that Obama’s comments after the Trayvon Martin case apply to Lane.

“This sounds like a pretty tragic case,” White House Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest replied when told about the murder of Christopher Lane. Earnest said that he hadn’t heard about the murder previously. Police say that the three teenagers who allegedly shot Lane in the back while he was jogging said they did so out of boredom. [...]

Earnest said that Obama’s comments after the Trayvon Martin case apply here. “[T]he president I think himself has spoken pretty eloquently about violence,” Earnest said when asked why Obama commented on the killing of Martin but not of Lane. “He expressed his concern about the impact of violence in communities across the country,” he added, referring to Obama’s comments after the Martin case..

[KevinD]

President Obama’s spokesman described the murder of Australian baseball player Christopher Lane in Oklahoma as a “pretty tragic case,” saying that Obama’s comments after the Trayvon Martin case apply to Lane.

“This sounds like a pretty tragic case,” White House Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest replied when told about the murder of Christopher Lane. Earnest said that he hadn’t heard about the murder previously. Police say that the three teenagers who allegedly shot Lane in the back while he was jogging said they did so out of boredom. [...]

Earnest said that Obama’s comments after the Trayvon Martin case apply here. “[T]he president I think himself has spoken pretty eloquently about violence,” Earnest said when asked why Obama commented on the killing of Martin but not of Lane. “He expressed his concern about the impact of violence in communities across the country,” he added, referring to Obama’s comments after the Martin case..

Way to spin it Deep, I mean Jay. Wait, what happened to Jay Carney???!!
I agree with some of the radio host. We need to forget that Obummer is Muslin, not a citizen, black/white, etc. We need to concentrate on the fact that he, many other Dems and Reps are all focused on advancing "big government" at the expense of the Constitution, and all other laws of the land. Over and over, the laws as written are being broken left and right. What we need to do is not just vote them out, but hold them accountable for the laws they have broken.

[Teh One Who Knocks]

As a parent of two girls, I can tell you that the oldest girl, with all the support I had in the community (I was a firefighter, knew ALL the local cops, and many, many other people) was hard to keep track of. You can't lock them down 24/7. The oldest girl got into trouble, yes she did, but, just as I had to when I was young, she had to pay the penalties. Thankfully, the youngest girl is much more levelheaded at this point. On the other hand, that juts means she's gonna go apeshit when she gets out of the house. :lol:

I think what it boils down to, is instilling in your children a sense of right and wrong, and the consequences/rewards thereof.
That said, how can you hold responsible parents that honestly try to raise their children right, but whose children go down the wrong path due to circumstances beyond the parents control? After all, it's illegal to beat your kids now.

And the author in the OP addresses that very issue:


We don't teach accountability, we don't expect accountability and I'm not even sure we even know what accountability looks like anymore. Some of us have become so addicted to pointing fingers at others for all the wrong that happens in our lives that self-assessment has become synonymous with blaming the victim.

Yes, there are cultural factors that make parenting difficult. And sometimes a bad seed is just that. But none of this excuses us from taking personal responsibility where we can.