Officer lets teens do push ups to avoid jail time
Instead of arresting or issuing citation to teenager caught smoking marijuana, Arlington Officer Eric Ball let him go free in exchange for 200 pushups.
A Texas police officer is going viral, and this time it’s for good reasons.
Arlington Officer Eric Ball was working security on Tuesday for a Cinemark when he was made aware of a teenager smoking marijuana near the front door.
“I asked him to come here,” Ball said. “When he noticed I was an officer, he came walking toward me. But he dropped something in his hand.”
He told the teenager that he was facing a misdemeanor citation and fines, saying, “You out here in front of the door smoking weed. What are you thinking? That was dumb. So you’re going to go to jail for something dumb today.”
But rather than take the teen to jail, Ball decided to ask the teen to do 200 push ups instead in a move inspired by his own high school mentor, also a police officer.
“The officer who was my mentor, he looked out for me,” Ball said. “So I just wanted to do it as a learning tool.”
“It’s easy to arrest folks,” Ball said. “But it’s harder to change someone.”
The whole thing was captured on video by a mother nearby, who said in the video, “We think the police is so bad. They’re not all bad.”
