The Outstater
‘Isn’t the Way This Works’
ECONOMISTS TALK ABOUT “moral hazards,” that is, situations where someone takes on excessive risk because they do not have to bear the full consequences of that risk. Essentially, it’s the idea that if someone is insulated from the negative effects of their risky behavior, they might act less cautiously than they otherwise would.
Our society is creating walking, driving moral hazards. Parents, teachers, somebody, is raising children who think they are immune to social rules even at the risk of their lives and others. I have an example, a torturous one. If you want to try to follow along, here is one unofficial, unverified video and here is another.
Police in my city stopped a young women the other night for allegedly running a stop sign at high speed. It was 3:30 a.m. The woman, her car pulled to the side of the road, was texting on her phone when the police officer approached. He was polite as he began running through the standard questions.
Did she have any identification? No, she had left her purse at a friends. What was her name? Only silence as she continued texting. She was asked her name several more times. Still texting, still silent.
Pressed, she said she wouldn’t comply because she said she hadn’t run the stop sign. She demanded to see the video from his dash camera. “That isn’t the way this works,” the officer said in apparent reference to “Indiana Code, Title 35. Criminal Law and Procedure,” which the young women had apparently not had the opportunity to read.
At that point, the two officers now at the scene felt that duty required them to take further action. The first officer told our young woman that if she would not step out of the car voluntarily to discuss the matter, and if they had to remove her forcefully, she would face additional charges. She said, “Do it,” in a sort of inverted scene from “Dirty Harry.”
It was a battle. The young women allegedly kicked one of the officers repeatedly with a placement that caused him to yell an obscenity. In any case, the officers eventually brought her to the ground to be handcuffed.
Interestingly, the angle of a phone video taken from across the street made it look wrongly as if the officers had simply pulled an innocent woman from her car and began pummeling her to the pavement. Whatever, we had a George Floyd moment by then with numerous bystanders shouting disparagingly at the officers (are there bystanders around at 3:30 o’clock in the morning in your neighborhood?).
What to think of all this?
Again, what stuck me was emergence of a new sense of perverse entitlement. Is it widespread? I don’t know but this young woman, who already was named in a warrant for driving without a license, seemed utterly comfortable, even fearless, in her position that police had no authority over her.
Indeed, they need not be obeyed and she could go on about her business unencumbered by their silly contentions. At worst, she anticipated dismissal without prejudice after an on-the-spot inspection of the police dash camera. Nor did she hesitate to attack a police officer any more than she might have hesitated piling into a lunch fight in the school cafeteria.
Somewhere along the line, at home, at school, somewhere, she had gotten the idea that all of that was OK, or at least she had not been introduced to countervailing values that would have guided her through the incident more safely. She saw the police as a mere nuisance, an impediment to her get-along.
So, are we to signal to a generation of youth that speeding through a stop sign in the early morning without a license or identification and with an attitude that requires the application of police force to get you to step out of your car and state your name, all can be taken lightly, that it’s no big thing?
Our new woke mayor described the video of the police cuffing the young woman as “shocking” and lent her weight to an immediate internal affairs investigation while reassigning the officers involved. Are they now assumed to pose a danger to innocents on the streets observing stop signs in the wee hours?
The young woman was routinely charged with resisting law enforcement causing injury, battery against a public safety official, refusal to identify herself, all perhaps to be bargained down to driving while suspended (what happened to the stop sign?).
It is uncertain whether a court date has been set and of course there is no immediate word expected from the prosecutor’s office, always hyper sensitive to such incidents. Only one thing is certain: The accused now has massive street credentials.
Still, this all may explain why traffic deaths among a certain segment of drivers have increased 78 percent from the decade before. Could it be an expansion of the moral hazard to include driving while indignant?
Finally, do we need to assign race to the individuals involved? It’s too sad. — tcl
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