...for your phone, then you found out who did it. would you press charges?
here's a scenario going on in my fb feed among people i don't/ barely know:
a few months ago, a young white male (19-21) moves into a notoriously violent and segregated neighborhood that is very slowly beginning to gentrify. although having been warned of the danger (mostly by black friends) of a white kid moving there alone, he does not listen and moves there anyway. cut to a few weeks ago, he is walking down a street in this neighborhood when a girl asks him to use his phone. when he hands it to her, she stabs him, and runs off with the phone. the girl is black. the stabbing is not life threatening but enough to warrant a hefty medical bill. a week or so later, he finds out that she stayed logged into icloud or some kind of cloud service and has been accidentally uploading enough personal information to be identified.
now: when he takes to facebook to share the good news, he is shocked to find that many people are a) blaming him for putting himself into the dangerous situation and b) vilifying him for turning in a clearly poor, possibly homeless young black girl into a grinding racist judical and prison system that, odds are, will do the opposite of rehabilitating her but instead send her into a cycle of further poverty and crime. for his part, he has no way to pay for the medical bills he has accrued, and is somewhat understandably upset that he got fucking stabbed. it has been floated that he turn to social media and crowdfund the medical bills, but i think the odds of that succeeding is slim.
so, suppose someone stabs you for your phone, then you found out who did it. would you press charges?
edited for conciseness
Last edited by palms on Thu Aug 17, 2017 7:57 am, edited 2 times in total.
She could have done a lot of other things besides stabbing him to get the phone, I'd definitely press charges
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wait I just read it and I change my mind. the stabber was a black? girl? let her go; this white guy sounds like a real piece of trash and if I had been there I would have finished the job
especially since there's no way to know if she really knew what she was doing. Anytime you put a knife in someone my thinking is you may accidentally kill them. So fuck that.
pretty sure doing any of this will not get him back his hospital bill money though. For sure IF you can afford to not live in a potentially dangerous area then you shouldn't. But if he was really slumming it i think he'd have no issues paying his medical bills.
I must insist on being a pessimist, I'm a loner in a catastrophic mind
I think the argument is that by gentrifying he created a situation that wouldn't otherwise exist and he can choose if it ends with him being harmed or with her going to jail
I probably wouldn't press charges but I wouldn't judge someone for doing so
wildarms wrote:how does pressing charges get his bills paid?
this is one thing i don't fully understand. there are references to restitution and medical bills being a big part of the decision making but i'm not familiar with the process so i cant comment. my understanding is that they would charge the girl or her family or whatever related parties for as much money as possible, even if it doesn't necessarily cover the full amount?
Last edited by palms on Thu Aug 17, 2017 7:59 am, edited 1 time in total.
I don't think it's that far-fetched to think that you should consider the potential effects of placing charges on someone in the actual world before you press charges and ask if it's worth it. Ideally we'd live in a world with a fair judicial system and you could place charges if someone wronged you without worrying about unjust effects that are likely to follow, but we don't. Kid will recover from this, but it's not guaranteed she will. Like I said it wouldn't even cross my mind to attack this kid for pressing charges tho. I don't think the worry is totally laughable either