When kids take the keys
As a teenager growing up in Los Angeles, Bruce Talamon was a good student, regular churchgoer, even a Boy Scout. And on a few occasions, he was also a joy rider.
Like many adolescents eager to take an early turn behind the wheel, Talamon would tag along with friends who would furtively borrow a parent’s set of car keys, cruise the neighborhood, and finally return home, exuberant and undetected.
“We’d just ride around, we didn’t ditch class. This was on the weekend,” said the 55-year-old professional photographer from View Park. “My parents kept a fairly tight leash on me.”
Joy riding is a veritable rite of passage for countless teens across America that cuts across racial and social lines, one that is as prevalent in rural and suburban communities as it is the inner city. The underage youngsters, typically male, crave what the iconic automobile promises to deliver -- control, mobility and freedom.
Though in the vast majority of cases the act is harmless, it is nevertheless still a crime, one freighted with myriad potential problems from law enforcement, the judicial system, insurance companies and parents. One need look no further than last week’s tragic shooting death in South L.A. of 13-year-old Devin Brown, who family members say was merely joy riding, but Los Angeles police contend was in a stolen car.
“Joy riding is extremely common,” said Laurence Steinberg, a psychology professor at Temple University in Philadelphia who specializes in adolescent behavior. “[Driving] is right up there with beer drinking as something we encourage kids to look forward to doing one day. Look at the Super Bowl commercials. They were mostly about beer and cars. It’s a hard temptation to resist.”
Reliable crime figures for joy riding are almost impossible to obtain. Law enforcement, judicial and even insurance agencies don’t make statistical distinctions between an auto theft made for financial gain and one committed for a quick thrill.
Complicating categorization efforts even more, the term “joy riding” can encompass two dramatically different activities. One, less popular and more dangerous, involves actual auto theft. The other, far more commonplace and usually innocuous, has an underage driver secretly climbing into the driver’s seat of someone else’s vehicle, often a parent, relative or even a peer who is legally licensed to drive.
“It was viewed as kind of stepping out, moving to the next level, trying to prove my coming manhood,” said John Mack, president of the Los Angeles Urban League, who has been highly critical of the LAPD in the Brown case. “I didn’t steal anybody’s car, but we would do a little joy riding in my little town of Darlington, South Carolina.”
Neither Mack nor his friends were ever stopped by police. Anecdotally, law enforcement agencies believe such joy riding usually occurs at times when youngsters may be unsupervised.
“In a smaller community, neighbors know each other and their kids,” said Mack. “Even the police in small communities are more involved in the greater community. There’s a greater probability that they live in the community, and know the kids. It’s less of a confrontational situation.”
Psychologists acknowledge the first brand of joy riding is illegal and potentially dangerous, but hardly constitutes antisocial behavior. It falls more within normal boundary testing where adolescents experiment with new identities, roles and skills, they say. And apart from perhaps underage drinking, there’s no correlation between joy riding of this kind and future criminal behavior.
“It’s really a ‘wannabe’ situation,” said psychologist James Janik, who served for eight years as chief psychologist for Cook County Juvenile Detention Center in Chicago. “They ‘wanna be’ liked by their friends and the car is the currency to buy that interest.”
Recalled Los Angeles civil rights attorney Connie Rice: “My brother took the Mercedes and backed it down the street. He was all of 13. He got mad, and decided he was going to drive around the block on a military base. We’re talking about boys. They usually take a relative’s car. I’m not talking about grand theft auto.... Who hasn’t heard of a kid joy riding?”
In a few cases with these dynamics, something can obviously still go awry. An unskilled motorist can easily get into a driving situation they can’t handle and suddenly find themselves in the legal system. But even in these instances when the car owner knows the joy rider, charges are hardly ever filed. Unless there is serious property damage or injury, if not immediately dismissed, a first-time joy-riding offender would probably face some combination of probation, community service and counseling in California and most other states, say legal officials.
“If a kid gets charged for joy riding it’s usually because there’s a lot of other bad behavior going on and the incident represents some sort of breaking point,” said Janik.
In a joy-riding case that grabbed national headlines, police picked up a 4-year-old driver in Sand Lake, Mich., last week. The young boy, apparently distraught over losing his video games, jumped into his mother’s car and drove a quarter-mile to a video store around 1:30 a.m. (Unable to reach the accelerator, the boy put the car in gear and a heavy idle propelled him down the street.)
The store was closed and he returned home, but not before a police cruiser began to follow him. The police cornered the boy in his apartment building’s parking lot when the panicked youngster put the car in reverse and backed into the cruiser.
No charges were filed in the case.
More theft than joy
The other kind of joy riding is far less common, but far more destructive. It typically involves a teenage boy who either by himself or in a group steals a car. The theft is essentially for the thrill of defying authority rather than any real monetary gain, according to those in law enforcement and psychologists.
The stolen ride can last minutes or maybe a couple of hours, but at some point the vehicle is abandoned, usually at a shopping mall or remote stretch of roadway. In many cases, the car is vandalized and any valuables within it might be taken, say law enforcement agencies.
Unlike a youth who absconds with his parent’s car and drives extra carefully to avoid getting caught, a joy rider in a stolen vehicle usually drives recklessly -- speeding through neighborhoods, scraping or smashing into other cars along the way. These joy riders frequently move on to other crimes such burglary and robbery, say law enforcement officials.
“It’s grandiose behavior,” said Janik. “Sometimes, they [go to the bathroom] in the car to show that they are powerful and you are not.”
The crime seems to be more prevalent in city areas, where higher unemployment, lack of after-school programs and supervision are also blamed for the illegal activity. In recent years, cities like Seattle, St. Louis and Washington, D.C., have experienced a rise in joy riding in stolen cars where the perpetrators range in age from 9 to 18.
“Because the damage is usually minimal, it may not even make the deductible,” said Frank Scafidi, director of public affairs with the Sacramento-based National Insurance Crime Bureau. “So a lot times we never know about it, but it’s still a big problem.”
The dual notions of joy riding are central to the Brown case, now hanging over Los Angeles. It’s still not clear whether the youngster was out in the car on a harmless prank or was involved in a more serious crime.
Meanwhile, Talamon has been discussing the issue with his 13-year-old son Jordan, who is the same age as the victim of last weekend’s tragic police shooting.
“You want to ask what was [Brown] doing out at 4 o’clock in the morning? I never went joy riding at 4 o’clock in the morning,” said Talamon, an African American, who believes the police overreacted. “I heard his father just died six months ago, maybe he was at loose ends. I told Jordan, if something happens to me or your momma, don’t be going crazy, because you’re only hurting yourself.”