Slashdot Mirror
12-Year-Old Sikh Boy Arrested In Texas After Bringing a Power Bag To School (salon.com)
AaronW writes: A 12-year-old Sikh boy in Dallas, Texas was accused by another student of bringing a bomb to school. Apparently he had a powerbag; a backpack with a built-in phone charger. Rather than send him to the principal's office or ask for an explanation, the teacher instead called the police, who promptly arrested him and threw him into a juvenile detention center for three days. The school promptly suspended Armaan, and the police released him after three days but required that he wear an ankle bracelet.
Verifiable details are scant, for this case — probably because the whole thing seems to revolve around some 12-year-old kids talking to each other. Armaan's story is that another student said his bag looked like it had a bomb in it, and that he would report it. Believing it to be a joke, Armaan laughed. The police say he "admitted" to joking about a bomb, and they insist their actions were justified. A school district spokesman says the family was notified, but the parents say they had to dial 911 to find somebody who could tell them where their son was being held.
That's pretty sick.
Take them for all the money that can be had. False arrest charges would be nice too.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I think it was who said that one failed terrorist attack and we all have to take our shoes off before boarding a plane but 31 shootings later still no new gun laws. This country has it's priorities completely backwards :(...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
This is a horrible miscarriage of justice. If we're to accept this story on face value, the failures and stupidity at every level of government is distressingly palpable. How absurd is it that no one at the school or police department performed even the most minimal investigation much less inform the parents. Isn't it outright illegal for police to talk to children to interrogate them without the parents having the option to be present?
Soon we'll hear accusations that the student's father's sister's cousin's former room mate was also unverifiably be accused of making bomb threats.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
That's 1% of the problem. The other 99% of the problem is that they see someone who looks different from carrying an unknown device and think "bomb."
Dear America,
Please get a grip on yourselves.
Signed,
The Rest of the World.
Sadly when dealing with law enforcement you can't make jokes. It is a related issue to the whole "zero tolerance" mindset that has besieged school policy. Being reasonable is no longer a reasonable expectation.
A normal human can be expected to crack a joke when confronted with a bizarre situation, such as a teacher asking a seemingly insane question as to whether your clock, or backpack is a bomb. Using humor to diffuse a tense situation is one of those social skills we pick up as a way to survive being crammed into overcrowded schools with a bunch of numb skull peers. But normal human behavior will get you tazed, pepper sprayed, arrested, or even shot these days.
Similarly we have a lot of cases of folks freezing up while being barked at by armed cops and being shot for not dropping the "weapon" (real or imagined). Normal human behavior for sure, but you die as a result. Trying shield yourself from a rain of blows? To a cop that can be seen as "resisting arrest" and justify a further rain of blows, a choke hold, or a tazing. Using body language like gesticulating with your arms and hands as you try to talk things out with some meat head pointing a gun at you? To a cop that is "acting erratically", maybe even causing him to "fear for his life". Not answering questions per your Miranda rights? "Acting un-cooperatively."
For me, the most disturbing thing is that there are (many apparently) teachers out there who call the cops on young children. Racism has always been there, but as far as I remember for anything less than knife-wielding 17 year old gangster students, it would be a school affair, dealt between teachers, parents, principle. Nowadays, they just call the cops on kids...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
It's looking more and more like a certain Sunni extremist group has already obtained one of their primary objectives: polarizing the United States against anyone of middle-eastern origin. I know this is at this point a 'Planet Texas' problem, but the problem is growing everywhere: people are already primed to be afraid of anyone who looks like they might conceivably be Muslim, and you give them any half-assed reason for a knee-jerk reaction, and you have what happened in this news story. One has to wonder how long it'll be, before someone (a cop, most likely) 'shoots and asks questions later', and some kid or other innocent dies just because they looked (or were in fact) Muslim -- and they weren't doing a damned thing wrong or even planned to do a damned thing wrong. After that, it'll likely be an avalanche. Something has to be done to stop this chain of events, now, before it gets to that point, but I'll be damned if I know what we need to do. Other than kick Trump out of the whole campaign process, and furthermore duct-tape him to a chair and stuff a sock in his mouth; that guy is doing at least as much damage to the whole situation as so-called Islamic State assholes are.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
From a good-to-society perspective, it is bad to discourage people who can make things from making them, and showing them to their school peers, just because mundanes would not understand them and feel threatened. We don't want everyone to be a mundane, we'd not be able to feed our society if that was the case.
Bruce Perens.
It wasn't even homemade, it was a commercial product with a phone charger in it.
Should the lesson be "doing anything remotely suspicious while brown is punishable, and suspicious is what officials want it to be"?
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
The odds are much higher that you will use that weapon against your own family than that you will ever use it in any way that actually protects them from harm.
My dad was a reserve and was called up for both World War II and Korea. He killed people in Germany, and had a Purple Heart and a panel of decorations. He brought home a Luger which he'd taken off of some German. He destroyed the firing pin, because he knew that his family would be safer without an operating weapon in the home.
Guns are pretty reliable. Your brain isn't. Everybody has a crazy day in their life. Everyone.
So, I figure that not having guns all around us is better for our freedom overall.
Bruce Perens.
You need an elementary education in cultures of the world. Sikhism has nothing to do with Islam. It's not even an Abrahamic faith, any more than Hinduism or Buddhism or Shintoism are. Christianity and Juadaism have more commonality with Islam than any of them.
Um, wouldn't "them" in this case be the local government which means the local community, i.e. people who are paying taxes in that town? Best case the police department is insured and the insurance company would pay any settlement and then just jack up insurance rates on the rest of their customers to make the money back. Yeah, good idea.
I really hate this type of reply.
It attempts to sway the reader into thinking that responsibility and/or justice will be expensive. It tries to dissuade the reader from commonsense actions which would tend to prevent future transgressions.
Don't fine the company - they'll only jack up their prices and it's the customers who would pay. Don't sue the government, they'll just jack up the taxes and the people will pay.
This might cost the taxpayers in one or two instances, but it would have a chilling effect on other abuses in other districts. It's an overall gain for the taxpayers everywhere.
We don't have to sit outraged and powerless while these sorts of abuses happen. One or two groups of taxpayers can take the hit and we will all benefit. They will benefit later when we take the hit for other types of abuse.
Let's work together to stop this nonsense.
Including, saying that commonsense punishments are futile.