Now Cops Can Give Parents in Wisconsin Town Tickets When Their Kids Are Caught Bullying

Before we get into it, just know I have mixed feelings on this…

A new ordinance in Plover, Wisconsin allows police to ticket parents of children who bully other kids, making the parents financially responsible for their children’s behavior.

How it works is the police first notify the parents in writing of a verified bullying incident. If the child is caught bullying again within 90 days, the parents can then be ticketed, which includes court costs and can amount to up to $124.

Plover Police Chief Dan Ault told Parenting Magazine, “It’s not the school’s responsibility to raise the kids. It’s the school’s job to teach the kids. It’s not the police’s job to raise your kids. It’s the parents job to raise the kids… You’re the parent. You’ve got to have some responsibility in this.”

I’m with him up until this point. Parents should and do have the responsibility for their kid’s crappy behavior because it is parents who are supposed to be raising the kids first and foremost, not school or TV or video games or iPads or the government (although the government would like to be daddy to all of us).

However, think of the politically correct insanity that has infected this country, then couple it with this law. Knowing what we know about the American police state, I can see how this could easily become a slippery slope to charging parents for every “bad” behavior a kid exhibits toward another kid, including recent stories like the one where a school threatened a nine-year-old boy with sexual harassment charges for writing a love note to a crush in his 4th grade class. Girls who aren’t politically correct enough because they don’t want transgender students in their locker room. A kindergartner being labeled “racist” for the “hate speech” of calling another student a “broccoli head”. This list goes on and on.

Add anti-social behavior laws like the ones already in full force in the UK, and American parents will be financially screwed under a never ending mound of police extortion. Don’t know if you knew, but parents over in Great Britain are getting ticketed by cops for the “anti-social behavior” of their children climbing trees these days…

So it’s a mixed bag. Parents should be responsible if their kids are horrible jerks to other kids, but can this be twisted and taken too far the way everything else is in the American police state?

What do you think?