So, there’s this kid.
Let’s call him Kid A. Kid A is walking around the neighborhood with a bunch of friends,
and of course they all think they are badasses.
To show just how bad they are, they do dumb things to impress their friends so they might
gain some attention and hopefully climb the pecking order.
Kid A and his gang walk past a pond whereupon they see ducks.
Instead of throwing breadcrumbs to the majestic mallards they throw stones at the creatures.
You have to remember; those kids’ prefrontal cortexes have a long way to go to be fully
developed.
Kid A has a bright idea.
Steal a duck.
Won’t that be funny.
Kid A gets in the pond.
His buddies laugh.
Kid A gets his duck.
He gets approval.
He also gets arrested.
It won’t be the last time.
And if you think that’s dumb, listen to this:
20.
Ok, so we might have been a little harsh calling Kid A dumb.
Maybe the poor guy was having problems at home.
Maybe we should have given him a break.
We think a 6-year old girl that was arrested in Florida early in 2020 really should have
been given a break.
You heard that right.
She was six and she was arrested.
Ok, so she was guilty of kicking staff at her Orlando school, but really, did she deserve
to be arrested by a burly male cop and then have zip ties placed around her feeble wrists?
When the cop pulled out the ties the girl asked, “What are those for?”
He replied, “They’re for you.”
She then started crying and shouted, “Help me.
Help me, please!”
Is that really how to deal with tiny children?
If you think that’s bad, there will be worse.
The cop was fired by the way.
19.
Every kid can be forgiven for stealing a candy or two in his life, but this kid you could
say took things a little far.
The Ukrainian 9-year old didn’t steal candies, but he stole his parents’ life savings to
buy candies.
In 2012, he found their stash of cash hidden under a sofa.
Rather than save for a rainy day, he went straight to the local store and tried to buy
around $4,000 worth of candy.
The cash was recovered so the parents kept their nest egg.
18.
Back to the USA.
In 2019, a 10-year old was playing dodgeball, which is the kind of thing that you’d expect
to see kids doing.
During this game one of the kids didn’t manage to doge the ball, which is also something
you’d expect to see.
But get this, the thrower of the ball who hit another kid in the face ended being charged
with aggravated assault.
The case was dropped in the end, but only after the mother of the child said her son
had been charged because of the color of his skin.
He was African American.
The kid that didn’t dodge the ball ended up with a black eye, but you might ask if
he should have been playing the game in the first place.
That’s why there is chess club.
It seems he didn’t want the police involved, telling his mom, “Mom it’s OK we’re
still going to be friends.”
You have to now ask if one day kids will be appearing before a judge in relation to injuries
caused by hide and seek and tag.
17.
In 2018, the parents of a 10-year old autistic boy from Texas said they were going to take
legal action after their child was handcuffed.
A video shows the highly distressed boy screaming like a banshee as he struggles on the floor.
The boy had been handcuffed because he’d been lashing out, but again you might ask
if cops should have had to intervene and if he really needed to be placed in steel bracelets.
He actually incurred quite a few bruises after the incident.
All this is a bit heavy.
As you’ll see now, some kids just make very silly choices.
16.
You all know that school shootings are a very real threat in the USA, in fact, they only
seem to happen en masse in the U.S.
That’s why if you come from this country you don’t go around bragging to your friends
that you plan to shoot up a school.
If a kid in say, England, bragged about shooting up a school his friends would think, “Yeah
right, as if you could get a gun.”
In the US his friends would think, “Well, it’s been a nice life, now we’re all going
to die.”
In 2019, a 16-year old kid from Ohio made a threat and posted it on Snapchat, “You
aren’t even prepared for tomorrow,” he wrote.
It wasn’t the first time he’d made such a threat.
The cops later turned up to his house.
Tip: If you work in a fireworks factory you don’t joke about fire.
15.
You could say this case is similar, although we don’t think we can say the kid should
have known better.
The year was 2020 and the place was Colorado Springs.
A 10-year old was out in the street playing with his toy gun.
He pointed it at a few cars, and someone reported him to the cops.
They arrested him, handcuffed him, charged him, and took his mugshot and fingerprints.
His parents spent thousands of dollars on legal costs and the kid ended up completing
a community service order.
As one critic put it, this was criminalization of childhood.
It was later found out that the orange toy didn’t look anything like a real gun and
the kid was only pretending to play an imaginative version of Fortnite.
14.
In 2014, a 14-year old Dutch girl went on Twitter and posted to the official American
Airlines account.
She wrote, “Hello my name’s Ibrahim and I’m from Afghanistan.
I’m part of Al Qaida and on June 1st I’m gonna do something really big.”
The FBI was contacted, the girl got scared, and she went and handed herself in to the
Dutch cops.
13.
That kind of thing has happened in the US, too.
Two kids in Louisiana in 2014 thought it would be funny to troll their school on Twitter.
They wrote that a bomb had been placed in the cafeteria and another had been placed
in a classroom.
Maybe that was funny to the kids, but bomb threats can’t be ignored.
The Louisiana State Police Bomb Squad was sent to the school.
This is what an investigator later told the media after they found out who sent the message,
“He is 16-years-old, and he is being booked into the Assumption Juvenile Detention Center
for terrorizing [felony] and cyberstalking [misdemeanor].”
