The PORTLAND Daily Sun, Thursday, August 15, 2013— Page 5
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There’s more stuff in the home that can get kids in trouble VACHON from page 4
fills many lonely hours; increased use of prescription medication, by more members of the household, has given rise to prescription drug addiction. Through education and awareness, kids can be empowered and taught to keep themselves safe; parents can be given tools to safeguard and protect their children. Michael served up safety tips I’d never heard before — tips to teach young children; tips to keep older children safe and drug free. For example: He
Michael Mercer, Child Safety Specialist from Keeping Kids Safe, a local nonprofit, spoke to Think Local Community Networking Westbrook. One initiative is the Smart ID Stick for missing children. (KAREN VACHON PHOTO)
advised that if a kid is approached by a stranger who attempts to grab them; they should curl up on the ground in a ball, grab their legs and scream bloody murder. It’s hard to pick up a kid who is all rolled up, and keeping the perpetrator in place gives a child a far greater chance of survival. If a child is pulled into a car, don’t put on their seat belt; rather, jump on the driver’s lap and make a scene. The combination of erratic driving and a person in the lap is strange enough to prompt someone to make a 911 call for help. For parents with teens, Michael had bottles on hand. Yup — drug testing! He explained that “Just Say No” didn’t work anymore. Peer pressure is too great; “Put the blame on your parents,” explained Mercer. “Tell kids you can’t do drugs because your parent’s drug test you. If you get caught, they do, too.” Keeping Kids Safe was founded in 2008 by law enforcement officer, Michael O’Neal. Prompted when O’Neal’s daughter came home from school with, what he considered, an inadequate ID card. Parents were instructed to fill out the back. Only 5 percent of the parents did it. Then O’Neal discovered that many of his friend’s daughters had put personal information on myspace.com, he decided something needed to be done. Today, the organization offers many educational programs to parents, young children and teens. I was taken by Michael Mercer’s passion to educate; his ability to engage and get you thinking. I was curious to learn his background and how he came to Keeping Kids Safe. Mercer’s career in law enforcement began at age 19. Inspired originally by the friendly police officer, John Reed, of Gorham he joined the Portland Police Department in 1985; later moving to the Gorham Police Department, and eventually to Mesa, Ariz., where he worked in the fifth largest metro area in the country. He did undercover drug stings and saw the devastation of kids hooked on drugs. He worked as a gang liaison officer, specializing in community action and policing. He noted a new trend. Policing was moving from pro-active friendly cop in the neighborhood, who knew the whole cast of characters — the good,
bad and vulnerable, to a more reactive style of law enforcement. This change was brought on by a combination of factors: increases in crime, less manpower, more calls for service, and more report writing. The computer age, combined with crime analysis, helped law enforcement see patterns; police spent more time in bad areas, and the overall, good cop presence in regular neighborhoods became more a thing of the past. In 2006, Mercer returned to Maine, and went to work as a deputy for the Cumberland County Sheriff ’s Office. While on duty, he fell and suffered a severe brain injury. Disabled, he was unable to return to law enforcement. This was a trying time for a man, whose entire life had been law enforcement. “It was my identity, I was devastated, and wallowed in my own pity party,” said Mercer. Dark times; Mercer did some serious soul searching; he prayed to God, and reflected: He realized that he had always wanted to be a teacher. In 2010, a friend introduced him to Michael O’Neal. O’Neal realized that Keeping Kids Safe needed a full-time effort; this was a perfect job for Mercer. Today, Mercer is out in the community educating schools, church groups and organizations. He’s living his childhood dream of teaching. And he has a vision — Keeping Kids Safe should go national. The only thing holding it back is fundraising. Mercer laughs: “It isn’t my gift! I couldn’t sell a parka to an Eskimo!” Recently Keeping Kids Safe rolled out a state-of-the-art, FBI-quality smart ID stick. This is a partnership with Guard A Kid, and a fundraiser for the organization. Mercer explained the many features of the ID stick. The key thing I learned: Still today, issuing an Amber Alert isn’t easy. Law enforcement needs to get all the information quickly. The Smart Stick is a way to provide that information. Pink Hostess Snowballs — make way for Smart Sticks. We’re living in a new age. FMI go to: www.keepingkidssafe.us. (Karen Vachon is a Scarborough resident. She is a licensed health and life insurance agent and active community volunteer. To follow her on Facebook, go to: http://www.facebook.com/karenvachonhealth.)
