They've arrested a 16-tear-old kid for making an announcement at the WalMart in Washington Township, New Jersey.

Last Sunday at around 7 p.m., someone at the Wal-Mart announced "Attention, Wal-Mart shoppers: Will all the black people please leave the store. Thank you."

There were 24, count 'em, 24 managers on the floor. One of them grabbed a microphone after about 5 minutes, announced that the announcement was a prank, and apologized to shoppers.

What Was The Crime?

If you find a car with the keys in it, and take it for a joy ride, they call that theft. What happens, though, if you simply roll down the window, turn on the radio, and listen to it from ten feet away? It's wrong to use someone else's property, and in either case, that's what you're doing.

In the case of a joy ride, you're potentially depriving the owner of the use of his car. You're exposing the car to greater risk of a traffic accident. You're using up a little gas, wearing out the brakes and the tires a little bit, adding a few miles to the odometer. In the case of the radio, you're potentially running down the battery so that the car won't start.

But they probably aren't going to arrest you for turning on someone's radio.

What's The Crime?

In this case, they've made an arrest. If it was an adult, the prankster would probably be charged with criminal mischief. In Pennsylvania, that requires that the criminal "intentionally or recklessly causes another to suffer pecuniary loss by deception or threat".

If someone got POed and left without buying anything, that would result in a pecuniary loss to WalMart, if the sale was a profitable one. If you're only buying the loss-leader in the ad, it actually would prevent a pecuniary loss to WalMart. And if I were the defense lawyer, I'd argue that the loss was not really the result of the announcement, but the result of the underlying racism at WalMart. After all, the prank only is funny if it's believable.

Leaders of the Gloucester County NAACP said Saturday that there have been similar, previous incidents at the same Wal-Mart.

What's more, as the defendant's attorney, I'd argue that the matter of "deception or threat" was not clear-cut. The announcement didn't assert that it was an announcement by store management, nor did it state why black people should leave the store. One could argue that the defendant was trying to call an ad hoc boycott of a racist business.

It's Juvenile Court

However, in most states, when a kid gets arrested, he can be charged with juvenile delinquency. In that case, the state doesn't have to assert that the kid broke a law, only that he wasn't behaving.

Even if what he did was entirely legal, there's little question that the kid was pulling a prank, and that makes him a juvenile delinquent. In most states, the kid can be removed from his home until the age of majority for that.

Kids are supposedly "protected" by the courts, but in many cases, that's not what happens. If this incident had happened in the 1950s, the kid and his parents would be hauled down to the WalMart store office, the parents would assert that the kid would be properly disciplined, and the WalMart manager would give the kid a stern talking-to, and possibly forbid him from entering the store again until he was an adult.

Zero Tolerance

These days, though, there's "zero tolerance" for errant kids. If you have a shaft passing through a bearing, and the shaft is exactly the same size as the bearing hole, what happens is that things sieze up, and the mechanism gets ruined.

It's bad enough when that happens to the crankshaft of your engine - but that's only a matter of $5,000 to fix. Screw up a kid, and it's not a misfortune, it's a tragedy. If it had been a racist sentiment, one could argue that we ought to come down hard on teenage racists - but the prank only worked because people believed that racism flourishes at WalMart. It takes a child to point out that the emperor's new clothes don't exist - and that kind of behavior benefits us all.

WalMart needs to publicly assert that the kid needs nothing more than a stern talking-to.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
announcement - criminal mischief - joy ride - juvenile court - racism - WalMart - zero tolerance