Officers need to exercise discretion.
It’s good to see a 95-year-old Daytona Beach woman absurdly arrested for slapping her granddaughter with a house slipper has struck a blow against a bad police department policy.
On May 5, Hattie Reynolds called the police non-emergency number to report her 46-year-old granddaughter was cursing at her and refusing to get out of bed. According to the police report, the responding officer interviewed the granddaughter, who said Reynolds had smacked her on the left side of her face with her slipper. There were no marks on the granddaughter’s face, the report said, and the granddaughter said she didn’t want to press charges or give a statement. Police took Reynolds to jail anyway.
She was charged with one count of misdemeanor domestic battery. She spent a night behind bars before a judge released her on her own recognizance and sent her home. Last week, the State Attorney’s Office said it will not prosecute Reynolds. Nor should she be.
On the spectrum of such crimes, Reynolds’ act has to rank up there with jaywalking and spitting your chewing gum out on the sidewalk, offenses that rarely if ever get you placed in handcuffs and booked into the jail. If elderly grandmothers can be arrested for slipper slapping, we shudder to think what the punishment would be for all those grannies who told their misbehaving grandchildren to go find a willow branch they could use as a switch on their young backsides.
(READ: Slipper slap sends 95-year-old Daytona great-grandma to jail)
Police Chief Craig Capri initially said that although the arrest probably was excessive, the officer’s hands were tied — state law mandated that on a domestic violence call, an arrest must be made. But that’s not what the Florida statute says: An officer “may” arrest a person suspected of domestic violence, not “shall” arrest them. That indicates that the police can exercise discretion, something that was needed in the Reynolds incident.
In addition, DeLand defense attorney Don Dempsey told The News-Journal’s Patricio G. Balona that he has represented many clients in domestic violence battery cases where they either got a notice to appear or were charged by affidavit, but not arrested.
(READ: Daytona police change policy after arrest of 95-year-old woman)
Thankfully, after the story of Reynolds’ arrest was first published, the DBPD backed away from Capri’s original explanation. Deputy Chief Jakari Young issued a statement Thursday evening on the department’s website, saying that “since 2012, it has been the department’s policy” — note, not the law — “to arrest the primary aggressor when called to the scene of a domestic dispute.” That policy did not allow for officer discretion “in the face of age, gender or disability.” Now, though, the department will make room for judgment calls by ensuring that an on-duty supervisor responds to a scene “to better assess the situation and make a determination on the best course of action to take to resolve the dispute.”
That’s as it should be. The problem with zero-tolerance policies and mandatory-minimum sentences is that in trying to create a strong deterrence, they leave no room for exceptions, cases that don’t exactly match up with the intended law or which have extenuating circumstances that deserve to be considered.
Punishments should fit the crimes. Inflexible application of the law will result in injustices, which serve only to erode trust in the criminal justice system. It’s good to see the DBPD finally allow its officers to use the discretion state law already gave them. Too bad it took an elderly grandmother’s plight to open its eyes.