Teen who trashed police cruiser gets higher bail than cops implicated in death of Freddie Gray (Video)

If you can’t do the time then don’t do the crime. Alternately, if you can’t pay the bail then don’t go to jail.

Meet Allen Bullock, age 18, of Baltimore, Md. You may already be familiar with Allen’s handiwork, which was immortalized on cell phone video last Sunday. The clip, shot at the height of the riots (and posted to the teen’s Facebook page), appears below. In it, young Bullock can be seen mounting a police cruiser armed with an orange traffic cone and proceeding to go medieval on the car.

At the urging of his mother and stepfather, Bullock turned himself in to authorities last last week … and was summarily hit with eight misdemeanor counts.

It is at this point that the liberal media join the fray. MSNBC reports with more than a hint of intended irony that Bullock’s bail — at $500,000 — is “reportedly” (their word) higher than that set for the six officers accused in the Freddie Gray case. The black website The Root misleadingly notes in its headline that Bullock “faces life in prison.” In the body of the story, author Breanna Edwards concedes that this is the maximum punishment allowable under the law. A source that she links to, the Guardian, indicates that a sentence of between 4 and 8 years is more realistic. Their source is Bullock’s parents, who know whence they speak: Both have prior criminal convictions themselves.

Perhaps it was her own conviction (of prostitution in 2003) that prompted Bullock’s mother, Bobbi Smallwood, to urge him to surrender to police. The boy’s stepfather, Maurice Hawkins (charged with first-degree murder in the 2011 stabbing death of a homeless woman), told the Guardian, “By turning himself in, he also let me know he was growing as a man and he recognized what he did was wrong.”

Apparently, the judge who arraigned Bullock was unwilling to overlook his history — which includes a string of minor convictions for fighting and theft — or the fact that he was on probation at the time of his surrender. Or maybe the judge had seen Bullock’s other protest video, also posted to his Facebook page, in which he parades around in a police officer’s hat and mumbles incomprehensibly. Maybe this video suggested that Bullock’s assault on a police car was less an act of unbridled frustration and outrage than one of delinquent mischief.

In any case, Bobbi Smallwood now says she regrets having encouraged her son to do the right thing. “It is just so much money, who could afford to pay that?” she said an interview with the Guardian. “If they let him go he could at least save some money and pay them back for the damage he did.” Judging from another photo from his Facebook page, restitution shouldn’t be a problem:

Allen Bullock gangsta

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Howard Portnoy

Howard Portnoy

Howard Portnoy has written for The Blaze, HotAir, NewsBusters, Weasel Zippers, Conservative Firing Line, RedCounty, and New York’s Daily News. He has one published novel, Hot Rain, (G. P. Putnam’s Sons), and has been a guest on Radio Vice Online with Jim Vicevich, The Alana Burke Show, Smart Life with Dr. Gina, and The George Espenlaub Show.

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