Weekend Edition: Lost & Found
Imagine finding your car gone. Vanished. Not even a set of skid marks to document the trajectory of the assailant.
You take a moment to catch your breath. The police are contacted along with the insurance company, family and close friends. Before long you have spent nearly half the day overloading your mind with stressful thoughts and conversations. Two nights follow with little to no sleep.
Three days later the car is found along with the assailant. It’s someone you knew! A young guy who has usually been a good person. If it weren’t for the “issues” in his life, none of this would have likely taken place.
So what do you do?
A) Press charges. The guy is booked for grand theft auto and the future prosecutions are entirely up to the local DA.
B) Decline to press charges. The car in question was only worth $1500. An amount that is far lower than the average unsecured credit card deficiency. You wonder to yourself, “Should a guy go through the rest of his life with a felony on his record for a non-violent act he did in his early-20’s?” A non-violent felony conviction may inflict more long-term harm than good.
C) Call a friend. You name the person. Call them and thrash out the details. A person should be punished. But at what price damnation?
Think about your answer. It’s not always an easy thing to do good for others… or for yourself.
More by Steven Lang
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People who decide they need to steal, then decide their friends are easiest to take advantage of are not friends. They don't respect you and they will never be your real friend. So if I change "acquaintance" to "random junkie" I'd go with option A: press charges, let him rot.
Press charges. You don't screw with someone's car.
If you don't press charges then this guy, or six of his friends, will be back up in your driveway "borrowing" whatever else you have. After all, now they know you wont press charges. That's the way the world works.
I'd play it like this: *IF* the guy genuinely is a "good guy" and just has some exceptional circumstance happening (and it'd have to pretty goddamn exceptional), then I would take option A as the compassionate move. With no other major blemishes on his record, he wouldn't suffer lifelong branding as a criminal unless that is the path that he chooses. If he really is a "good guy", this should scare him on the straight and narrow. Any other circumstance, however, is not such a happy situation. You no longer qualify as a human being once you start to steal. I will not condone or discuss illegal activities as part of comments on a website, so I would just classify my response as "D".