Zero tolerance idiocy...

There was a time and age where community justice was appropriate. Some idiot misbehaved, and the local population saw to their punishment: anything from a sucker punch to "tar and feathers". Seems to me that this sort of community justice needs to have a renaissance.

I had days that my dad left tools in my car because I would meet him after school and work on a friend's apartments. Knives, etc, etc. I just covered it all up, and the only time the school resource officer asked to look in my car, I refused, saying that the particular car I was driving today was not registered under my name and he would need to produce a warrant to search it. Luckily our SRO was a good guy, and knew I wasn't into drugs or anything, so he let it go.

The detention centers and alternative schools need the bodies to keep the funding. Our incarceration is a wealth redistribution scheme to take money from tax payed and funnel it toward the connected. The outcast, marginalized, and otherwise vulnerable are fodder.

Unless you are wealthy enough to put your kids in a private school where this nonsense doesn't happen, or homeschool them yourself, I don't know why anyone in the right mind would have kids at all.

Okay – let me play devil's advocate:

1) fishing knife is found in valedictorians car

2) fishing knife is found in thug's car

Explain how to treat them differently. Observe all applicable law. Assume that yes, the thug has a criminal record, and the valedictorian does not.

Please note that I think that a distinction is necessary.

"Explain how to treat them differently. Observe all applicable law. Assume that yes, the thug has a criminal record, and the valedictorian does not.

Please note that I think that a distinction is necessary."

Mens rea.

Okay – let me play devil's advocate:

1) fishing knife is found in valedictorians car

2) fishing knife is found in thug's car

Explain how to treat them differently. Observe all applicable law. Assume that yes, the thug has a criminal record, and the valedictorian does not.

Please note that I think that a distinction is necessary.

Posted by: Radwaste at February 28, 2014 5:57 AM

How about, don't search cars at all without probable cause, and punish kids for stabbing or shooting someone, as opposed to posessing a tool, that can be used as a weapon.?

Considering that even pencils, and books can be used to stab or bludgeon someone shouldn't assault or battery be the standard for punishment, and not proximity to ordinary household objects?

And Michelle is completely correct. They keep their alternative schools, and social workers employed by grinding up the innocent as well as the guilty in this system.

Zero tolerance policies emerged because they needed to skew the numbers to show that they weren't punishing disproportionate numbers of minority kids in public schools, which is why they had to remove common sense from the equation.

This is why I objected vehemently to the DARE peogram. It let the police into the schools, and opened up a conduit for them to become involved, in what should never have been police business.

Oh, and if any of you are unlucky enough, to have a kid in public school?

Never go down to the principal's office to visit with the administration, about something your child is accused of, without calling an attorney first, and if necessary, taking that attorney with you.

And tell your child to never give consent for any kind of search, or to answer questions about anything that could be construed as a crime, without calling you first.

I had a cousin who had a son, years ago, who was accused by a principal of knowing something about a crime that occurred OFF school property.

He was threatened with suspension/expulsion if he did not turn in the kid, they thought was responsible.

My cousin walked in with an attorney, who politely explained that investigating crimes off school property and grilling students about those "crimes" was not the business of the school administration, and they backed down in one hell of a hurry.

+1 Isab

Plus

- never answer any police questions that might tend to incriminate anyone. If in doubt, don't answer any police questions at all.

- never consent to any searches or detentions. There is virtually nothing that you can say or do to an investigator which will make your situation (whatever it is) any better if you do these things. Even if you are as innocent as a new-born babe.

- As I was reminded after the last time I parroted this formula, do not, under any circumstances, come within less than 2 zip codes of a polygraph machine. It most certainly will not 'help clear things up' or let you give 'your side of the story'. Killing a black rooster by moonlight and reading the entrails is a better indicator of truthfulness than this laughable carnival novelty.

- Am I being detained? Am I free to go? If "yes", then Shut Up and Leave.

llater,

llamas

Aren't these "alternative" schools just pre-prisons for kids who are actually violent offenders?

And don't a lot of kids like the one in this article come out worse off and more likely to commit actual crimes in the future?

Just basing this off a story I read about a kid in a similar situation who said that having to spend those months essentially locked up with real violent offenders "ruined his life."

As I keep saying, the schools are teaching the kids a lesson all right. Just not the one they intend to teach.

Another +1 for Isab.

If you had told me, when I was back in high school, that there would be a deputy sheriff assigned full-time to my high school, I'd have thought you were insane.

Now I think everybody is – especially parents who think that this is "normal".

I'm like Radwaste. Cops assigned to schools? An SRO? When I was in high school I'd never heard of such a thing. My how times have changed.

There are way too many people working in the education and criminal justice systems who simply cannot tell the difference between right and wrong. Or simply don't care.

There was a cop on campus most of the time when I was in high school (1996-2000), but I think he really was there to protect us. These days, I don't know.

I remember the article I was thinking of. It was a about a 12-year-old who was forced to attend an alternative school with rapists and armed robbers after going to school without knowing that his boy scout knife was in his jacket pocket.