ROSCOE’S Weak-End Review

Grow up, Air Force cops

It’s never a good thing when military police try to push civilians around. It’s even worse when they do it to kids. Some of those people seem to need counseling more than they need guns and badges.

To wit: A recent episode at Air Force Academy High School in Colorado Springs, where three cheerleaders were arrested, handcuffed and hauled off to jail, where they were patted down, told to remove their shoelaces and generally terrorized before being released. Their crime? Covering up some letters on the word “Douglass” on a sign for nearby Douglass Valley Elementary School so it would read “ass Valley Elementary School.”

Really. Oh, yeah, and swiping some traffic cones from the parking lot. Most normal people would recognize this as a garden variety high school prank. The difference in this case is that these two schools are on the grounds of the Air Force Academy and therefore subject to military security. Guess they don’t get a lot of opportunity to try out their training, so this particular incident attracted four—count ‘em, four—squad cars for these three dangerous girls.

School officials protested the over-reaction, saying the officers had their hands on their weapons during the entire confrontation. According to the Colorado Springs Gazette, “School officials asked security officers to allow the district to decide how to discipline the girls and not to detain them, but the request was denied by the flight chief on duty.”

This is a dangerous situation for civilians, though no surprise to us. When our daughter attended this school a few years ago, I had an encounter with these people that I can only describe as abusive. For simply not stopping at first where I was supposed to while picking my daughter up from band practice, I was screamed at, threatened with arrest and generally intimidated for a good 20 minutes by a pea-brained martinet with an anger management problem who apparently thought he was Sgt. Carter dressing down Gomer Pyle.

It was all I could do to restrain myself and not punch his lights out. Some day someone will. Some day someone’s going to get hurt.