Am I wrong for what I did to a group of teenagers at the county fair last Saturday? My sergeant says I could lose my badge over this. My wife says she’d have done worse.
I’m 42, been on the force in Pottawatomie County for nineteen years. I was off-duty, out with my daughter Bree who’s seven, eating funnel cake by the livestock pavilion. We go every year. It’s our thing.
There’s this kid – maybe ten, eleven – standing alone near the ring toss. He’s got a service dog with him, some kind of golden retriever mix in a vest. The kid has a visible tremor in his hands and he’s trying to throw the rings but his arm keeps jerking. He’s smiling though. He’s having a good time.
Then I hear it.
Three teenage boys, maybe fifteen or sixteen, standing right behind him. One of them – tall kid, baseball cap backward, letterman jacket from the high school – starts mimicking the tremor. Shaking his arm, making his voice all wobbly. “Ohhh look at me, I can’t even THROW.” His friends are dying laughing. The kid at the booth turns around and his face just crumbles. Like watching a light go out.
I’m already standing up.
But before I get there, this guy on a Harley who’d been parked by the food trucks – big dude, full leather cut, beard down to his chest, patches everywhere – walks up behind the teenagers. Doesn’t say a word. Just stands there. The tall kid turns around and his face goes white.
The biker looks down at him and says, real quiet, “You think that’s funny?”
The kid stammers something. His friends back up.
The biker says, “Apologize. Right now. To his face.”
The tall kid’s dad comes out of NOWHERE. Red-faced, chest puffed, gets right in the biker’s space. “You threatening my son? Who the hell do you think you are?”
That’s when I step in. I get between them. I identify myself as law enforcement. The dad immediately turns on me – “Then ARREST him, he’s threatening a minor.”
I looked at the dad. I looked at his son. I looked at the little boy still standing there with tears running down his face, his dog pressed against his leg.
And I said to the dad, “The only assessment I’m making right now is whether YOUR kid committed harassment against a disabled minor in a public space.”
The dad’s face changed.
My friends and family are split on what happened next. Half say I was protecting a child. Half say I used my authority when I had no jurisdiction off-duty and no right to do what I did.
Because I didn’t stop there. I pulled out my phone, and I called it in. On-duty. To dispatch. With the dad standing RIGHT there. And then I turned to the biker and said –
What I Said to the Biker
“Thank you. Stay put a minute if you don’t mind.”
He nodded. Crossed his arms. Stayed.
The dad was sputtering. Something about lawsuits, something about knowing the sheriff personally. I’ve heard that one maybe four hundred times. The sheriff is a guy named Dale Hutchins who coaches youth soccer on weekends and absolutely does not want to hear from this man.
I finished my call to dispatch. Gave my name, my badge number, my off-duty status, the location. Described what I’d witnessed. The teenage boy. The mimicry. The disabled minor. The service animal. All of it, out loud, in front of the father, in front of the son, in front of the biker, in front of the ring toss lady who’d gone very still behind her counter.
The dad stopped talking.
His son was looking at the ground.
The two friends had drifted back maybe fifteen feet. They were trying to become part of the crowd, which wasn’t working because the crowd had formed a loose ring around us, the way fair crowds do when something is more interesting than the deep-fried Oreos.
Bree was still sitting on the bench behind me. I’d told her to stay and she had, because she’s seven and she actually listens, which I know is temporary. She was watching with funnel cake powder on her chin.
The Part Where the Dad Tries a Different Angle
He pivoted. That’s the word for it. One second he was going red, the next he was going reasonable.
“Look, officer,” he said, and his voice dropped about forty degrees. “Boys will be boys. It was a joke. Nobody got hurt.”
I let that sit for a second.
“The kid’s crying,” I said.
“Kids cry.”
I looked at him for a moment. Not long. Just enough.
“Sir,” I said, “your son targeted a disabled child in a public space and performed a mocking imitation of that child’s disability for the entertainment of his friends. That child’s face when he turned around – I’ve been a cop for nineteen years. I know what humiliation looks like. I know what it does to a person. Your son did that on purpose.”
The dad opened his mouth.
“I’m not arresting anyone,” I said. “That’s not what this is. What this is, is a report. A documented report, called in by a law enforcement officer who witnessed the incident firsthand. Whether anything comes of it is above my pay grade right now. But it exists. It’s real. And your son is going to stand here and apologize to that boy before anyone goes anywhere.”
The son – and I want to be fair here, because he’s fifteen, and fifteen is not forty – the son looked up. His face was doing something complicated. Not crying. Not defiant anymore either. Something in the middle that I recognized. The moment when you realize you’re not going to be able to talk your way out of something.
He looked at the little boy with the dog.
The little boy was watching him. Dog pressed tight against his knee, nose up.
The Apology
It wasn’t a great apology.
