Strings of Fear: Entitlement
“We all come into the world helpless, with a need for others. If you survived infancy you did so because someone gave you a hand. Children either react by feeling gratitude or feeling a sense of entitlement. Those who feel gratitude create relationships of hope and trust. Those who feel entitlement are happy only when they destroy the feelings of hope and trust in others. As they steal hope, they leave behind only fear.” These are the opening words of Jamal and Josh in the film they created for their class project on fear. When I wrote those words in my screenplay, Strings of Fear, I was expressing thoughts that had formed and slowly percolated over the years. Sometimes that’s how creativity works.
In the film Scott was an athlete. His father is a “pillar of the community” who works in the mayors office. In creating his character, I tried to portray all the thinking errors from Stanton Samenow’s studies, but I also gave him a role of entitlement that I had seen in my real cases.
As a prosecutor of juveniles for years, I handled thousands of cases. Between the masses of forgettable cases and the few imprinted in my memory for ever, I formed my ideas. Just like the forces of society combine with the actions of a few great men to change history, likewise these cases worked together to change my outlook.
One of the earliest cases that grabbed hold of my imagination, was a case in which a high school boy happened to walk through a lonely stair well on his way to class, when he was grabbed from behind, thrown to the ground and beaten by a group of students. He curled up in a ball on the floor, in a fetal position, trying to protect his face. There he was repeatedly punched and kicked. He did not get a look at the boys who beat him although he did remember one boy was wearing boots. They left him lying on the floor, bruised and bleeding. He suffered physically for days even weeks. Emotionally, he was shaken and afraid. Still worse, the story of his beating spread throughout the school, causing him to feel embarrassment and even shame. He had not tried to defend himself. After all, there were too many of them and they took him by surprise. But he could not help wondering what he had done to be treated like this, whether it might happen again, and whether he should have reacted differently. He didn’t want to go to school any more. He wished he was invisible.
I would never have met this victim, if it had not been for another student in the school. That student had happened to step into the top of the stairwell just as the three boys jumped the victim. He saw the whole thing. He did not know the victim, but he knew he had seen the perpetrators before. Silently, he took a good look at them. Then he left. Although he did not interfere or try and fight off the perpetrators, he did go straight to the office to report what he had just seen. He was unable to give the names, but he knew they were student athletes and would recognize them if he saw them again. The assistant principal took him to a trophy display that showed the pictures of some of the school’s best athletes. The witness picked them out right away. He was absolutely sure.
The student athletes were called down to the office and denied their involvement. The victim had no idea who had done this to him. So it was the one boy’s word against the three of them. We received a call from the victim’s mother, complaining that her son had been assaulted and nothing had been done. I decided to look into it. Eventually, I learned from another teacher that not only was there a student witness, but the lead bully, who was a star athlete, had confessed to his coach. The coach had not informed the administration. In fact, he refused to cooperate with the investigation. Eventually, I had to subpoena him, and then the truth came out. He had been protecting his athletes. The more people I spoke with, the more I learned that these boys had a reputation for doing whatever they wanted in the school and getting away with it.
The three boys were arrested and refused to plea. They wanted to take it to trial. Before the trial, the mother of the witness called me, very worried for her son’s safety. When I spoke with the boy, he said he wanted to testify. When he took the witness stand, he testified with quiet confidence. I wanted to establish that he did not have an axe to grind against the boys charged nor was he friends with the victim. I asked him their relationship with them and he said he had none. Then I asked him, “Why did you report this to the school administration?” I had not told him I would be asking this question and I didn’t know what his answer would be. I was confident that it would not be about any bad motivation. He looked me right in the eye and answered, “Because it was the right thing to do.” I don’t know why the answer was so memorable. It was a simple truth, yet it was profound.
Incidentally, the victim and his mother kept wanting me to ask the defendants why they beat him up. After they were convicted and placed on probation, I asked them. Their answer was that the victim had just come along at the wrong time. They were looking for someone to beat up, for fun, and he happened along. When I relayed the answer to the victim, I could tell that it did not give him the closure he was looking for. But, it was what it was.
Long before I wrote the screenplay for Strings of Fear, that case was the impetus for change. At that time, my state had a basic school crime reporting law. I had been put in charge of trying to enforce it statewide. In discussions with a compassionate legislator who was concerned with student safety, we began to focus on the need to revise it, strengthen it, enforce it and educate the public about it. The idea was that when certain crimes were committed in school, school officials should not be able to sweep it under the rug based on who the kids were. It should not be about favoritism.
