A Case of Double Duping

First, Garden Grove police arrested a man for a crime that didn’t happen, the result of the apparent lies of three girls. Then, police made their second flub in the case: They dragged the 12-year-olds away from their middle school Monday in handcuffs in a highly publicized arrest.

The alleged actions in this case -- depriving an innocent man of liberty for petty, self-serving reasons -- would deserve consequences, including arrest and charges, and police officers say that’s the message they were trying to deliver. But in the process the police forgot that the juvenile justice system calls for young wrongdoers to be able to set their lives straight without their deeds publicly following them. There are more than enough wrongdoers in this story, and the police should be looking inward to find some of them.

Last May, police understandably were looking elsewhere. It all started when the girls came home from school late and wanted to avoid punishment. So they supposedly concocted an elaborate tale of fighting off an attacker near the park. Enter Eric Nordmark, a drifter who had recently been arrested for public drunkenness.

After the “crime� was reported, officers say, police drove one of the girls past Nordmark as he stood on a sidewalk. She said he wasn’t the “attacker.� Even so, an investigator later showed her a picture of Nordmark in a photo lineup. (That’s outside what many police departments, including Los Angeles’, call good procedure.) This time, the girl picked Nordmark as the villain. Then, the girl went to get her friends to look at the pictures -- and, police say, coached them to pick Nordmark. That was made possible only because the investigator allowed the girls to talk privately before each one saw the photos and because the pictures were left in the same order.

Nordmark was arrested and spent eight months awaiting trial. During the proceeding, one of the girls testified that the drifter “started choking me� while her friends fought him off. She later told her mother the story was not true; the trial was called off. The 12-year-old now faces perjury charges, and all three face conspiracy charges.

The police are publicly embarrassed -- they were duped by kids. But they were duped as much by their own sloppiness. Taking out their embarrassment by going over the top on this juvenile arrest makes police look vindictive as well as inept.