Column: Promise not based on place

I took some heat this week from two readers over my Saturday column about the alleged boy robber from Solon.

You remember - that 10-year-old who police say stole a stock conversion kit from a gun store, then fought the store employee who tried to catch him.

These readers didn't like my phrase: “the boy robber from Solon.”

“Not only did that comment label a child for life who may, with the right help and support, become rehabilitated, you also tarnished the image of a town,” they wrote.

I agree that most young lawbreakers can be set straight and hope the boy gets the help he needs. That's one reason journalists, myself included, didn't publish his name.

Maybe in that column about troubled kids I should have more strongly reminded you that everyone is innocent until proven guilty in court.

At least that's the way it's supposed to work.

It was a friend who pointed out to me the sea change in online comment boards when readers learned a small-town kid was accused of the southside Iowa City crime.

When that mostly irrelevant geographical information was published, writers' assumptions about the offender changed as if a switch had been flipped.

Or like the moment when you're staring at one of those brain-bending optical illusions and the babushka turns into a pretty young woman.

The secret, of course, is that both images are in the picture. We unconsciously choose which one we'll see.

When information is scant, our brain fills in the blanks. Maybe it's biological - I've never met a person who doesn't do it.

But geography is a strange factor to use in discerning between budding sociopath and a good kid gone wrong.

As the chatter goes, when southeast Iowa City 13-year-olds give themselves a goofy name and go out to act like gangbangers, it's because they're irredeemable criminals. But when a boy from Solon robs a gun store, he needs help.

The story we tell depends on where we focus our eye.

It's more than an interesting comment about our community. There's evidence that treating populations of kids like criminals only encourages them to act like criminals. It doesn't do them or us any favors.

That's true no matter where they live, what their ethnic or racial heritage, or what they eat for breakfast.

If we think troubled kids need correction instead of condemnation - and we should - that should be true for all kids.

It doesn't matter where they come from, only where they're headed.

Jennifer Hemmingsen's column appears on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Contact the writer at (319) 339-3154 or jennifer.hemmingsen@gazcomm.com