Theft Of A Child's Integrity

One summer evening around 7:00 when I was working third shift I was sent to a residence concerning a theft. When I arrived at the residence I observed several men in their early twenties standing in the front yard.  It was explained to me that one of the men left his wallet sitting on the edge of the front porch of the house while they played football in the front yard. 

They said when they were finished playing and went back to the porch the wallet was no longer there.  They recalled a young boy was hanging around the yard allegedly watching them playing football and they thought it was probably he who took the wallet. They pointed  to the house where they thought the boy lived.  I walked a few houses down to where the boy supposedly lived and observed a young boy hanging out in the front yard.  I approached the boy and said we needed to talk.  I also saw what could have been the outline of a man’s wallet in the young boys pants pocket. If I recall correctly this boy was about seven years old.  I asked the boy if he had taken the wallet off the porch two houses down. He looked sheepishly at me and pulled the wallet out of his pants pocket.

I told him he needed to take the wallet back and I would go with him. I also told him he was in a lot of trouble, but we would see what the man he took the wallet from wanted to do considering the boy’s age and that he returned the wallet with nothing missing.

The man from whom the wallet was taken did not desire to press charges, thus I was going to let the boy go with a warning. I was lecturing the boy on how what he did was wrong and how much trouble he could have been in when his mother came up to the boy and me and tore into me about who was I to tell her boy he was wrong. She said she has told the boy to take from those that have since they probably had more than they needed anyway. That it was a person’s right to take things left lying around.

I told the women that it wasn’t okay to just take things that people left laying around, technically that was actually classified as a theft of lost or mislaid Property. Leaving it on the front porch of a private residence was not just lying around. I also advised her it wasn’t a good idea to encourage her son to take things, to steal things. The woman grabbed her son by the arm and walked away from me cussing me out and saying I had no right to interfere.

In recent years the chasm between the haves and the have nots seems to be widening. As individuals how should we feel about that widening? Do we have an ethical responsibility? As individuals? As a society? How do we narrow the gap between the haves and the have-nots?

Until another time,

Sally S