Joan Crawford would have even been envious. Bam! ... slam! ... smack and double and triple smack! We all saw it and even I initially looked on in wonder with appreciation at the scene of Toya Graham giving her son a what-for on the streets of Baltimore, and a what-for she did and then some. Graham didn't let up. I wasn't alone of course. Everyone from Carly Fiorina to Whoopie Goldberg just gushed with glee at the sight of Graham following her son, consistently smacking him, refusing to stop. That Graham later said that she knew her son saw her and that he knew he was in trouble should make anyone stop and pause to think though. The kid seeing his mother would have been frozen in place and certainly wouldn't have run even if he later said his "instinct was to run". He didn't. So why the continuous beating? Graham could have simply confronted her son and sternly ordered him to get his ass home and he would have.
That Toya Graham didn't want her son to become another Freddie Gray is understandable but that beating she gave her son was symptomatic of something much more than just anger at seeing her son a Freddie Gray waiting to happen. That beating was an habitual form of discipline which Graham herself learned. Like wife beaters, parental violence is always learned.
Graham admitted her tendency for strictness, which is just a euphemism for getting physical with her kids. That kind of very harsh physical abuse, and it is physical abuse, is learned by kids and they in turn grow up and do the same to their kids, having learned that it's better to smack a kid around rather than talk him out of something he should not do. It's a never-ending brutal cycle of lessons by hand when lessons learned by mouth aren't even considered.
What Toya Graham did, you should excuse the expression, smacks of a double standard too. If Toya Graham was instead Todd Graham and his daughter was out on the street in a hoodie and partial mask with a brick in her hand and Todd smacked his daughter around like Toya Graham smacked her son, would he too become America's Favorite Dad? Maybe to some but not to Child Protective Services.