Learn To Live With It

Society spends millions to rehabilitate kids at risk while kids who are trying are given the short end of the stick. Young offenders are not punished and you can't even identify them. Young offenders are victims and they are exempt from the responsibilities that the rest of us must accept. It is time someone started accepting responsibility; ie: social in-activists, shrinks, etc.

Stop protecting kids gone wild
By JOHN GLEESON

Well, they caught the little buggers.

That is, bearing in mind the accused are innocent until charges are proven in court, on Monday Winnipeg police arrested three youths allegedly involved in an incident that stunned even this crime-hardened city.

Around 6 a.m. last Thursday, a stolen blue Pontiac Sunbird rocketed along posh Wellington Crescent, the driver taking deliberate aim at early-morning runners, turning the car around and repeating deadly swipes at the same fleeing joggers.

The car hit two men in separate incidents, seriously injuring one of them.

It was a nasty new variation on an old, old tune in Canada's statistical capital of car thievery.

Then on Monday the arrests. Two 16-year-olds and a 13-year-old. One of the older boys, identified as a prolific "Level 4" car thief, was charged in the hit-the-runners incident with two counts of dangerous driving causing bodily harm. Police say they caught the trio after an 11-hour car theft spree that started late Sunday and ended with one of them slamming a stolen Monte Carlo into a light standard during a police chase.

Some car thieves apparently never take a day off.

Winnipeggers, judging by the letters they write, are fed up with a vehicle theft rate that's close to three times the national average. They're fed up with the mollycoddling Youth Criminal Justice Act and a court system that puts chronic underage auto thieves back on the street before the last hot car they crashed has even been swept away. In the case of the Sunbird driver, they're already angry that the accused wasn't charged with attempted murder and they're calling for adult sentencing and lengthy incarceration if he's convicted.

Which begs the question -- if youth crime dropped for the second straight year since the YCJA was passed in April 2003, as StatsCan reported yesterday, why are so many Canadians clamouring for an overhaul of the act because youth crime, they feel, is out of control?

One of the answers is that under the YCJA, young offenders are routinely diverted out of the court system. Crime rates appear to drop on paper, which makes governments look good but in reality leaves the public less protected.

The police are usually in lockstep with the frustrated masses but in this latest Winnipeg incident, they came off sounding almost like apologists for the car thieves, of whom about 135 "chronics" are monitored to varying degrees under a police auto theft strategy.

"A lot of these kids suffer from intellectual disabilities, whether it be FASD (fetal alcohol spectrum disorder) or any combination of these things," Sgt. Doug Safioles, who heads the Winnipeg police stolen auto unit, said Tuesday. "What they lack is the little voice in the back of your head that tells the rest of us that at some point this is just too dangerous, we should stop."

The comments were enough to warrant a clarification from Winnipeg police yesterday, their official spokesman saying FASD is no excuse for stealing cars and criminals with FASD still know right from wrong.

Still, it should come as no surprise that most of these youths have intellectual challenges far beyond the average bear.

But if locking them up is inhumane, another solution had better be found, preferably one involving 24/7 monitoring. Because a little voice in the back of our heads is telling us the public isn't going to sit back and just take it much longer.