Around that time, I was speaking with an assistant principal who willingly expressed to me his concern that he had caught a kid in his school with drugs, something that the law required the principal to report to the police, but that the boy was a son of a woman legislator, who came into the school and yelled at the principal until he capitulated and agreed not to report the boy. It had happened several years earlier, and the assistant principal was just letting me know the type of favoritism that went on.
So we went about improving our state’s mandatory school crime reporting laws to prevent such injustice. The idea was that if a student committed certain crimes, those crimes should be reported to the police regardless of whether the kid was an athlete, the son of a politician or the child of a homeless person. It was the crime being reported, not the person. The police should be informed as a result of the behavior in that incident alone. The emphasis was on protecting the victims. Once the police got the report from the school, they would often call me and explain extenuating circumstances, (yes the kid brought a knife, but he brought it in his lunch bag to peel an orange,) and then I would make a decision based on those circumstances, but it was never based on anything beyond the behavior and the circumstances surrounding that behavior.
Years later I was shocked and dismayed to hear accusations that school crime reporting laws had been created to exclude minorities from school. I can only speak for the motivation behind the mandatory reporting law that I wrote, but it was to prevent prejudicial decisions, not to encourage them. The current theory that such laws were based on the war on drugs, could be true in some places. I cannot speak to what they were based on nationally. I know that any political war on drugs had absolutely nothing to do with the mandatory law that I drafted. The need to enhance and enforce the law was evident to me from cases I handled in which crimes were not reported to the police because of favoritism granted the perpetrator, which ignored the plight of the victim.
It is completely illogical to call a mandatory reporting law prejudicial. A mandatory reporting law requires that crimes be reported regardless of the race, religion, sex, economic status, athleticism or charming personality of the perpetrator. In fact, I find it interesting that buried in this article about how minority children are more likely to be arrested in schools is the following statement:
“The data show that schools that maintain “zero-tolerance” policies are actually less racist in meting out punishment than more free-wheeling systems. That’s because the more rigid disciplinary school regimes give teachers and administrators less discretion for lenience to white kids that misbehave.”
The truth of this statement is intuitively obvious. Certainly there are schools who fail to enforce the law, or who enforce it unfairly. But the fact remains, that when a prejudicial arrest occurs, it is because the mandatory law has not been followed, not because it has.
Along with mandatory laws, SROs (School Resource Officers) have been vilified. An excellent report on the role of SROs in the schools can be found here. Bernie James, Professor of Law at Pepperdine University has been one of the few people willing to speak out in defense of the School Resource Officers and their roles to protect victims within the school, but also to educate.
Years after I started working with the schools and SROs to make sure that students knew and understood what actions in school would lead to their arrests, I learned that the mandatory laws were under attack. In 2001, Bernardine Dohrn and Williams Ayers had written a book entitled: Zero Tolerance: Resisting the Drive for Punishment in Our Schools :A Handbook for Parents, Students, Educators, and Citizens. This book began the public backlash against mandatory laws.
Periodically attendance at certain conferences was mandatory in my job. One such conference was one in which the topic was mandatory reporting laws and the school to prison pipeline. I read the description and realized that the workshop was being given to support the popular opinion that mandatory reporting laws were written to promote prejudice, and it would be directed specifically at the law that I had written. I was in a new administration. I informed my supervisor of my dilemma, and told him that if I went, I would not sit quietly and listen, but I would speak the truth. He checked with his superiors and I was told that I was released from the mandatory requirements and it would be better if I did not attend the conference but stayed back at the office and worked. It was clear that in discussing the law, they were not interested in hearing from the person who had written it. I didn’t go. Perhaps this shows that I had less courage than some of my young witnesses.
Going back to when the amended law had been passed, we not only amended the school crime reporting law, but we also instituted education programs. The idea was that if kids were going to be arrested for committing certain crimes in school, the least we could do was to thoroughly educate them as to which crimes they would be arrested for. We began presenting assemblies in schools that included skits to clearly portray the elements of these crimes. One of the first skits I included was a reenactment of the assault in the stairwell, along with the lesson of the witness who acted because it was “the right thing to do.”
This becomes one of the themes of the movie, of mobilizing bystanders to do the decent thing. Without giving any spoilers, this young witness’ words are echoed in the final scene of the movie Strings of Fear. Throughout the movie, a major theme is the attitude of entitlement of Scott, the bully.
The tragic results of a culture of entitlement can be seen in Aaron Hernandez. New research has revealed the inverse relationship between gratitude and entitlement that my young filmmakers Josh and Jamal discuss in their film. Entitlement thrives in an environment of secrecy and favoritism. How then do we promote an attitude of gratitude?
