Most police officers are decent and fair-minded working stiffs trying to do a good job — just ordinary people like us with families and modest aspirations. This is easy to forget, because these cops usually don’t make the news, so they fly under our radar. We bloggers focus on bad policing because that’s what we, as citizens and communities, need to be talking and thinking and doing something about; but when we do that, we also need to keep things in perspective.
Last week, Ben Hall, a traffic cop in a Michigan township, pulled over a young mother riding with her 5-year-old daughter without a child seat in a friend’s car. This is against the law for safety reasons, and Hall could have cited her. But she told Officer Hall her car had been repossessed the previous day with the child seat in it, and she couldn’t afford to replace it. Instead of writing her a ticket, Officer Hall took her to a nearby WalMart and bought a new child seat for her at his own expense.
One thing about this story, though, mystifies me. Repo pros almost always allow people to remove personal belongings from vehicles unless a subject’s behavior forces them to make a quick getaway. So, if this young woman wasn’t being a jerk when they took the car, why didn’t she retrieve the child seat from the car? Or if she wasn’t present when they took the car, why couldn’t she pick it up at the storage yard? There may be a good answer for this, but I don’t know.