Phoning Hotel Arno
If Deans and APs of security know one thing, it is how to deal with lost or stolen cell phones. NYC repealed its ban and allowing them in schools several years ago. This compounded solving MIA devices exponentially. So, welcome to our world, Hotel Arno. It seems for all your swankiness and cache, you could use a training session from New York City’s school safety task force on de-escalation .
A woman couldn’t find her cell and went ballistic on a kid whom she thought had stolen hers. It could’ve been a racial bias, or it could have been an out of control where’s-my-phone hysteria; it could have been both.
The woman’s exasperation, to anyone who felt panic mode over their missing phone, evokes empathy from those once or often afflicted. What followed was a flustercuck of poor behavior and bad interventions. The most innocent of all was the accused, a 14-yr-old boy occupied with his phone who got sucked into the vortex of the woman’s inexcusable outburst.
Stealing phones is the national sport of middle school teenagers. It is not limited to race, gender, nor socio-economic class. It does seem to attract the anti-social and the poorly behaved, the academic transients and the riffraff of a school population. For an adolescent to have stolen a cell is not an unusual circumstance. To immediately label the accusation racial by an eager press and publicity seeking personalities does an injustice to all victims of theft.
The woman should have asked the hotel for help, get security, and let the hotel investigate. Start by collecting evidence, piece the info together, until a picture emerges. The easiest thing to do—and the hardest—is just ask the kid to show proof the phone belongs to him. Ask to see the contact list and photos that the woman would have no idea who they are. Or ask the accuser to describe the phone contents. The phone is still the only piece of evidence in a he said-she said scenario. There wasn’t enough time to change content. This could have been done civilly with cooperation of the boy and his dad. You are not trying to convict, merely looking for a baseline. The evidence would exculpate the boy and lead the search for the phone down other avenues. There is circumstantial evidence to warrant talking to him. Boy Harrold believed the Hotel official was "basically siding with her" over him. Such statements, no matter how sincerely expressed, are red meat for the press, activists, politicians. TGBL, after many years of being in the middle of such scenarios, can say with full confidence that questioning a young teen in an investigation very often meets with such reactions. They are kids, after all.
But the accuser, Miya Ponsetto, screaming and assaulting the boy, took the whole episode out of the hotel’s hands and into the NYPD’s-- and political world’s. That her phone was returned a few minutes after the incident attests to how bad outcomes could be avoided. Fate’s timing too could have been better. You not only need good security you need people to proceed within a structure. These days, respect for authority seems lower than a valley at 1000 feet below sea level: everyone takes the law into their own hands.
Ponsetto’s lawyer according to WINS 1010, said her client seems “unwell.” Usually, someone with mental or emotional issues draws sympathy when the law comes down on criminal actions. No such slack was given to her, whatever mental problems led her lawyer to call her “unwell”. Apparently there’s a check list for sympathy—and Ponsetto did not qualify. Her terrible behavior may reflect disturbances cited by her lawyer’s opinion of her mental state, but her behavior cannot be dismissed, nor unaddressed. Neither can any underlying mental or emotional condition .
That’s how you end up in jail and your business dragged through the mud of New York media and racial politics. Two big stingers for an ugly situation – except one innocent 14 yr old caught up in the maelstrom. We’ll award the boy an honorary honey dollop.