Where Were the Parents of the McKinney Pool Party Troublemakers?

So now the race debate has moved to McKinney, Texas, a bedroom community of Dallas, with an out-of-control party invading a quiet family-oriented community. The story is encapsulated and reduced by the all-seeing media to a ten-second clip of a white police officer manhandling a pretty teen girl wearing only a swimsuit to the ground.

“Oh, waily, waily!” the liberal media screamed. “Clearly this is yet another case of racey-hatey racist white men oppressing the black children!”

Apparently unlike the media, I took the time to inform myself: I listened to interviews with the black man who made the call (the man was fully supportive of the cop, by the way), watched the entire seven-minute clip made available publicly, and listened to other community members who witnessed the incident. There was way more to the story than that ten seconds of looped and incendiary video.

Black activists, smelling another opportunity to hoover up cash and sympathy, were not so skeptical. Instead, they organized an 800-person march from a neighborhood school to the swimming pool of the mixed-race, mixed-income neighborhood, chanting and singing the whole way about how black lives matter.

Well, sure they do. But what I saw on that video was not a situation where black lives don’t matter. Instead, I saw a young lady who clearly had not been taught respect for authority, who repeatedly returned after a police officer told her to leave an area where she was trespassing, and who finally pushed him into using physical force to make her behave. And then she resisted, crying and hollering for her mama. Had she not resisted, there would have been no juicy video. Had she done what she was told, this would be a local story at best.

I would be utterly humiliated if any of my children, INCLUDING THE AUTISTIC ONE, had behaved in such a way when confronted by a police officer. I’d have been furious at them for participating in an out-of-control party like the one that was broken up.

Here’s what you really need to know about this “party”:

• A small private neighborhood pool was commandeered for a graduation party. This party included a DJ who played music that was, according to one neighborhood resident, not appropriate for children, and not really appropriate for underage teens.
• Present, but not attending the party, were children and families entitled to use the pool. They were just there to hang out at their neighborhood pool for a quiet afternoon in the sun.
• Social media was used by party-goers to put out a call to bring other kids in.
• The neighborhood pool prohibits any resident from having more than two guests. Unauthorized people at this pool are, by law, trespassing.
• The party quickly spiraled out of control, with neighborhood residents confronting trespassing party-goers and escalating to a physical altercation between two women. The neighborhood security guard was unable to control the situation.

Now imagine yourself as a solitary police officer coming onto the scene: utter chaos, little children running away crying, loud music blasting, bad actors laughing, ordinary neighborhood families forced to abandon the pool THEY PAY FOR because of what was becoming a riot.

These party-goers were teenagers. Think back just a few weeks ago to Baltimore. The first night of rioting, the earliest altercations were started by teenagers not in school or employed or at home with their families. They threw rocks at the police, some of them as big as bricks. They put one cop in the hospital overnight.

This isn’t a case of race problems. This is, rather, a problem of parenting and of idle kids with no employment prospects. I am reminded of Toya Graham, who was hailed as the Mom of the Year when she dragged her 16-year-old son Michael away from a riot he was participating in.

I loved her actions, but my reaction was not to hail her as MotY. Instead, I wondered where the hell all the other parents were. Most kids in that riot had at least one parent out there who presumably cared about them. How come they were not out there dragging their little darlings home by the ear?

Flash forward again to McKinney. Same situation: hordes of teenagers with nothing better to do than cause trouble for other people, cops called in, video captured and used for political propaganda, not a parent in sight.

Shouldn’t we be asking whether the kids know where their parents are?