The garage was canted over at an angle, it’s walls tipped over to a perilous degree. It would look like a fun house building in a theme park if it had been painted anytime in the last thirty years, which it hadn’t. The house next door looked every bit as ramshackled as the garage. There couldn’t be anyone living there, surely?

There was a single pane of glass in the garage door, among the line of empty gap-toothed openings next to it, so I picked up a rock, contemplating the pleasing sound of shattering glass.

“We’ll get in trouble,” my friend said.

“It’s an abandoned building,” I said. “No one’s going to care.”

“You think so?” He was still querulous at the prospect of doing property damage.

“Come on, it’ll be fun,” I said.

So we pelted the door with rocks from the road until we managed to hit the pane of glass, which shattered with exactly the kind of sound that I thought it would make.

It was glorious. Until…

The old lady came belting out of the front door of the house that I would have sworn was abandoned, waving a stick at us and screaming like a banshee. My friend and I, terrified of her as much as at being caught doing a thing that we knew was wrong, ran away from her as fast as we could and didn’t go home until late in the evening for fear of leading the old lady to our houses where she could confront our parents with what we had done.

When I finally did go home, there was a policeman standing on our porch talking to my father. It was a small town, so of course the old lady knew who our parents were. I was informed that if I wanted to avoid criminal charges I was going to have to replace the window, which meant that I would have to go to work for my father to earn the money necessary to buy the window pane and have it installed.

Which I did. Not only did I work to earn the money back for her one window, we bought four window panes to replace the other broken ones that children had broken in the months before. If I remember correctly the carpenter even straightened the walls up and made the garage look like it wasn’t going to fall down; but they still didn’t paint it, which is what it really needed.

I was a criminal. I was caught. I made retribution. The injured person was made whole and better than she had been before. This is because I wasn’t shot for trespassing and damaging property.

Someone had their car broken into in a Dallas parking lot recently. More than one person has had this happen recently in Dallas, I’m sure. The victim was cynical about the Dallas police force ever doing anything to find the missing items from his car. Probably rightly cynical, who knows? A stolen briefcase isn’t going to be high on the Dallas police radar. They have real problems to deal with and not enough hands to get the real work done. Stolen property is pretty low-down on the importance list.

The conversation about the outrage of having someone steal shit out of your car turned to shooting criminals in a very short order, as these things do in the here and now. In Texas the property laws favor the property owners to a ridiculous level. At night, even in a public parking lot, you can shoot someone who is breaking into your car. On your property you can shoot people if you feel even vaguely threatened.

I know, because I’ve been following these stories for a long time.

More at: https://ranthonyings.com/2024/09/criminal-justice/