Crash?

Life is never dull with teen boys. We had a little altercation with the police last night. This photo is of the 5 cop cars outside our house. I was watching from the kitchen window as they questioned my son and frisked my husband! He had gone out to ask them what the problem was and ended up getting checked for weapons.

What happened: Ben's friend was goofing around and turned off his car lights as he turned in to our cul de sac to drop Ben off. The guys had been at Sean's house and Ben was a few minutes after his 10 p.m. come-home time. He got out and quickly came inside, but 2 police cars who happened to be within sight thought all this to be quite suspicious. They immediately pulled up and officers approached the car with their guns drawn. Sean was told to put his hands on the dash and keep them there. His girlfriend who was a passenger in the back seat was told to keep her hands up on the back of the front seat. The female officers called for back-up. That's when Tom went out to find out why the big fuss. The male officer who took charge told T. he would be the one to ask the questions and told T. to take his hands out of his pockets. I had just made a joke to Ben, saying, "I hope Dad doesn't go out there and get himself shot." To which Ben replied, "They're patting him down in the front yard right now!" "What?!" I turned to view the scene from the window. He was right. They then called Ben out to question him and run his license through the computer. This took forever, and I was about to go out there myself (wouldn't that have been smart?) but the cop told T. and B. to go back inside. These are good kids who haven't been in trouble. B. was captain of the tennis team and S. works at a daycare. Didn't they discover there were no warrants out on them and that it was just a dumb decision by the driver? I would expect the police to give S. a warning about not turning his lights off, but I thought it was just one more step of over-reacting when they presented him with a ticket. They seemed to assume these kids were criminals without stopping to think. Cops have a dangerous job and some people will be foolish enough to have a gun and to pull it on them. But, surely police are trained in more than crisis-S.W.A.T. team- shoot first and talk later- behavior. How about common sense, psychology, and courtesy in the event it's not criminal or threatening? It will be hard for these young guys to have a good attitude about police if the cops do so much reacting and so little de-fusing of a situation. They seemed to escalate the tension we were all feeling. It was hard to get to sleep after that. It occurred to me, too, how much more grief the kids would have taken if they were black. I know of too many stories about that. I'm ranting on this blog in lieu of making a phone call or writing to the police about our (insignificant) situation, but I may yet express our frustration at the way it was handled.