Cop traumatizes children to teach them a lesson.

The police arrive at your workplace and ask to see you. They solemnly tell you that your husband/wife/partner was viciously murdered in your home a short while earlier. Apparently your loved one forgot to lock the door properly and a psychopathic killer managed to walk in and commit this heinous crime.

You are now hysterical with grief. You are emotionally destroyed. Tears are running down your face and you can only think of the horror that the love of your life just experienced. You don’t know how you can cope with the loss yourself. And how do you tell the family and the friends of this horrible incident. You weep over not being able to have been there to offer your protection.

For one hour you are barely able to talk as you are hyperventilating from the trauma. As the hour mark is passed the police officer tells you, with a smile, “I was only kidding. No one was murdered. But this isn’t a joke. We want you to realize the serious nature of home security and we are just teaching you an important lesson.”

For one full minute you look at him in disbelief. Could this bastard be serious? Was he kidding before or kidding now? What sort of sick mind comes up with a “lesson” like this? You look carefully at the weapon as his side and you think how you’d like to pull that gun from the holster and shoot this asshole for the cruel trauma he just inflicted on you. You don’t give a damn about his “morality lesson” about locking doors. You want to see him suffer the way he just made you suffer.

Of course cops wouldn’t do something that vicious and cruel -- no matter the reason. Would they? No, they wouldn’t -- at least not to legal adults who can sue the bastards easily. This would be considered an intentional infliction of psychological trauma. Any cop who does it ought to be fired. Personally I think he should be fired and jailed and then sued until he doesn’t have a dime left.

The fact is that police officers have done this very sort of thing. They seem to get away with it because they traumatize students in the local school and not adults in their workplace.

The monster who does this to school kids is California Highway Patrol Office Eric Newbury. He goes to a school and walks into a classroom where one student is missing. He tells the students very soberly that their friend and classmate, perhaps a boyfriend or girlfriend or a sibling to other students in the school, was killed in a drunk driving accident. He reads an obituary for the students and places a flower on their chair and then he leaves.

For one hour the students are left believing their friend was dead. The newspaper story on this torture program says: “Many juniors and seniors were driven to tears — a few near hysterics...” by Newbury. Then the students are brought to an assembly where they are told their friend didn’t really die. They are being taught a lesson that they shouldn’t drink and drive. This little psychological horror was dreamed up by the fanatics at Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

Newbury doesn’t mind that he has emotionally scared some of the kids he lied to. He thinks it is worth it because “what I’m doing is waking them up.” Yep, he is, just not to the little morality lesson he thinks he is.

I suspect a lot of those teens learn that police officers can be lying scum. They learn that police will use any tactic, no matter how destructive to others, in order to get what they want. They learn you can’t trust a cop. Is that what Officer Newbury wants to teach.

These kids were traumatized that a friend had been killed only to find out that the whole thing was charade and that the cop had been lying to them all along. And they learn he doesn’t care what sort of emotional pain he inflicts on others in order to get what he wants.

He says that if he simply lectures the kids they ignore him so he uses this manipulative infliction of emotional pain in order to get them to pay attention. He says, “I want them to be an emotional wreck.” Apparently he believes that if terrorizes them they won’t “have to live through this for real.”

So what happens after Officer Newbury pulled his theatrics on the students the first time? Can he do it twice? Will next year’s classes fall for it? Or will he have to do something even worse to get their attention? Maybe he stage a real accident where it appears their closest friend is decapitated before their eyes? That would work.

Now would they forbid a student from leaving the classroom during this hour? Even if they have to use the bathroom? So consider this scenario. A distraught student believes his/her closest friend was just killed. The student is an emotional wreck and asks to go to the bathroom. Perhaps they sneak out of school then. In an emotional stupor they decide they don’t want to live without their friend so they take their own life. Great lesson there!

In reality when a student dies this way the schools rush in with counselors to help the students deal with the pain. They accept that such news can be emotionally damaging to the kids. They bend over backwards to help these kids deal with this pain. Here they intentionally inflict that pain. That the story later turns out false doesn’t stop the damage that is inflicted by it.

Perhaps the most moronic statement defending this use of emotional torture on children came Lori Tauber, a counselor who helped inflict this on the students. She said: “I just know in my heart this was worth it.” She ought to be fired and kept away from children.

Tauber, Newbury and the lunatics at MADD ought to be inflicted to the same sort of emotional pain as they are inflicting on the young. MADD can mean angry. It can all mean insane and this is insane.