My my, the lessons American society is teaching its youth today.  Our soon to be adults are learning that you can’t even help another kid find their parent lest you be accused of kidnapping them.  According to the Orlando Sentinel, that’s what happened to one Florida teen last week, and now 14-year-old Edwin is facing charges of false imprisonment:

Edwin approached the girl and told her he would find her mother. Edwin’s mother said she saw the two together, asked Edwin what was going on, and then said she would help.

Then Edwin made his big mistake. He thought the girl’s mother might be among a group of women that he saw leaving the store. So off he went.

The video shows him leaving the store, with the girl following behind. Once outside, he took her by the hand.

Edwin’s mother then appeared, following after him and the girl.

Eventually the girl’s mother, who had been returning an item to a shelf when she lost track of her daughter met up with her daughter, Edwin, and his mother.  So there we go.  Daughter is back with mother.  No harm, no foul.  Right?

Wrong!

A store employee then called 911 at the behest of the girl’s mother. After the employee tells the dispatcher about the abduction, the dispatcher asks where the perpetrator is.

Ok, so maybe this is understandable.  By the article’s account, Edwin is a big kid for his age.  But surely the police, after ascertaining the facts of the situation, would just leave Edwin alone and go back to their work of stopping the real criminals, right?

Well now that would be just too reasonable, wouldn’t it?  Instead they arrested Edwin, paraded him in front of the media, and then slapped him with a BS “false imprisonment” charge.  The Sheriff’s rationale for this act?

“He was in custody of the child and had no authority to be so,” said Capt. Angelo Nieves. “The thing is to make clear we have not charged him with an offense that did not occur.”

Translation: We’re looking a little slow on arrests this month, so we decided we’d get real tough on a 14-year-old kid who was being a good Samaritan so that our town council doesn’t take away our funding.

Now I could understand an argument that, at 14, a kid should know that, under the current paranoia climate (thanks to recent high profile kidnappings), approaching and walking away with a child looks suspicious at best.  More so if you’re a male.  So that’s on his parents.  On the other hand, there is no reason that, once the police understood what was happening, they should have arrested him.  There was absolutely no legitimate rationale for doing so.  None.  Additionally, I don’t think “false imprisonment” means what they think it means.  Unless it means walking around with someone’s child in 1) A department store  or 2) A parking lot.  You know, things that don’t involve locking them in a basement or something other place where they would be imprisoned.

I call on the Orlando Sheriff’s office to drop these absurd charges.  And I call on America to drop the paranoia it has that their kid might be taken any second.  And I call on the corporate media, and particularly CNN’s Headline News, to stop feeding in to that paranoia.  When constant fear that your child will be taken is combined with constant reinforcement that they may be in danger, we get situations like this.