Boy fools police into thinking he's a cop.

Apparently a 14-year-old boy dressed up as a police officer and walked into a Chicago police station. The local cops then sent the boy out on patrol. They claim he did not have a gun, didn't issue any tickets and didn't drive the patrol vehicle. That would mean another office drove the vehicle and spent five hours with the boy without discovering the ruse. The impersonation was only discovered after the patrol ended and the boy returned to the station where it was noticed that a part of the uniform was absent.

I don't want to use this to chastise the police here. There are far more serious things they have done deserving criticism to waste it on this matter. So why bring it up?

You might remember when I ran this story about a young woman in Florida. As the photo here shows she was a very mature looking young woman who was prone to trawling the web and picking up men. Her name is Alesha Dean and she described herself as 19 years old and divorced. In truth she was 13 years old. Morris Williams didn't know that when he started dating her after she picked him up on the street. When he discovered her true age he went straight to her parents to tell them what she had done. They had him arrested claiming they simply can't control their daughter so it was his problem.

Ms. Dean did the same thing to Darwin Mills. She seduced him, lied about her age and then her family had him arrested as well. Neither Mills nor Williams thought that this young woman, who looked, and acted, like an adult was actually 13-years-old.

I also wrote about a young man named Ricky who was 16-years-old. He went to a teen club with a minimum admission age of 16 and met a girl there. She told him that she was also 16. He had no reason to think she was lying but she was. The girl never denied lying to Ricky and the circumstances of their meeting would give the reasonable impression she was 16. But Ricky was arrested as a sex offender because the girl was younger.

It seems the police are no better at telling how old someone is than the general public. They couldn't tell that a 14-year-old boy was far too young to be a police officer. The circumstances gave them the impression he was a police officer. Not one of these trained officers of the law immediately realized he was a child, well under the age necessary to be a police officer.

If trained police officers can be so easily fooled in this case why does the law assume that people like Ricky, Darwin Mills and Morris Williams ought to be better able to tell when a girl is lying about her age? In each of these cases the young person lied about their age, in each case they apparently looked older than they were. And the circumstances present at the time of deception gave credibility to their false claims. The difference is that Williams, Mills and Ricky are now criminals and registered sex offenders while the cops just look silly.

There ought to be a defense allowed in cases like these where a reasonable individual would believe that the "victims" clearly looked and acted older than they were, and where they intentionally deceived others by claiming to be older. Such a defense is reasonable.

But it won't happen. The politicians are not that reasonable and they want votes. And one way to get votes is to appeal to the lynch mob mentality of the Boobus Americanus. So they won't reform the law to allow this reasonable defense and others will suffer because of it. No politician wants to appear "soft" on child molestation so they continue to crank up the laws and send more and more innocent people to prison, and ruin the lives of more and more teens. I guess at some point the utter damage they are doing will so clearly outweigh any good they have done that even the dumbest of the dumb will realize the laws need changing. Once that happens, I suspect it will take another few decades before our elected officials figure it out.