It was “I’m sorry, I wasn’t trying to be mean,” which is the apology of someone who absolutely was trying to be mean but has done the math on the situation. I’ve heard ten thousand apologies in my career. I know the difference between the ones that cost something and the ones that are just exit strategy.
But the little boy nodded. Quietly. And his dog pressed harder into his leg, which I think is what those dogs do.
The biker said, from where he was still standing with his arms crossed, “Say it like you mean it.”
The kid looked at him. Looked at me. Looked back at the boy.
And something shifted. I don’t know what it was. Maybe the biker’s face. Maybe the dad going quiet. Maybe just the specific weight of a crowd of strangers watching you be the worst version of yourself.
He said, “I’m sorry. For real. That was messed up and I shouldn’t have done it.”
Still not a great apology. But it was different from the first one. It cost something small.
The little boy said, “Okay.”
Just that. Okay.
His dog’s tail moved twice.
After
The dad left without saying anything to me. Just put his hand on his son’s shoulder and steered him away. The two friends were already gone.
The biker walked over to the ring toss booth. Paid for a round. Threw all three rings, missed all three, shrugged at the kid like what are you gonna do, and bought him a round too. He had big hands. Cinder block hands. He had a patch on his cut that I clocked but didn’t comment on.
I went back to Bree.
She said, “Dad, is that boy okay?”
I said, “Yeah. He is.”
She said, “His dog is really pretty.”
She went back to the funnel cake.
I sat there for a minute. My hands were doing something they do sometimes after a thing like that, a low-grade hum in the fingers, not shaking exactly, just present. Nineteen years and I still get that.
I looked over once more. The boy was throwing rings again. His arm jerked on the release. He got one over a bottle neck and made a sound that I could hear from thirty feet away.
Pure.
What Happened Monday
Monday morning I’m in the sergeant’s office.
Sergeant Dwight Pruitt, twenty-six years on the job, man has seen everything. He’s got the report pulled up on his screen. He’s not yelling. Dwight doesn’t yell. He just looks at you with this expression that’s worse than yelling.
“You were off-duty,” he said.
“Yes.”
“You called it in as on-duty.”
“I identified myself as law enforcement and called in what I witnessed. I didn’t make an arrest. I didn’t detain anyone.”
“The father is saying you coerced his son into a public apology using the implicit threat of your badge.”
I thought about that for a second.
“I asked a fifteen-year-old to apologize to a disabled child he publicly mocked. The badge was incidental.”
Dwight looked at me. He’s got a daughter too, grown now, lives in Wichita. He coached her soccer team for six years. He’s got a picture of her on his desk next to a photo of himself at the state fair, 1987, holding a ribbon for something agricultural.
He said, “The father’s talking about filing a formal complaint.”
“Okay.”
“You understand that goes in your file.”
“I understand that.”
He looked at the screen. Looked at me.
“The biker,” he said. “Who was he?”
“Don’t know his name. Big guy, full cut, patches. Parked a Heritage Softail by the food trucks.”
Dwight nodded slowly. “He threaten anyone?”
“No. He stood there and asked a kid if he thought something was funny. That’s not a threat.”
“The father says it was threatening in manner.”
“The father’s son was mimicking a disabled child’s tremor for laughs. I’m not real concerned about the father’s feelings about manner.”
Dwight was quiet for a moment.
Then he said, “Get out of my office.”
I stood up.
“Pruitt,” he said, before I got to the door.
I turned around.
“My granddaughter has CP,” he said. “She’s eight.”
He turned back to his screen.
I walked out.
Where It Stands
The complaint was filed. It’s sitting somewhere in the system, working its way through whatever process it works through. My union rep says it’ll likely go nowhere given that I didn’t make an arrest, didn’t use force, and the incident was documented by my own call to dispatch before anything happened.
My wife Karen heard the whole story Tuesday night after dinner. She sat across from me at the kitchen table with her coffee and didn’t say anything until I was done.
Then she said, “I’d have done more.”
I asked what more.
She said, “I’d have called the school.”
She’s not wrong. She’s also not a cop, which is the only reason she can say that freely.
Bree asked me this morning if we’re going back to the fair next year. I told her yes. She asked if the boy with the pretty dog would be there. I said I didn’t know. She said she hoped so because she wanted to try the ring toss with him.
I don’t know that kid’s name. I don’t know his family. I don’t know what he went home and told his parents that night, or whether it mattered to him the next day, or whether the apology meant anything at all past the moment it was given.
I know his dog’s tail moved twice.
I keep coming back to that.
—
If this one hit you somewhere, pass it along. Someone out there needs to read it.
If you’re in the mood for more tales of unexpected encounters, you might enjoy reading about My Neighbor Grabbed My Arm Hard Enough to Leave Marks When a Stranger Rode Up, or perhaps The Biker at the Shell Station Said One Name and My Whole Town Made Sense. And don’t miss the story where He Crouched Down in Front of My Granddaughter and Said Four Words That Changed Everything.
