Almost seven years ago, a troubled 11-year-old girl reported that she had been raped — twice — in her Northwest Washington neighborhood. Despite medical evidence of sexual assault, records show that no suspects were arrested and the cases were given only sporadic attention by the police . Instead, in the second case, the police had the girl, Danielle Hicks-Best, charged with filing a false report.
After Danielle’s family agreed to what her parents say was a poorly understood plea, she was convicted and made a ward of the court. She spent the next few years in and out of detention and secure treatment centers between episodes of running away. She never finished high school, had a baby at 15 and is struggling to move forward with her life.
“After 11, she lost the rest of her childhood,” said Danielle’s mother, Veronica Best, who campaigned for years with her husband, Mayo, to get the police to focus on the assaults, contacting officers all the way up the chain to D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier and her deputy, Peter Newsham. ...WaPo
And that's when the police chief is a woman, and the girl has "severe behavioral, academic and mental-health issues rooted in the drug exposure and physical abuse she suffered from her birth mother, a crack addict."
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One of Ian McEwan's earlier novels, The Child in Time (1987) centers on a writer who loses his three-year-old to a snatcher one day in the supermarket near his home in London. And one of the things the grieving father learns is that official search will fizzle out in only a week or so because the police are busy.
As it happens, the police are busy in north London where they are dealing with protesters. Of course, this means the onus of searching for the child falls on the child's family. The father rushes around the area carrying photos of the missing little girl. Of course, any experienced snatcher of little kids will know this and will -- at least for a week -- get well away from the neighborhood where the child lived and would be recognizable..
So what's the point? Well, in Britain, no less than here in the US, the police are guilty of what could at least be called serial bad choices. Obviously -- obviously! -- the loss of a child is nothing for the urban taxpayer compared to the annoying reality of malcontents blocking traffic.
The police reflect our values in the District of Columbia no less than in London. (See above.) We have plenty of opinions about how children should be raised. But we don't allow them the freedom they need to roam and discover.
