Juvenile Liasson

Now available on You Tube.

Juvenile Liaison was a cinema verite film made in 1975 by Nick Broomfield and Joan Churchill.

It follows the juvenile officers in a northern British community as they strong arm children. Not teenagers. Children. The youngest is a seven-years-old. The cops demand to know where he got that cowboy suit. There is a Pakistani girl accused of eating someone else's apple. She said she brought the apple from home, but the cop told her she was a very convincing liar. And where did she get that colored pencil?

She won't admit anything. "We'll have to set a trap for her," the cop said.

The cops walked around with the camera crew, but didn't seem to modify how they acted, unless they were normally even worse. But they began to realize that this might be a problem for them. So they pressured the British Film Institute to ban the film (which they did for years) and they began bullying the parents who signed release forms to appear in the movie to withdraw their permission. One reported that the police called her repeatedly.

The film would have been a major scandal, but news of it came out just as Harold Wilson resigned as prime minister and Princess Margaret announced she was getting divorced.

Juvenile Liaison 2 was a 1990 follow up to the film. They talk to some of the kids from the first movie. The main cop in it refused to speak to them because the first movie hurt his career. Not as much as it should have.

It's depressing to watch.

Children don't really understand their right to remain silent. They can't refuse to answer when talking to any other adult. Of course, the cops in this movie never read the kids their rights or even show their ID. Apparently, in England, any adult can walk up to a child, declare that he's a cop, and drive away with them.

Parents really should teach their kids not to talk to cops. They really need to get their priorities straight. If your husband or wife was being questioned by police in any criminal case, you'd get a lawyer immediately. If it's their child, they tell them, "Answer all their questions, honey! Just tell the truth!"

In the Central Park Jogger case, a father pressured his son to sign a false confession "so we can go home". The kid signed and spent his entire youth in prison.

In another case, a child signed a confession all the while explaining that it wasn't true (it was thrown out in court.)

In the case of a mass murder in the southwest, they were questioning a teenager. The kid kept asking for a lawyer. Each time he did, the cops brought in his father.

"Just tell them the truth---tell them the truth---" his father kept saying.

The kid would talk some more, then ask for a lawyer again, and the cops did the same thing again. Bring in his father.

I'm not sure a parent would necessarily want their son running around loose if he'd committed a mass murder, but this was a case where police had already bullied several other people into making false confessions.

I saw a posting on an internet message board once. A woman said her teenage daughter had been arrested. The police had conducted an illegal search of a car she was a passenger in and she and everyone else in the car was arrested for possession of marijuana. It wasn't hers, she didn't know it was there, and even if it was, the search was illegal. But this idiot woman told her daughter to plead guilty and to be more careful about who she rode in cars with.

I posted a long message. "If this happened to your husband, would you tell him to plead guilty? Would YOU plead guilty?" She wasn't teaching her daughter respect for the law---she was teaching her that criminal record was such a minor thing that she should plead guilty even when she did nothing wrong and even though she could easily get out of it. You want kids to respect the law, teach them that a criminal conviction should be avoided like the plague.

She wised up and got a lawyer. It took the court about two minutes to throw out the charges.