Consequences

If they aren't seen, are their impacts lessened?

Over the holiday I encountered a really odd and convoluted story from a city not too awfully far from my home.

Photo by Stephen Picilaidis on Unsplash

The story, as I understand it, goes something like this:

-A teenager violently assaults two other kids in school with a pipe, sending both to the hospital, one to intensive care with a traumatic brain injury.

-Police respond and arrest the kid.

-The Police Chief (who is quite new to the job) issues a statement to the effect of ‘we are pleased to have caught the kid so quick, but my officers should have arrested him out of the sight of other students instead of in front of them, and I’ve counseled them to do such in the future.’

-A goodly number of students then refuse to attend school, holding a protest instead, claiming to feel unsafe at school and objecting to the Chief’s statement.

-The Chief then makes a second statement, apologizing for his first statement, along the lines of ‘of course we’ll arrest kids who do violent things, my earlier statement was badly worded.’

-Other people object to this second ‘apology’ statement. At this point, I have no idea what on earth anyone is whining about.

-The Chief then goes on a very popular local podcast, where he apologizes for a second time, for seemingly both formal written statements he had made, and tries to explain things along the lines of: ‘yes, we will always arrest kids who we catch doing violence, we arrested this one quickly and safely, but when working with young people in schools we need to be sensitive.’

There is certainly a lesson to be learned in all of this manufactured drama:

It doesn’t matter what the poor police officers do, someone is always going to bitch and complain. In the eyes of far too many today, police are judged by default to always or nearly always act in bad faith.

That of course just isn’t true.

But that does bring up a question to my mind. A question fundamental to the Chief’s first statement.

Police Officers responded to a vicious attack at a school, found the teenaged criminal in the school environment with other students around, handcuffed him and hauled him off.

That seems perfectly right in my mind, and in keeping with what a rational society would expect its Police force to do.

The Chief however, in that initial statement, seemed to disagree. Arguing that his officers should have led the teen to a more private part of the school, where students couldn’t see what was happening, and made the arrest privately, handcuffing him there.

And he indicated in the statement that he had now communicated that expectation to his Officers.

Maybe this is somehow important, maybe it isn’t, I don’t know, but it certainly has caused that poor new Police Chief a tremendous amount of grief in recent days.

Here’s what I wonder though:

As the arrest was handled by responding Officers, lots of teens got to see their fellow student hauled off in handcuffs. They got to see him begin suffering the consequences of his actions.

Had the arrest instead been handled in the way the Chief initially indicated he would have preferred it to be handled, fellow students would not have seen the little criminal facing those consequences. Undoubtedly they would have learned of his arrest later, but they wouldn’t have seen it with their own eyes.

And, I have to wonder, does that make a difference?

It seems completely alien today, but when I was a high school student, we (me and plenty of other kids) took guns to school. Primarily during deer season when some hunting would be done before school, and rifles would remain in the back window racks of pickups during the school day.

But, it wasn’t just that. I remember an occasion in a public speaking class where we were all made to teach a skill to the other students. One of my classmates set a revolver on the table and taught a ‘class’ on how to clean it.

These things weren’t considered a big deal, or even strange in my extremely rural school.

Nowadays they would be unheard of.

But, when I was a high school student, we didn’t have mass shootings in schools like we have today. Why not? What has changed?

I do have to wonder if at least part of it is a tendency to shield kids from seeing the consequences of bad acts.

In the years since I was a kid, protecting the kids seems to have become the highest priority of all in child rearing. And I do think that it was different when I was young. I don’t think that protecting me was my parent’s highest priority. In fact, given the really dangerous stuff they embraced me doing as a kid, I think my safety was pretty far down on their list.

I think that instead their top priority was to raise me, their child. To ensure that I grew up in such a way as to be able to become a successful adult. I likewise think that was the priority of my friend’s parents.

I don’t think that is the priority today. Today, the priority seems to be safety at all costs. Lock the little bugger in the house, never let him or her out of sight, never allow independent decision making.

And, a whole lot of hiding of consequences.

Will the average kid, in the school where this particular assault took place, who watched the arrest happen, be less likely to commit a crime because he or she witnessed a consequence of crime?

I tend to believe so.

And I think that comes back to Freemasonry as well. If there are no meaningful consequences when a Mason or a Lodge acts in an un-masonic manner, if people see a Mason doing something Masonically bad without consequence, well that just, in my view, encourages more of the same.

Sometimes we must, as our ritual and traditions demand, attempt to correct our erring Brothers. Whispering good counsel first, taking action if those efforts fail.