Larry Summers, Mr. De-Regulation, has never stepped forward to say ... ‘Oops! My bad!’ DOWD from page 4
it belongs to him, that he would be an enthusiastic enforcer of bank regulation to protect the little guy? I have my doubts. This idea is being pushed by the boys’ club around President Obama, and also by the bullying cool kids, some of the Wall Street types like former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin who paved the way for the country’s ruin. Larry’s loyal former protégée Sheryl Sandberg aside, it evokes a sexism of complacency — just a bunch of alpha males who prefer each others’ company and who all flatter themselves that they’re smart enough to know how smart Summers is. These days, it’s impolite to mention that all those cool bankers that President Cool didn’t punish enough brought the country to the brink of disaster. One person unafraid to recall it is the Divine Miss M, who has been trashing the Disheveled Mr. S in tweets this week, picked up by Washington Post economic columnist Neil Irwin. HUH. The architect of bank deregulation, which turned straitlaced banks into casinos and bankers into pimps, may be next Head Fed: Summers. @BetteMidler 2:34 AM — 10 Aug 2013 HUH. The architect of bank deregulation, which turned straitlaced banks into casinos and bankers into pimps, may be next Head Fed: Summers. @BetteMidler
11:26 PM — 11 Aug 2013 Larry Summers, Mr. De-Regulation, has never stepped forward to say ... “Oops! My bad!” Even Bill Clinton has offered an “oops,” saying he got bad advice from Summers and Rubin. In the late 1990s, when the prescient Brooksley Born, then chief of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, wanted to publicly examine derivatives, Summers, who was deputy Treasury secretary, worked with Rubin and Alan Greenspan to block her. Michael Greenberger, a University of Maryland law school professor and former Born lieutenant, told The Post that Summers called and said: “I have 13 bankers in my office, and they say if you go forward with this you will cause the worst financial crisis since World War II.” Instead, these bankers were behind the policies that caused the worst financial crisis since before World War II. As The Times reported this week, when the 58-year-old Summers came to the Obama White House, he was worth $7 million; when he left at the end of 2010, he “jumped into a moneymaking spree” at a hedge fund and at Citigroup — a bank rescued by a government bailout — so he could be a gazillionaire by the time Ben Bernanke retires and the job is open. His stuffing of his pockets within hours of leaving the White House job now makes it unseemly for him to lead the Federal Reserve in enforcing the impor-
tant new regulations from the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. He is an exemplar of, rather than a solution to, the obscenely lucrative revolving-door problem mocked by Mark Leibovich in his new book, “This Town.” The Fed is entering a new era when it is supposed to be getting tough on the banks, even if it means that the banks are smaller and less profitable and that shareholders make less. Sure, Summers, the son of two economists and nephew of two Nobel laureates in economics, has a high I.Q. and inspired a great cameo bit in “The Social Network.” But there has to be somebody out there to run the economy who wasn’t a part of the culture that ran the economy into the ground. Janet Yellen, the Fed’s vice chair, has generally been more publicly aligned with Bernanke than Summers has been in using monetary policy to revive the economy. If the president passes over the trailblazing and more temperamentally stable Yellen to appoint Summers, he’ll be giving Larry some vindication on his infamous critique of women that helped get him ousted as president of Harvard — a job he got thanks to Rubin. Does the fact that we’ve had no female Fed chairs and no female Treasury secretaries mean that Summers was right when he said women are less likely to have the kind of brains that would allow them to get top jobs requiring math skills? Is that what makes Larry Summers so brilliant?