When I was a child in the 70’s at school there was something called the Mcgruff crime dog. He would come tell us to “take a bite out of crime.” To keep our doors locked, and stay off drugs. I always thought it was ridiculous that they were come to school to take our fingerprints, and give us papers to take home.
The ploy was to take our fingerprints to keep in their files so if something “bad’ happened to us we would be able to be identified. But few failed to recognize the police had our fingerprints if we committed a crime.
I thought this was ridiculous because the generation I lived through was what I called the latchkey generation. We were expected to come home, lock the door, do our homework, and sometimes feed our siblings, all before our parents got home, with my mother being a stay-at-home parent. I didn’t go home. I stayed gone as long as possible to avoid her. At night, I would come home, get whatever was in the refrigerator to eat cold, and sneak off to bed.
Most kids were expected to do everything this program taught. It was a waste of funds and time. It failed, as you can imagine. It except allowed the police to get our fingerprints.
From Pity to Praise 