When the young maniac kicks the old Asian woman in the head, you know all you need to know about these four criminals. Feral and hateful, so-called human beings who have forfeited all claim to humanity. And one of them just eleven years old.
They brutally attacked the woman in her retirement home and, when they were finished stealing everything they could, one of them administered the coup de grace: a thrusting kick to her face as she lay immobile on the floor.
Thank goodness three of the four young men have been arrested; it’s only a matter of time before cops snag the fourth. All will be charged with crimes of violence: the 18-year old as an adult, the 13- and 14-year olds as juveniles. But the 11-year old apparently will get off scot free. “The 11-year-old is too young to be charged with a crime,’’ San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins said.
How is that possible? Just because he’s only 11 doesn’t mean he’s a child. This bad seed is almost guaranteed to grow up to be vicious predator. He willingly participated in a violent, grotesque attack on a 70-year old Asian woman. Are we simply to let him go? This is not possible. And yet it happens all the time: very young people, almost always males, do horrible stuff, and the law says, “Well, he’s too young to charge with a crime. It’s now a community issue.”
Those were Brooke Jenkins’s words: the 11-year old is now “a community issue.” Can I ask what that means? It would be nice to think that the entire community in which the 11-year old lives would turn its attention to him, inculcating good manners and respect for the law. Wouldn’t that be something! But it’s not going to happen. That manchild will return to the same incompetent parent/s and the same hard streets where he grew up, and will most likely be committing more crimes within days. He needs serious intervention—not pity, not compassion, but stern, unrelenting interference in the course of his life, for an indeterminate length of time, so that society has its eye on him 24/7 and he won’t be able to submit again to his violent instincts. But it sounds like there won’t be any intervention. The predator will be free to hunt again.
And then there was the shooting yesterday, on Bellevue Avenue near Lake Merritt, that was uncomfortably close to my home. Not much is known of the details, except that police nabbed the suspect. One witness told reporters the suspect was “homeless” and “violent.” There are still quite a few tents in Lakeside Park; they come and go, and the city seems determined to do nothing about them, despite the Encampment Management Policy that forbids them. From what I’m able to observe walking past these tents, some of their inhabitants are creepy and scary. There have been multiple reports of various crimes being committed in and around those tents: open-air drug taking and dealing, human trafficking, selling stolen items like bicycles and so on; but this is something that the City Council has decided to tolerate, rather than take on the more difficult task of rousting the campers and arresting them when called for. Meanwhile, a grand old neighborhood, Adams Point, and Oakland’s “crown jewel,” Lakeside Park, deteriorate. Thank you, City Council, your “progressive politics” are ruining Oakland, just as you intended.
Steve Heimoff