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.

Comments

Wow.

[jtownatpunk.net]

That's pretty sick.

Re:Wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

No; it's kidnapping. A 12 year old with a charger is clearly outside their official roles so whatever immunity the people involved here have from their jobs should be ignored. Everybody involved in locking him away should be charged with kidnapping or conspiracy. Put them down for 10 years minimum. Only when this happens regularly, reliably and visibly to many police officers and judges will these people begin to do their jobs and actually investigate whether there was a real threat or not.

Re:Wow.

[penguinoid]

Hm, I thought that they arrest the person under charges of calling in the fake bomb threat, like with "clock boy". They got the wrong kid! Should have arrested the racist who called in a fake bomb threat. And if they think the product Armaan purchased is threateningly bomb-like, they should arrest all the stores that sell it and the manufacturers. I mean, allowing the open manufacture and sale of fake bomb threat backpacks, what is the world coming to.

Or they could examine the perfectly harmless object owned by the "scary foreigner 12 year old" then tell the people involved in this to grow up.

Re: Wow.

[itomato]

I know, right? A charge that serious is liable to wind up on his permanent record.

Re:Wow.

[msauve]

This is a child. What happened to "think of the children?"

It's the anarchists, wait, communists, no, terrorists!

(Here's hoping a bunch of people lose their homes in civil suits)

Re:Wow.

[iplayfast]

I believe that when the officers of the law start arresting the youth because they are afraid of terrorists attack, a terrorist attack is no longer necessary. The terrorists have won.

Re:Wow.

[Darinbob]

The story is that he was making a bomb threat, not that there was a bomb. You can make a bomb threat while having only a box of cheerios in your backpack and it's still a bomb threat. The debate between the family and the school/police was whether there really was a bomb threat, a joke of a bomb threat, or a misunderstanding.

Then the next question, do you hold a 12 year old for this without notifying and having parents or guardians notified and present? And the notification must be from the police and not the school, the phone call should be from the police to the parents and not from the parents to the police. And not an excuse "we tried to contact them" without follow through.

And given that it's a 12 year old why treat such a person as an adult? That's absurd. This is more of the zero-tolerance nonsense that's turning schools into daytime detention centers. Let he who is without childhood mistakes cast the first stone.

Re:Wow.

[jblues]

I can imagine something like:

In the past, kid receives racist taunts. Makes a complaint. Investigation favors those making the taunts - they were clearly joking. Kid told to lighten up and develop social skills.

Kid gets taunted about having a bomb. Decides to lighten up and joke along. Gets sent to juvenile detention for joking about security matters.

Sue em.

[TechyImmigrant]

Take them for all the money that can be had. False arrest charges would be nice too.

Re: Sue em.

[Anonymous Coward]

A community that supports that behavior should expect higher rates.

Re: Sue em.

[Anonymous Coward]

He was 12, talking to another 12 year old, thinking it was a joke between them.

The cops couldn't check the "bomb" begot arresting him and holding him for three days? A 12 year old? Really?

What an asinine comment.

Re: Sue em.

[RyanBaron]

He was 12, talking to another 12 year old, thinking it was a joke between them. The cops couldn't check the "bomb" begot arresting him and holding him for three days? A 12 year old? Really? What an asinine comment.

Re: Sue em.

[MightyMartian]

Perhaps that community will fire the morons they hired for cops, and find cops that aren't simpering halfwits.

Re: Sue em.

[alvinrod]

Good luck with the current police unions in place. A copy pretty much have to go to jail before they'll get tossed out, and cops can get away with practically anything. Even if they do actually get charged, the odds are still slim against a conviction.

Re: Sue em.

[whistlingtony]

No... This was a chain of stupidity, and the Police could have broken that chain. There are multiple stupid people here. The police are stupid on this one too. I'm also pretty sure we have more choices than A. Blaming police for obvious stupidity and letting lowlifes ransack our homes and B. Letting police off the hook and them doing their jobs when some lowlife threatens my home. Black and White fallacy!

Re:Sue em.

[Anonymous Coward]

False arrest? The kid lied and said it was a bomb. No false anything there except for a bomb threat.

They questioned a minor, presumably after searching him, without his parents there?

Who knows what they told him to get him to confess; because the police never lie and the never misrepresent--oh wait.

There are some people who need to be wearing ankle bracelets after this; unfortunately they're still wearing uniforms and carrying guns.

Re: Sue em.

