NYPD Rescues New Yorkers From Seven-Year-Old School Child

Being a kid these days must be really horrible. If you do something stupid, one of two things seems to happen:

1. a photograph of you doing this stupid thing will be made available on line and disseminated throughout the internets, making it impossible for you to get a job when you are older (not that there will be jobs to get) and ruining your life forever or alternatively

2. you will be kicked out of school, or arrested, or sent to jail, or all of the above, probably ruining your life forever.

Number 2 seems likely to happen if you are a Poor, or a Demographic American, or (God help you) you are a Poor, Demographic American who lives in New York. Like Wilson Reyes, a seven-year-old in the Bronx who was handcuffed to a wall for five to ten hours (depending on whom you ask) and interrogated by the NYPD over five dollars and a schoolyard fight.

Most kids get a timeout or a spanking for bad behavior, but a 7-year-old Bronx boy, Wilson Reyes, was arrested and handcuffed to a police precinct wall for hours on a robbery rap, police sources said.

Frances Mendez, the mother of the pint-sized “perp,” is threatening to sue the NYPD for $250 million — saying cops treated her son like a hardened criminal after he allegedly punched a 9-year-old boy in the face and took $5 from him, her lawyer and a police source said Tuesday.

Your Wonkette hit a kid with a stick way back in fourth grade, and was given a stern talking-to (don't worry, the kid deserved it, he was throwing rocks at baby ducks at the park). And in fifth grade, Your Wonkette got in a fight with two bigger kids (and WON, we might add) and was given another stern talking-to. But Your Wonkette was never handcuffed to a wall, or sent to the police for these and other schoolyard scuffles because this all happened before America was ruined, possibly forever. Also, Your Wonkette did not live in New York or Mississippi , so that could have been the reason why we were not handcuffed to a wall.

Anyway, surely the police are denying that they hauled a 7-year-old to the station, handcuffed him to a wall, and interrogated him for hours? They must be. Right? RIGHT?

“If (this) 7-year-old and his mother lived on 64th and Park and he attended a $35,000-a-year private school, do you think (he) would have been arrested, handcuffed to a wall and denied access to his mother and legal counsel for 10 hours?” [asked the family's lawyer, Jack Yankowitz/]

But an NYPD spokeswoman said Tuesday the boy was held for just four hours and 40 minutes.

“The attorney is fabricating the amount of time the child was in custody,” Inspector Kim Royster said.

See, holding a 7-year-old over five bucks for ten hours--that would be SILLY. Let's not be SILLY, OK guys? Holding him for almost five hours without legal counsel, at a police station, where he is chained to the wall--THAT's reasonable. If it were ten hours, OK, fine, maybe that's overkill. But four hours and forty minutes? That's like watching a couple Harry Potter movies back-to-back, no biggie.

“Everything was done properly,” [a] cop source said. “He was arrested for a robbery. He was taken to the precinct and put in the juvenile room. His parent was allowed to see him.”

Babying the boy wasn’t an option, the second police source added.

“He had to be handcuffed — he was a prisoner. If we didn’t handcuff him and he ran out the front door, then we would have had an escaped prisoner on our hands.”

The source said charges could not have been filed against a child 6 and under, but kids 7 to 17 can be charged as juveniles.

[...]

“This kid is no angel, even though he may look like it,” the source said. “We made the arrest based on the complainant aggressively complaining about what the defendant did to him.”

“This wasn’t something where one kid runs off with another kid’s basketball. This 7-year-old attacked someone and took his money. There’s a little more to this story than it appears."

Oh we can steal basketballs with impunity? Duly noted. We were afraid there would be no silver lining to this story, but we are elated to have been proven wrong.

 [NY Daily News]