Yep, that’s not funny at all.
But as you’ll see, kids have done much worse.
12.
We’re guessing that some of you remember what life was like before social media.
Did you ever hear a kid say in the school yard, “I’ll kill you,” or, “You’re
dead”, or something to that effect?
It didn’t usually mean much at all, but still, if you put that kind of thing into
words these days and post it to social media you can get in trouble.
It’s exactly why a 16-year old girl at Mervo High School in Baltimore was arrested in 2020.
She’d merely made a threat online to another student.
11.
We won’t delve too deep into the past only because it’s hard to relate to.
We’ll just tell you that a boy aged 8 or 9 named John Dean was arrested in 1629 in
England.
He’d started a fire.
Kids will be kids, and don’t we all know that many kids like playing with fire.
The authorities were unhappy with young Dean’s behavior and he was hanged by the neck.
10.
Just so you know that kind of thing didn’t only happen to boys, 15-year old Susannah
Underwood was hanged for arson in England in 1776.
The next day the local Hereford Journal newspaper didn’t write anything about her being executed
at such a young age but criticized her for not shaking hands with her master before she
was hanged.
9.
Back to the present day and 2015.
A nine-year boy from Idaho was in big trouble.
He’d stole a pack of gum from a store but had failed to turn up to court after he was
arrested.
He was taken to a detention facility where it’s said he was treated well.
Hmm, he was nine.
It was a pack of gum.
Let that sink in.
8.
Some kids do start a life of crime young.
In 2020, a 12-year in Delaware stole a truck that he evidently couldn’t drive.
He was chased by the cops.
He crashed twice before he was caught.
Ok, back to the crazy stuff.
7.
In 2014, a grand total of 60 students from Teaneck High School in New Jersey were arrested.
They broke into the school at night then then proceeded to pee all over the place, put grease
on door handles and generally just destroy stuff.
The cops turned up and not many kids could get away.
What the police found was a stinking, wrecked school and a bunch of embarrassed kids.
One cop said, “I've been a police officer 19 years, and this is the craziest thing I've
ever seen.”
The kids said, hey, it was just a prank.
The cops said, hey, this is just a criminal charge.
6.
After watching this video, you might think that 2014 was the year of the idiot.
That year an 18-year old in Florida stole a car.
He then turned the music up loud and started filming himself.
In the video he goes through red lights; he weaves through traffic, and on four occasions
he slams into another car.
In the last of those crashes the young driver sustains serious injuries and so is airlifted
to hospital.
The cops at this point don’t know exactly what has happened, so it is helpful when the
hospitalized teen gets a little better and is able to upload his driving carnage to YouTube.
Not long after the police turned up to his hospital bed and said thanks, you are charged
with all the things we saw in your video.
Now for something very different.
5.
As you know, some teens are very, very intelligent.
They might not be developed enough to understand the consequences of their actions, but they
have skillz.
In 2020, it was discovered that one of the kids behind the greatest social media hack
ever was just 17.
This kid from Florida along with a 19-year old from the UK and a 22-year old also from
Florida managed to hack the Twitter accounts of Barack Obama, Kanye West, Elon Musk, Bill
Gates, Joe Biden and more.
The best ones are coming.
4.
In 2019, a middle school student from Kansas was arrested on a felony charge after pointing
a gun at someone.
The thing was, it wasn’t a real gun, but two of her fingers.
You know, like when you play games as a kid and run around shouting, “POW, POW.”
The New York Times wrote that the 13 year old was the first person in a year and a half
to be arrested by cops for making a hand gesture, although schools have reported around another
dozen cases.
If you think that’s weird, listen to this: 3.
We looked for the youngest people we could find who had been arrested and we came up
with a 4-year who was arrested in 2010 in, where else, Florida.
He was arrested on misdemeanor criminal mischief charges for breaking into a neighbor’s shed.
We should say that he had friends with him, aged 6, 8, 9 and 11.
2.
If you think this only happens in the USA you’re wrong.
In 2019, a boy aged just 12 was arrested in Hong Kong.
He’d been protesting and had been caught on camera by the cops.
They got down to work and followed the kid around, such a dangerous 12-year old of course.
They arrested him when he was on his way to school and he was later convicted of causing
criminal damage.
Of course that’s far less funny when you realize the Chinese government arrested him
because he was protesting for democracy, not for breaking into a neighbor’s shed.
1.
Ok, so we did say earlier in this show that kids in the UK don’t usually have guns at
their disposal.
Even adult gangsters might find it somewhat difficult to get a gun and they will have
to pay quite a lot on the black market for it if it is any good and is of course untraceable.
That’s why British news readers were blown away in 2011 when they read that an 11-year
had been arrested on possession of a firearm.
He became the youngest person in the UK to be charged with this crime.
This was a sign of the times.
Drug dealers in the UK had already started using kids to sell their drugs, often sending
them to other tow Now you need to watch, “The MOST EVIL KIDS
in the History of the Mankind.”
Or “Kids Behind Bars.”ns and cities.
They would cross “County Lines” and like something out of Oliver Twist, the kids would
live in a house with an adult while going out at times to deliver the drugs.
Kids don’t usually grass; they don’t often take their own stash and the cops can’t
do much to them because they’re so young.
It seems they are also now being armed.
Scary times.