[msauve]

There are limits to the immunity given to government employees when they deny civil rights, especially in federal court. 42 U.S.C. section 1983, provides:

Every person who under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage, of any State or Territory or the District of Columbia, subjects, or causes to be subjected, any citizen of the United States or other person within the jurisdiction thereof to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws, shall be liable to the party injured in an action at law, Suit in equity, or other proper proceeding for redress...

Unreasonable false arrest and detention I believe is covered by that.

Re: Sue em.

[Dahamma]

Initially arresting the child because of a school zero tolerance policy might not be the police's fault. Holding a child for 3 days and requiring him to wear an ankle bracelet after knowing he had a backpack with a phone charger is most definitely the police's fault.

Re:Sue em.

[Will.Woodhull]

At the age of 12 he would be a couple of years too young to wear a turban or carry a ceremonial blade. Sikh boys of that age would, however, have long hair tied up in a bun and covered by a head cloth. So those things would have fed the rampant xenophobia of the Texans involved. The kid was some kind of long haired hippy towel head.

The Sikh way is highly tolerant of other religions and beliefs, and profoundly pacifist. These factors along with his appearance quite likely made him an outcast in his peer group, and teachers and school administrators may well have recognized him as some kind of weirdly disruptive influence.

I do not understand why the police held him for three days. What possible justification could there be for that? There is a gross systemic failure there.

John Oliver

[rsilvergun]

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 :(...

Re:John Oliver

[harrkev]

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 :(...

Taking guns away from honest citizens helps them how? You seem to be under the mistaken assumption that somebody desiring to kill others would somehow obey gun laws. Plus, the laws that are always proposed after a shooting would, in general, have done nothing to stop the incident that actually caused the law to be proposed.

You have also failed to show how your comment is relevant to this story about a Sikh boy (a religion, I might add, that is not generally known to kill people).

Re:John Oliver

[Moof123]

Honest citizens are still mostly badly trained dumbasses. I am more afraid of accidentally being shot by some redneck who drank too much and got in an argument than I am from being blown up by ISIS. The statistics bear this out. Do you live your life by real numbers or just gut feelings?

Re:John Oliver

[CohibaVancouver]

Taking guns away from honest citizens helps them how?

Same way it does in Japan, Australia and pretty much every other first world nation that's not the USA: It reduces the number of guns in circulation, making it less likely you (or your little kids) will be shot.

Re:John Oliver

[harrkev]

Same way it does in Japan, Australia and pretty much every other first world nation that's not the USA: It reduces the number of guns in circulation, making it less likely you (or your little kids) will be shot.

So, getting shot to death somehow makes you MORE dead than somebody stabbed to death? Curios. Please explain the logic behind this. Isn't the real reason to ban guns to reduce the overall homicide rate? If so, banning guns FAILS at this.

Case in point, Australia. They cracked down on guns HEAVILY. Result? The homicide rate was reduced by about as much as it was in the US. Overall violent crime, however, has dropped a lot in the US, while it has NOT done that in Australia. Some years the violent crime rate was up, some years it was down, but the US has seen a distinct downward trend.

Another point for you in Australia, which banned lots of guns around 1996:
In 1995, guns were used in 18.38% of homicides.
In 2012, guns were used in 17.5% of homicides.

http://www.aic.gov.au/dataTool...

Yea, less than ONE PERCENT of change. Wow, what a difference.

Now, let's look at Japan, where they are NOT culturally diverse, respect for the law is a lot higher, the society stresses conforming, and suspects do not have the same legal protections that we do here. They also have no guns, and a MUCH higher suicide rate. I am not to dishonest as to ignore the other differences and say that if they had guns, that the suicide rate would drop to US levels. Apparently, you are not so honest and just like to look at the one difference that matters to you and are free to ignore the other differences.

Re:John Oliver

[harrkev]

Armed victims aren't stopping shootings or deterring them. Also you have a poor sense of how targets are being sought.

Too bad actual FACTS don't back you up.

Case in point -- about two miles from my house. An armed honest person stopped a potential mass murderer. So, yeah, try to tell me that what happened in my neighborhood did not actually happen. When given the choice of believing you or the truth, I know which one I will go with.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

And ... more examples.

http://concealednation.org/201...

Maybe just just don't know about it because the media does not want to report it.

