Ohio State Helicopter Parents Should Quit Crying
Crime has always been a part of life at Ohio State long before your precious cargo matriculated.
These Ohio State helicopter parents crying about crime in Columbus is the latest atrocity in my life. The other day, I’m driving, and I see a billboard blaring about how “college should not be a crime scene.”
Crime has always been apart of life at Ohio State, as it is with any college tucked into the intestines of a major metropolitan area. And contrary to this group of concerned helicopter parents who go crying to the press whenever their son gets pistol whipped in a drug deal gone bad, crime existed around Ohio State’s campus long before the university gentrified High Street and started chasing the wealthier clientele that come with higher ACT scores.
We’re talking about “Buckeyes for a Safe Ohio State,” an astroturfed group that claims 4,600 members while leading us to believe there is a group called Buckeyes for an Unsafe Ohio State that must be counteracted.
We’re talking about the group that put up a billboard on Lane Avenue commemorating a former student who got shot while trying to buy roofies in a fraternity’s parking lot.
Somehow, Allyson Reid, a co-founder of Buckeyes for a Safe Ohio State, has become someone whose opinion must be sought from local media whenever a crime occurs on or near campus.
Here are separate links to separate stories that have been written since September, where she pants her petrified adult son as representative of the other 64,443 students that attend the university:
10TV: Irene Hendrick and Allyson Reid said they felt good about the lack of crime lately, but that was disrupted after two crimes near campus over the weekend…
NBC4: “We’ve been at this for a year now and we haven’t seen much until recently,” said Allyson Reid, a co-founder of the group and the mother of a second-year student. “There needs to be a desperate sense of urgency.”
10TV: “These students are terrified, absolutely terrified. The University District is so incredibly dark,” said Allyson Reid, whose son attends Ohio State.
The Lantern: Allyson Reid, co-founder of Buckeyes for a Safe Ohio State and mother of a second-year student, read a letter from Chase Meola’s mother, Margaret Meola, on the churches’ steps, which expressed the family’s continued heartache over their loss of Chase. It also reiterated her belief that the university has not allocated enough resources to student safety.
FOX28: "They have to step into today which people are putting stories up on Instagram and they are gone in 24 hours," Parent Allyson Reid said.
10TV: "I was actually at the game in Columbus visiting my son for the weekend and we are becoming so accustomed to getting these alerts,” Reid said.
ABC6: “At some point, victims should have more rights than criminals. And it feels very lopsided to me right now,” Allyson Reid said.
I’m still laughing at the idea of having to endure my mother That last one is a doozy. In what world do criminals have more rights than victims? Certainly not on this one, especially in America, the country with more prisoners per capital than anyone else.
That worldview might make sense, however, if you exist in a right-wing echo chamber that you convinced you live in the most dangerous time in American history. It’s a worldview the cops will help push as a way to show they’re the only ones actually interested in keeping the streets safe:
“The three suspects we arrested the other night all had prior arrests, some for robberies, and for gun offenses,” said Deputy Chief Tim Becker, who heads up the Investigative Unit for CPD.
“Is there a relatively small group of young suspects that have been caught for multiple crimes? Yes,” Becker said. “Our patrol officers have arrested the same young suspects more than once in many of these crimes. The three suspects we arrested the other night all had prior arrests, some for robberies, and for gun offenses. One of the suspects was wearing a monitoring device. Once we make the arrest, establish the probable cause, get the evidence to prove the case, it is kind of out of our hands what the courts do."
Wow! As it turns out, there are more parts to the American Justice System than just the police officers.
You’ll notice that Deputy Chief Becker used words like “arrests” and “charges” but not that famous word, “convictions.” Much to Deputy Chief Becker’s chagrin, it takes more than the words of a police officer and circumstantial evidence to convict somebody of a crime (most of the time) in this country.
I understand the parents’ desires to want their children to forever live in a cocoon where no harm can befall even a hair on their heads. No parent wants their child living in a war zone unless that child signed up to defend our freedoms by exporting a war zone to a poorer, browner country halfway across the world.
But what exactly do they want Ohio State to do in this situation, other than erect an open air prison that keeps students sequestered from the riff-raff that understandably sees them as any easy lick?
They “won’t remain silent” while “their students are victimized,” which I guess is noble if not utterly futile. Their students will either drop out, transfer or graduate at which time their focus will turn to whatever minor inconvenience they’re facing at work, and the helicopter lifestyle will continue unabated until either mother or child is in the ground.
But since their “advocacy” isn’t doing anything to produce actual results, all they’re doing is spreading the falsehood that Ohio State’s immediate off-campus area is an unsafe hellhole where students are burgled, assaulted, raped and murdered “literally every day.”
If that’s how they actually see student life at Ohio State, then perhaps they’d be wise to seek safer harbor at one of the numerous religious institutions in distant rural lands where White Jesus protects His sacred flock. The rest of us will continue to look for reality-based solutions to our problems without the incessant grandstanding from fear-mongering weirdos.
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