Cop Prom

Here is a letter to the editor I haven't decided to send in yet:

In regards to “Police Keeping a Close Eye on Proms”, I am surprised that police will be “working in and around those proms and parties”. Is there truly a need for undercover police officers to be in the prom, sipping punch with kids, trying to find out if there is a big party afterwards that they can bust? Have the parents of Traverse City become so uninvolved that they need police to manage their children? To have undercover spies mixing with them at a school function so that they can keep their distance and not get to involved in their children’s activities?
I don’t have a child going to the prom, but I don’t know if I would want them going knowing that they were being watched by a government agency that has recently had the audacity to confiscate a pair of police pants in fear that their authority was being undermined by a beatnik on a moped.
Please monitor the roads, let’s keep an eye out for drunk drivers, please pull over a car, or stop a car from being driven by a child who is drunk or has been drinking, but do we need the police in amongst children? Where are the chaperones? I’m sure that there is an army of caring parents at all the proms in the area, who are more than enough to handle any situation that THEIR children are involved in, and are better equipped to handle it. Or they are aware of the situation at the prom, they know and trust the teachers and staff that will be there.
If police are needed I have found that calling them on the phone works well in getting them to an area where there is trouble. By having them sneaking around the prom, watching, spying, what does this teach kids? That deception, sneaking around, hiding, being covert about things is okay? That this is the way the world works? Why not have a very visible police car parked out on the street, making kids know if they make a choice to drive drunk, that there are going to be consequences? It’s spelled out, it’s honest. Then the kids who are just there having fun, not drinking, not doing anything other than being kids, have no fear of the police, aren’t worried that they are being watched and being bad, and don’t walk away believing that we live in a police state. One in which police are always watching, wondering what you are doing, keeping an eye on you.
I don’t live in Traverse City anymore, but grew up there and can remember on more than one occasion being treated rudely by the police while I was in high school. I see many of the same police officers still around so I doubt that they have changed their barking ways. Sometimes I wonder if one of the reasons that I left Traverse City was because the way I felt that I was being watched by police, that for some reason I was on one of their lists. Probably this was just my imagination, but that is the atmosphere that is created by actions such as undercover police milling about kids in a high school gymnasium. It doesn’t need to be that way. Parents, it doesn’t need to be this way, tell your school board that it doesn’t. The police of Travers City, you can only do so much, you have the best intentions in mind, but you carry guns and that is scary.