Yesterday, I finally had an opportunity to speak with an attorney about
this encounter, which I had on Monday, with a policeman in Marysville, Kansas. The cop had just arrested a young woman, and while she was waiting for him to do his coply duties of figuring out which crime she had probably not committed but with which he could yet charge her, she told me her children had been left alone as a result of her arrest. She asked me if I would call her mother on my cell phone and ask her to babysit, and the cop manhandled me and threatened to arrest me when I obliged. As it turns out, there is no crime in the annotated code of Kansas to be found suggesting that it is unlawful for a bystander to telephone a child's grandma to babysit while a parent gets arrested or otherwise hounded by law enforcement. I committed no crime, and any arrest would have been a false arrest. Any subsequent detention would have been false imprisonment. The police officer was making empty, stupid threats.
It was also suggested to me that such ploys are standard procedure at the Marysville Police Station whenever a woman with children is arrested. The goal is to force the mother to choose, when making her phone call, between calling a lawyer, or calling someone to care for her children. The mother will almost always choose someone to care for her children, and with no legal representation, the police are free to harass and bully her for a longer amount of time. Who ultimately pays for this? The children, of course.
Go ahead and continue your tactics, big badass cop. Have you heard of what's been dubbed the "War on Women"? Kansas officials are not looking terribly positive, of late, in any area involving women. How do you think the American Civil Liberties Union and the Southern Poverty Law Center will react to documented instances of women being forced to give up legal representation while in your custody?
