dupage county sheriffA Sheriff in Illinois took the take your kid to work thing a little too far, and he's now in hot water for it. DuPage County Sheriff John Zaruba has been accused of taking his teenage son along on official law enforcement tasks, allowed him to dress like a cop, and and even permitted him to get involved in car and foot chases. His son was 18 at the time, he's now 19 and a freshman at Illinois State University, and there's currently an investigation going on regarding, basically, WTF the Sheriff was thinking. Because, you know, it's kind of a no-no to bring youths on ride-alongs. There's the whole liability and insurance issue, not to mention the safety of the cops and the civilians.

I'm not the type of person who dwells on the "what could've happened" scenarios, but I mean, a lot of bad things could've definitely happened. It's not like the kid was in a backroom stuffing envelopes and alphabetizing mug shots, he was out in the field and even busted into a house looking for a suspect alongside his dad. There was real danger.

The Sheriff admitted to letting his son accompany him on the job, and for that, I think the Sheriff should be punished. That's just extremely poor judgement on his part. He's a Sheriff, for crying out loud, shouldn't he know what is and isn't kosher? Also, isn't it illegal to impersonate a police officer? Sounds to me that that's exactly what his son was doing.

I'm all for parents exposing their children to the real world, and to real work, but this was just a bad call. And if the Sheriff didn't see anything wrong with it, then maybe there's something wrong with the Sheriff.

If this happened in your town, how would you feel?

 

Photo via conner395/Flickr