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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.
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.
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).
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
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."
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.