On Saturday, in the greater Houston area of Texas, children played little league baseball. One such game between the 9-and-under Scorpions Baseball team and Prospects Baseball team ended with a Scorpions loss. It happens every weekend—one team wins and the others lose. Little league baseball (like many youth sports) has a great tradition where both teams and their adult coaches line up and then give one another high fives after the game. They do this as a reminder that they are playing a game, and win or lose sportsmanship is arguably the single most important thing one can learn from organized sports.
Kenneth Wendt is a sergeant with the Harris County Precinct 5 Constable’s Office. He was also the coach of the Scorpions team. I say was because, unlike the government, his little league team has justifiably removed him from that position after he assaulted a couple of the children on the Prospects Baseball team after the game.
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In video, provided by KHOU 11 News, Wendt can be seen wearing khakis and a “Blue Lives Matter” flag T-shirt hitting one kid and then twisting the arm of another kid during the end of game lineup. The 9-year-olds on Wendt’s team, unlike their bully of a coach, gave the sportsmanlike high fives the practice is supposed to inspire.
The Scorpions Baseball team gave a statement to KHOU 11, saying Wendt’s “actions were unacceptable and do not align with our organization’s values. We removed him from coaching and from our club about 8:30 a.m. Sunday." A parent from the Scorpions team defended Wendt’s character, saying he was “a great husband, father, and coach.” But he’s also a guy who would physically assault children in order to feel better about losing a little league baseball game. Shitty people do good stuff all the time, and good people do shitty stuff sometimes.
The real question is the balance between the two. This guy is allegedly a trained law enforcement officer who was recently promoted to sergeant. He is not simply picking on children, he’s being abusive. If Mr. “great husband, father, and coach” saw an adult doing what he was doing to his kids or his wife, I suspect Officer Wendt would want there to be a certain level of justice brought to the perpetrator.
If you cannot keep your cool under the pressure of your little league team losing a baseball game on a sunny Saturday afternoon, you need to take classes. Maybe even court-required classes. But the idea that you be allowed to carry firearms, let alone enforce the law, should be far out of the question. If you want people going through economic hardships to jump through hoops in order to receive a pittance of public assistance, the least you can do is have basic standards for your well-compensated law enforcement officers.
Considering that police officers around the country have claimed and charged people for assault for a lot less abusive contact, and the fact that the Scorpions organization was able to act quickly and definitively to rid themselves of a toxic and incompetent person, it makes one wonder about this final statement: “The Harris County Constable Precinct 5 Office is aware of the incident and they are looking into it.”