A Little Westside Story

One of the annoying little aspects of my job is dealing with gangs. I understand that it is natural for disaffected youth who have few family supports to band together as a gang. I get it. But the code that is kept by these gangs is so far removed from my experience that I have a hard time working with it in my job.

People of my vintage, even the bad kids, were raised to have, if not a healthy respect for the police, then a healthy fear of them. I was a bad kid. But one of the things I had to deal with in my early days as a prosecutor was the inherent fear I felt when I saw a police man with a gun. It was instinctive and ingrained in me that they were figures of authority and power. Of course, I am way past feeling that now - I know many and count some of them as personal friends and know that they are human beings doing a job that can get pretty lousy.

But getting back to "kids these days" (I know, I know). I feel sometimes when dealing with these gang members and gang wannabes that I have stepped through the looking glass. I mean, had my friend been murdered at a party by another friend, and I witnessed it, I would have come forward to the police and told them what had happened. Because murder is wrong. But time and again, I have witnessed The Rat Syndrome. It makes no sense to me that, should you come forward and tell the truth about what happened to your friend, you will be branded as a rat and ostracized. Shouldn't the person who committed murder be ostracized??? However, people who cooperate with the authorities are pariahs and treated as traitors - their homes and vehicles are vandalized, their families at risk.

Because there is a publication ban on my current matter I can't go into detail, but I can say overall that watching people stand up for what is right in the face of this new morality inspires and humbles me. Now, more than ever, people who have the courage to say "No that is wrong and we as a community refuse to accept this any longer" should be lauded. It was easy for me to do the right thing when I was a kid, because it was clear what the right thing was. These days, it is so more complex.

Ahhhh ....Sanity Provides Welcome Relief to an Overwrought Mind

I know, I know, I have been away for a while. I had contagious pneumonia and a small personal crisis. One would think that the mandatory quarantine would have given me time to write, but I was too discombobulated to put the electronic pen to the cyber paper. I am better now!!

Well, out of all my body parts, my stomach wins the "Who is Smarter" award. My head and heart came a distant 2nd and 3rd. It turns out that Mr. Cheesecake was a Tinman. All was revealed through a little snooping and a little bluffing on my part. Pretending to know things is an old lawyer trick we use, and has come in handy from time to time in my personal life. Really, when I think about it, dating cads, rakes, bounders and lotharios has sharpened my cross-examination skills to a razor sharpness. That twisty feeling in my stomach was not the beginning stages of love. It was a warning from my gut that, while the guy may seem like a bit of a geek, he was a low-down dirty player. A skeeze.

In the end, I have been able to compare notes with another one of Cheesecake's victims - the girl in the SAME CITY AS ME who he was bamboozling (there were more girls- it was just convenient that I approach her through a mutual friend).

When caught red-handed, he did not do the stand-up thing at that point which would have been to say "hey girls, sorry you caught me". Instead he called us both "insane" for thinking we were anything at all to him. I pointed out that, amongst other things, he INTRODUCED ME TO HIS PARENTS.

Too bad I can't think of the other names attached to mushy texts that I saw on his cellphone. I might approach them too. Save them a few months of frustration and some embarrassment. I know - that would be crazy, but I feel that the sisterhood should be warned about guys like this. I wouldn't do it, I swear. I just wish I could.

That weird feeling in my gut was not insecurity. My stomach knew this guy was BAD news. My stomach is smarter than the rest of me. I vow to listen to it from now on when it comes to boys.