From Wikipedia (with links to source studies):

Lower end estimates include that by David Hemenway, a professor of Health Policy at the Harvard School of Public Health, show approximately 55,000-80,000 such uses each year.[8][9]

Another survey including DGU questions was the National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms, NSPOF, conducted in 1994 by the Chiltons polling firm for the Police Foundation on a research grant from the National Institute of Justice. NSPOF projected 4.7 million DGU per year by 1.5 million individuals after weighting to eliminate false positives.[7] Another estimate has estimated approximately 1 million DGU incidents in the United States.

So, depending upon how you define it, good guys use guns to prevent crime between 55,000 to 4,700,000 times per year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Go peddle your lies elsewhere.

Re: John Oliver

[SvnLyrBrto]

Yes, but with appropriate enforcement, the number and availability of guns, legal or otherwise, can be driven down to numbers such that gun crime is negligible. See for example: Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan.

There's no magic to it on their part, just a lack of political will on our part. All we need is for politicians to grow a pair and tell the NRA to go fuck itself.

Re:John Oliver

[ScentCone]

If he needs more than a handful of examples (actually, people with guns stop many thousands of crimes every year - far more incidents than include people being murdered with guns, in case you're curious), then why does the political left insist that the handful of incidents involving terrorists is grounds to deny law abiding people constitutionally protected rights? You don't think that a small number of incidents should be used to make you wrong, but you're happy to let a small number of incidents (none of which would have been prevented by the proposed rights stripping, of course) is fine to show that you're right?

Re:John Oliver

[ScentCone]

Because throwing more guns into the mix hasn't solved the problem.

What do you mean? Millions more people own guns now than they did 30 years ago, and violence crimes of all kinds, including those involving guns, have been going steadily down, and are down 46% since the 1990's. So, more honest people own legal guns, and we have much, much less violent crime.

Still waiting for a better answer.

Better answer to what? The problem in just a handful of urban areas where almost all of the non-suicide gun deaths occur? That is a problem. Those are areas with the most draconian gun laws, but they still seem to have a problem. Why? Because they have a rampant violent gang crime problem in those small parts of those four cities. Other areas have much high rates of gun ownership, and only a tiny fraction of that sort of violence. Trying to figure out what to do with those specific urban areas? Ask the liberals who have run the city councils and executive offices in those cities for the last several decades straight. Maybe they have some insight into why their approach to inner-city crime and gang activity doesn't work as well as it does everywhere else. Take away the crime in those four spots, and the US's murder rate is 17th down the list, well behind other countries that have far, far stricter gun laws.

You want a "better answer?" Address the culture problems in that handful of urban areas, and ask your favorite media outlets to report this stuff in some sort of honest context.

Do we need an organized message?

[Bruce Perens]

The basic problem is that mundanes see any home-made electronic device as a bomb. This is the terminal point of anti-intellectual bias in society, if you can make something, it's assumed that you're out to make something harmful.

Re:Do we need an organized message?

[theIsovist]

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."

Re:Do we need an organized message?

[Mal-2]

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"?

Home of the brave?

[jareth-0205]

Dear America,

Please get a grip on yourselves.

Signed,

The Rest of the World.

Re:Home of the brave?

[siphonophore]

If Clockboy taught us anything it's to suspend judgement about this type of story.

Re:Home of the brave?

[JBMcB]

Dear rest of the world,

America is a very, very large place with a wide variety of people, culture, geography, and ideologies.

Look at where you are now, draw a two thousand kilometer circle around you, and tell me someone in that circle hasn't done something crazy.

That is all.

No sense of humor

[Moof123]

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."

Re:No sense of humor

[BitterOak]

Sadly when dealing with law enforcement you can't make jokes.

I don't think anyone is alleging that he made jokes to law enforcement. From what I understand a friend of his joked that his bag looked like it had a bomb in it and and he laughed. Law enforcement was brought in after the fact.

Calling the police...

[Ecuador]

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...

SIKHS ARE NOT MUSLIMS

[broward]

http://sikhism.about.com/od/To...

they are a respectable warrior culture with fairly high integrity.

they are not engaged in a jihad against Western culture.

if it's a 'V' you see (turban) it's a Sikh

[smoothnorman]

Dangit folks, learn your turban: Sikh's tie their turban's so that there's an inverted V at the forehead. and if one had to belong to a religious sect then being Sikh is in the top three (they're much nicer to females than your average Baptist). I'd sooner share a lunch with a Sikh than nearly any 'follower of Abraham' (for the curry, if naught else)

I hate this line of reasoning

[Okian Warrior]

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.