So, some kids in the tony suburb of Fishers called their parents yesterday and told them that a man had pulled up to their bus stop and asked them to get in his car.
The chain of events gets fuddled from there, but apparently the parents called the school, and the school called the po-po, and by the time the heat showed up at the bus stop, the alleged perv was long gone.
Naturally this has triggered something of a hooraw, and the police have issued a statement that kids should keep an eye out for the bad man today and call 911 before calling their parents, and lor' bless 'em for any extra work they've brought on themselves this morning, but the cherry on the icing of the cake of the whole thing is that the only description given was "A white man in a red car".
Who was the first concerned parent interviewed?
That's right, completely tone-deaf to irony, the reporter did his concerned parent interview with a white dude sitting in a red car. I was laughing too hard to yell at the TeeWee screen "That's the guy! Right there! Ask the little girl in the passenger seat if she's there willingly!"
I'm glad I'm not a Hamilton County 911 dispatcher this morning, I can tell you that. Or a white dude in a red car that has to drive past a school bus stop to get to work.
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13 comments:
I'm glad I'm not a Hamilton County 911 dispatcher this morning
*tactical face-palm* Ain't that the truth.
Waiting for the local fire marshall to get reported.
Sometimes it's difficult to tell whether it's a TV reporter or someone from The Onion.
The first legit bank robbery call that I ever went to, the early-arriving morning clerk was walked at gunpoint into the bank, pistol-whipped, and made to give up thousands in cash. She reported that the guy was hispanic, and that she had seen a white pickup near the parking lot. This was a weekday morning, in Texas. Do you have any idea how many vehicles met that description (white pickup, Latino driver), just in a one-mile radius, along the state highway next to the bank? There was an embarrassing quarter-hour flurry of stops for DWB before we said "enough."
That reminds me of this image:
http://www.unquality.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/reporter_suspect.jpg
I'm a white male and I drove my red vehicle past a bunch of bus stops on my way to work today.
Rob beat me to it. I thought of the exact same picture.
The linked video didn't have the interview - but when the bus pulls away, there are at least 3 red cars in the background which made me laugh.
Rob - that picture is perfect, how has SNL not used it?
"That's the guy! Right there! Ask the little girl in the passenger seat if she's there willingly!"
Tam, you mean something like this?
rickn8or, that's pure evil. But I laughed.
A few thoughts:
1. It appears that no one is complaining about children bringing cell phones to school.
2. The children with the cell phones are incapable of observing and writing down a plate/tag number to identify the vehicle.
3. Even though most cell phones now have cameras, no one has a photograph of the vehicle, plate/tag, or the driver.
4. No child directly contacted 911, which increased the response time.
5. No armed parent with a camera equipped cell phone was at the bus stop, which increased the response time.
6. No police officer was at the bus stop, resulting in a response time.
7. If a child was abducted, how much of a response time is acceptable to you? All answers with a value greater than zero are unacceptable.
Might there have been some failure-to-communicate-fully? There's a cascaded communication chain from driver to children, children to parents, parents to school, school to 911 center, 911 center to police, and police to newspaper. Somewhere very early in that chain, the man's actions were interpreted as threatening.
Was the guy a perv? Was he being generous? Did he communicate poorly? Or did the kids react strangely to an unexpected offer?
I'm glad I'm not a Hamilton County 911 dispatcher this morning
Oh man. I'm having flashbacks to the aftermath of Paul Bernardo's abduction of Kristen French (background here).
The market for cream-colored Camaros from Toronto to Buffalo was wrecked for a couple of years after that, as all the owners got sick of surrepetitious police visits and pull-overs.
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