By Steve Pomper
Las Vegas Metropolitan police officer with mother and child
I’m not gonna lie. I get warm and fuzzy when I hear about cops coming to the rescue—especially for kids. On the job, I felt a sense of pride when I saw people—well, victims, anyway—relax or become somewhat calmer when we showed up to a chaotic or violent incident. They trusted we would make things better or at least stop things from getting worse. Even if the break was temporary, sometimes that’s all we could give them. But that’s something.
And those times when cops, so maligned these days, come to the rescue can have unexpected and sometimes wonderful, consequences. During my research for an article, I interviewed a local suburban police officer. She told me when she was in high school, a sexual predator attempted to abduct her while she waited at a semi-rural stop for her school bus. A local sheriff’s deputy “came to the rescue” and arrested the predator who’d tried to hurt her.
That deputy was just doing his job, but that young girl he saved grew up and became a police officer. She told me he wasn’t part of why she became a cop—he was the reason. She wanted to do for others what that deputy had done for her. It was more than his saving her from that scumbag. His intervention made her feel safe, allowing her to reclaim her power as a maturing, confident young woman. If she could help it, no one would make her feel that vulnerable ever again, and she would do her best to see that no one she could help would feel that way either.
I thought about this effect police have on people when I read about a recent horrific incident in Nevada. The New York Post reported, “Sickening video shows Las Vegas cops rescuing young children who were allegedly battered, starved and put in cages by their parents.”
In a Clark County grand jury transcript, an officer testified the oldest of the six kids, an 11-year-old boy “kept saying that he needed big food because he was a big boy now and that he would have to share one large fry from McDonald’s with like all six kids and just that he was never really fed and that’s why he stole.”
The boy explained he stole food because he was always so hungry. A detective said the boy told him “[H]e was locked in a cage ‘all day, every day.” His father had allegedly locked him and his nine-year-old brother in a pet cage. Video shows officers rescuing the boys from the locked cage.
Officers found the boys “crouched inside…” the “cage.” The alleged pimp and prostitute parents, 31-year-old, Travis Doss and Amanda Stamper, also 31, kept the six kids in this one-room apartment with two dogs. The oldest boy told police he had to share the “little food he had” with his siblings. The boy told officers he hadn’t eaten in days.
The story gets worse. When the officers rescued the children, “they found one of the older children was beaten so badly that his father, Travis Doss, told Las Vegas Metropolitan Police he believed the 11-year-old was already dead, according to court transcripts obtained by TV station 8NewsNow.”
The boy told the police that when he was in the cage, his father hit him in the face “because… he was trying to get out of the cage….”
“Cops said the 11-year-old boy had ‘two black eyes that were swollen shut, multiple marks and bruises all over his body, and he was emaciated.’” In the report, the boy also alleges Doss kicked him in the head and assaulted him with a frying pan. He reportedly had severe fresh wounds and scars from previous assaults.
Anchorage P.D. officer with child at National Night Out
Prosecutors have charged Doss with 40 criminal counts stemming from the alleged child abuse. Stamper, who is mother to one child and “acts as stepmother” to the others, has also been charged but with fewer counts, including child abuse. Her defense attorney claimed Stamper feared Doss would assault her if she intervened.
An officer can have an enormous, life-altering, positive impact on a child in such traumatic situations. Notably, Lil Wayne is still friends with the cop who saved him after he’d been shot as a boy. Today, the rap singer respects the police and has no love for groups like BLM.
Lil Wayne tribute to New Orleans cop who saved him
NOLA P.D. Officer Robert Hobbler saved Lil Wayne
As with the young woman cop mentioned above, I think about the potential, far-reaching effects of what one officer said to that little boy in the Las Vegas case. She said, “You’re not a bad kid; this is just really a crappy situation. And we’re going to get you some help. This is not going to happen again” .