Do not help teen girls

Here is more evidence that our society has gone mad with paranoia. I did not know that it was a crime to offer a kid a ride in a car. I was offered rides many times when I was a kid. CBS News reports:

BARRINGTON, Ill. (CBS) – Two 13-year-old suburban girls are being credited with helping police catch a man who offered them a ride home.

Barrington police say the teens were alarmed and disturbed by the offer and took down the man’s license plate. But as CBS 2′s Mai Martinez reports, the man says he was only trying to help the girls, not harm them.

“This is a good deed gone wrong,” Rodney Peterson says.

During a March 2 snowstorm, he saw two teen girls leave a Shell station while he was pumping gas.

“I just noticed these girls, that they had no umbrella, no coats or hood or something of that nature and I just felt like I should help,” Peterson says.

When he drove off, he saw them a short distance away on Prospect Avenue near Waverly.

“I just pulled up and said ‘How far do you have to walk?’ And one of the girls just replied, ‘We’re OK,’ and waved me on.”

Peterson says he drove off and thought nothing of it until Barrington police showed up at his home three days later.

The married father of three, who has a fourth child due in June, listened in disbelief as police told him the girls reported the encounter and he was being charged with disorderly conduct.

It is silly enough that the cops visited him, but why did they charge him? Do they have a "must arrest" policy?

Here is another crazy prosecution:

A Missouri mother confronted her son's alleged drug dealer and allegedly attacked him with an aluminum baseball bat after her efforts to help her heroin-using son failed.

Sherrie Gavan of Imperial, Mo., had switched her 18-year-old son's school, sent him to live with relatives, had him tested for drugs frequently and confiscated his cellphone, but noting stopped him from using heroin for long, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Her last resort, she said, was to confront her son's alleged drug dealer, Joshua Loyd, 21.

"Naturally, my mother's instinct took over and I got paranoid," she told the Post-Dispatch. "I had no idea what to do because we had asked the father to please keep his son [Loyd] away from us, which obviously did not get relayed."

It seems to me that a parent ought to be able to use a baseball bat to chase away her son's heroin dealer.