Middleton police may have saved a life — or lives — when they broke up a party on East Street on Tuesday night.
Finding a house full of teenagers and alcohol — including beer, rum, tequila and wine — officers did the wise thing in breaking up the celebration and turning the partiers over to their parents. No one had to spend a night in custody (the teens will be summonsed to court), and no one got behind the wheel of a car, endangering themselves, their friends or anyone else on the road.
Now, however, instead of being thanked, police have to deal with angry parents. Tuesday night, one parent arrived at the scene and was incensed to learn officers were administering Breathalyzer tests.
"She said that police couldn't talk to kids because they're minors," said Middleton police Sgt. Grace Haley. Not only was this parent wrong on the facts — officers had the right to talk to the kids, who were in the home unattended — she was wrong targeting police, who were trying to figure out which kids had not been drinking and could drive themselves home.
This is too often the case these days, as parents direct their ire not at their children but the police, whom they accuse of overstepping their bounds or violating their children's rights or making too much of an innocent night of fun. It has to stop.
Last week's scenario has played out several times over the past few years:
When Marblehead police were searching for a 16-year-old boy who had disappeared after a New Year's Eve party earlier this year, one parent refused to let her child talk to police on the advice of her lawyer.
After a Hamilton mom was caught hosting an underage party with marijuana and alcohol, she blamed school officials for tipping off police and the Police Department for blowing the incident out of proportion.
A former North Shore Technical High School secretary was found guilty of hosting a party at her Hamilton home at which teens from Hamilton, Danvers, Beverly and Gloucester drank wine coolers, rum, beer and wine — all while the woman's 11-year-old daughter was having a sleepover for friends in the house.
Many parents feel they are doing the best for their children by "protecting" them from the police and keeping them away from the court system. They're dead wrong. It's not about creating villains or wringing the necks of children (or their parents) with a scarlet letter. It's about keeping the teens and everyone around them safe.
If one of those teenagers tried to drive home from last week's party after a night of beer and tequila and killed themselves or someone else in an accident, or stumbled into the woods to hide and froze to death, or succumbed to alcohol poisoning or a drug overdose, we would all be talking about lives cut tragically short and wondering what went wrong. We are forced to cover these stories far too often in these pages.
Police are often first on the scene at such disasters, so we'll give Sgt. Haley the last word:
"You don't want to believe bad things about your kids, even though we all know they're capable of making poor choices. If their parents continue to reinforce their child's poor choices, they're going to continue to make poor ones instead of learning from their mistakes and not repeating them."
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