In this case, an online predator has tricked a child into taking nude pictures of herself. The father understandably calls the cops, thinking that the cops would protect a child from an online predator. Instead, the cops arrived and threatened to arrest the child for producing child porn. Of course, they were going to do no such thing, because getting such a charge past prosecutors, a judge, and a jury is not going to happen. What this statement was really intended to do was send the message that the cops weren’t going to do anything.
In the old days before organized law enforcement, someone would molest a child or steal a horse, and the members of the community would form a posse, then ride out to find the criminal. The posse would often return without the criminal, but with the stolen object. The issue with this is that these vigilante law enforcers frequently got the wrong person.
Police departments were created to ensure that people accused of crimes receive a fair trial. The cops are nominally there to protect the right of the accused. At some point, they became corrupted into being the enforcers of government edicts, then morphed again into lazy cowards who are sucking at the public teat while doing as little as possible. Normally, it would make me happy that the cops weren’t out there arresting people on trumped up charges, or tossing grenades into baby cribs while searching for weed.
This isn’t the first time we have heard of children facing child porn charges for taking pictures of themselves. In 2015, a pair of children were charged as adults for producing child porn. The act that got them into the adult legal system? Taking nude pictures of children: themselves. So they were simultaneously adult criminals and juvenile victims. Twisted logic, to be sure.
This entire situation just sent a clear message to the father: his child is not going to be protected by the legal system that his is paying taxes to support. There is only one inescapable conclusion to this situation- the father is either going to have to do it himself, or he will have to let this go and accept the fact that his daughter is the sexual plaything of both a sexual predator and the cops who are supposed to arrest freaks like that. In my opinion, an appropriate response would be to duct tape the molester to a fence, cut his genitals off with a dull knife, then leave him there to bleed out.
The lesson that I take from this? A society that can’t protect its most vulnerable members (11 year old children) has already failed. Don’t call the cops. They are as useful as a football bat.
In a blog first, I offered to let my police readers do a guest post, defending this sort of behavior from the cops. I got exactly one response, and it appeared on this blog this morning. His issue was more with my made up on the spot number of 90% of cops being bad ones than any substantive disagreement with the behavior of cops. He was correct as far as that bit of hyperbole goes, but my main point remains- cops who allow this sort of behavior to exist without doing anything to put a stop to it are not good cops.