"(CNN) -- For more than two hours on a dark Saturday night, as many as 20 people watched or took part as a 15-year-old California girl was allegedly gang raped and beaten outside a high school homecoming dance, authorities said."
Are you surprised? I'm not.
For years we've heard about attacks on people where others watched but did nothing. This gang rape was probably considered great entertainment by those present. No doubt these are kids who have been raised by largely absent or uncaring parents and who are so bored out of their minds and/or stoned to the gills that they consider anything violent or out of the ordinary as fun. If any of them are interviewed about their behavior they will either deny they did anything wrong or manufacture tears to show their "remorse."
If we put these ratlike children in a laboratory and tested them, we would find they have no sense of morality or social conscience, lack basic social and intellectual skills, have high expectations from the job market but no concept of how to achieve goals. They are those who don't choose to show up for work on time yet complain when they get fired. When they get caught for an offense, whether it's gang rape or drinking in a dorm room, they condemn those who take them to task for their violation of law or rules but fail to understand their own culpability.
My car was burglarized in my own driveway about a month ago. I made two mistakes: I didn't put it into the garage and I left it unlocked. It was a foolish oversight. My bad. Mea culpa. In talking with the officer who came out to take the report, I learned it's not an uncommon problem in my area. He told me groups of gangbanger wannabes from a neighboring community are probably to blame or it could be kids from the other side of town, some of whom are given bags by their parents and sent out to steal all they can to fill them up, sort of the criminal and year-round version of trick or treat with emphasis on the trick. OK, that's bad enough and illustrates the points I made earlier.
But get this.
Folks on our street decided we want to put up Neighborhood Watch signs to show our new vigilance regarding criminal activity. We approached the city for permission. I had a conversation with a traffic sergeant about it today. He told me, "No one else has asked us for this. Other people will see those signs and approach the city to do the same thing in their neighborhood. We don't have a Neighborhood Watch program and we don't have the funds in the budget to provide signs to everyone that wants them." I told him we have already got the funds to pay for the signs ourselves and are just seeking permission to put them up. He told me he will "run that by the Chief" and let me know.
My prediction? Our city doesn't acknowledge a crime problem, nor does it wish to deal with the bad publicity from car burglaries and vandalism. It never has. The city will not approve our request for the signs and we will have to go to the media with our story.
Stay tuned...
