Here’s the second part of my Raleigh 911! post. When we left our intrepid hero, he was on the way to bust a murder suspect.
We approached the area and the two officers discussed their capture strategy.
Chris then turns to me. “If I get out to run or have to leave in a hurry, ” he said, “just sit tight in the car with the doors locked. No one will mess with you.”
Gulp. Ok, we’re not playing around anymore. I nodded and felt my pulse double in an instant.
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I was reading this article about other cities’ battles with teens loitering around malls and it got me thinking: do we want to discourage teens from going to malls – a place where they can be better supervised? Do we really want to disperse them elsewhere? That sounds like a bad idea.
I mean, while the mall melee was scary, no one was seriously hurt (a credit to our police agencies). And as far as I know, before the fight broke out these kids weren’t committing any serious crimes. Perhaps an occasional shoplifting, but not drug-dealing or shootings.
At the mall, the ways kids can get into trouble are limited. Perhaps the answer is simply to beef up mall security.
A friend suggests the easiest way to keep teens from loitering in mall food courts is to eliminate the food court’s free drink refills. While it wouldn’t be the only solution I think it would be a step in the right direction.
There’s also the “mosquito” method as well. It would need to be used where teens are and not kids, however, so that rules out a food court. Might be good for the open-air drug markets around town, though.
Remember the North Carolina Museum of Transportation excursion train I was psyched to ride from Spencer to Charlottesville? I happened upon the museum’s webpage last night to discover that tickets were already being sold. Though I had “sent an email for more information” way back, the museum left me in the lurch. It would seem important to know when one could actually purchase tickets, so I’m not sure why I wasn’t told about this.
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