Arresting Grandma

Whoa. The police handcuffed an eighty-nine year old woman in Ohio for confiscating a ball that landed in her yard. (AP report, AOL news—10/21/08) This wasn’t the first time. Kids have been kicking and overthrowing balls into her yard for some time, according to police sources.
She said, “I would have given it back to them eventually, but not now.” The police said, “Now”, and put the cuffs on her, put her in a squad car and arraigned her. She faces a judge next month for “petty theft” with a possible fine of $1000 and 90 days in jail.
At first I laughed. Incredulously. I grew up in middle class suburban neighborhoods where any one of my neighbors would have felt entitled to confiscate a ball that landed on his property. As a kid, I certainly would not have felt free to retrieve such a ball without going to the householder and asking permission to enter his yard. My parents –and our neighbors—enforced that.
I knew one man, only twenty years ago, who lived near a school. He had an garage full of balls he had picked up off his yard. He had taught in the school next door for decades; he was just sick of balls landing in his lawn and garden.
I’ve got a ball-size dent in the vent of my shed from next door. I don’t believe I returned that ball. Petty theft? Jail time?
Edna Jeeter has simply lived too long (maybe I have, too). She grew up in an era where it was the absolute obligation of the child –and his parents—not to hit balls onto someone else’s property. Jeeter was back in that time. Today, the parent called the cops on her. I suppose this makes her an atavist.
There is a much bigger issue at stake here than who gets the football. (Let’s not talk about a generation of children raised to believe there should be no significant consequences for any action or failure to act. That makes them very scary and totally unprepared for the real world.) Let’s talk about the more fundamental issue of property rights.
Unlike continental European democracies, ours was founded on the Right to Property. The men who wrote our constitution understood that it was a fundamental right (if not the most fundamental right) of a free man: to own and enjoy property with a total right to peaceful usage thereof and the guarantee that it could not and would not be trespassed upon.
That’s what the kids did. Use the ancient term: they trespassed. She didn’t; they did. And the parents and police arrested her to preserve the right of someone else (a child in this case, but that fact is essentially irrelevant) to trespass.
Bluntly, she will face a judge because she refused to allow trespass.
Again, whoa. Take away private property and the right to its unfettered (and untrespassed upon) use, and American democracy quickly goes away.
I said “American democracy”. If you prefer the continental variety of democracy, stand by for instability and constant changes of government. There is the joke that Italy, for instance, changes prime ministers about once a week. France has had at least 20 different styles of government since our constitution was written. You like governmental chaos, take away the absolute right to private property.
The constitutions well understood that ownership of property not only vests you in your own homestead but also in the entire body politic. That is why, at first, only property owners were permitted to vote.
Now some might argue that Ms Jeeter was a crab – that she was the antithesis of a cookie making, neighborhood grandmother. (I have no way of knowing.) But even if she was, her temperament in no way diminishes her right to peaceful enjoyment of her own property – free from footballs landing in the geraniums.
Crabs have as many constitutional rights as nice people. There is no legal imperative to be nice. There is—or used to be-- an imperative that you must stay off my lawn without my permission. If we’ve lost that, we have lost something huge.