|
Human imagination is boundless, but imagination is often conspicuously absent when it comes to excuses for criminality. It is truly incredible how so many different suspects in similar situations give me the same preposterous rationalizations. In fact, it almost seems as if the offenders that I deal with have all learned their lines at the same bad acting school. No where is this phenomenon more obvious than in the investigation of child abuse and neglect. People from all walks of life seem to fall back on the same clichés when confronted with their negligence and maltreatment. These are the ones that I heard most often as a cop: "I only had two beers": Every police officer is familiar with this hackneyed rationalization. Suspects usually don't deny that they have been drinking. Even in their fuddled state they realize that their symptoms are obvious enough to see. Their only option is to try to minimize what they've done. Often they'll tell you that they were "drinking earlier in the day." "I only use occasionally": This is the preferred excuse if the parents are drug addicts. Never mind that there are so many fresh tracks on their arms that it looks like a railway yard. Never mind that they're on the nod from heroin or strung out on cocaine. Ask them when they last used and they'll tell you "a week ago." Drug paraphernalia found in the home is usually explained away as "something my friend must have left behind the other day," even if the paraphernalia is found in their own pockets. "The babysitter was on the way when I left": This is often the line that you'll get when you've found young children left unattended at home. When you ask the delinquent parent who the absent babysitter is, they'll dream up a name. When you ask for this babysitter's phone number, the parent will claim that this babysitter has no phone. When you ask the parent how they got a hold of the babysitter, the offender will finally admit that they asked a person that they happened to run into on the street on their way out the front door. "I'm going shopping tomorrow": This is the excuse I usually heard when I arrived in some benighted “family residence” where there was no food in the house for the kids. In most cases I found receipts in the liquor store bags in this apartment which indicated that these people had found time to shop for something other than food that day. "You caught me on cleaning day": You could smell the squalid apartment the moment you stepped out of the elevator. Every level surface in the apartment was a half inch deep in dust, crumbs, and garbage. Food rinds and crumbs crunched underfoot as you walked across the floors. Flies swarmed around spoiled food on the kitchen counters. The cupboard shelves were jammed with empty wine bottles. The refrigerator was full of rotting food. The kitchen sink was jammed full of encrusted pots and pans. Cock roaches scuttled about everywhere. A regular Aegean stables. Often they’ll tell you "Give me an hour and I'll clean it up." Of course they couldn't achieve this even with the help of a fire hose and a front end loader “It’s Laundry day tomorrow”: You hear this from the denizens of home with filthy laundry banked in drifts against the hallway walls, leaving narrow pathways. A mouldering pile of soggy laundry is banked up around the toilet. The children have been sleeping on soiled mattresses with no linen. The children are soiled too. They looked as if they hadn't had a bath in weeks "But he has toys!" I once went to a sty of a basement suite where we found a dozen thieves and prostitutes smoking crack. A stolen safe was the center piece of the living room. There was no food in the kitchen. There were used hypodermic needles and crude crack pipes strewn about. Cowering in the corner of the room was the five year old, lice infested son of the couple renting this apartment. The mother, wilting under my disapproving stare, pointed to some beat up second hand toys she had acquired and gave me this familiar plea. As if her son's pathetic thrift shop toys somehow made up for the squalor and neglect that her child had to endure. "I was only gone for five minutes": This is the excuse that you typically get when you go to investigate reports of children left alone for extended periods in vehicles. It is not uncommon to find infants abandoned in parked vehicles on scorching August days or in the depths of icy winter. After I have stood around for a half an hour waiting for the fire department or a wrecker to arrive to unlock the car for me, the missing parents will suddenly come rushing up and give me this line. I then point out that this is clearly impossible, since I have been standing in plain view by their car with uniformed police officers and marked patrol cars for 5 times that length of time. The flustered parent's rejoinder will be: "I was looking out the store window every 30 seconds." Of course this excuse is just as ludicrous, given the obvious official activity that has been going on around the offender's car for the past half hour. "I only hit him lightly": I hear this particular line all the time from violent parents. Yet many violent parents will deny their behaviour and blame their children's injuries on some accident or freak act of nature. I have found that the most common stories used by offenders taking this approach are: "He fell down the stairs", "She fell in the bathtub" or "She fell out of the crib." Never mind the victim's bruises clearly take the shape of hand prints, boot soles or wooden spoons. I've saved the most commonly used line for last. The child abuse investigator often hears it as the paramedics are loading the battered child into the ambulance or the investigator is settling starving children in the back seat of his car. The parents have earlier exhausted all of the aforementioned excuses. As a last resort the offenders will scream the following remark out the front door: "I love my children!" There is no excuse for child abuse. I'm sure that these people believe that they love their children. They are unable to objectively examine their actions. If they did they'd see that they don't really care enough about their children. Is it any wonder that these people put so little thought into their child rearing given that they've put as little thought as this into their excuses? |
Attempted Exculpation |
|
e-mail: webmaster@officersofavalon.com |
|
To contact us: |
