

Zero Tolerance Policies Put Students In The Hands Of Bad Cops - whiddershins
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130722/18401023892/zero-tolerance-policies-put-students-hands-bad-cops.shtml

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pg
"Zero tolerance" is essentially a legitimate sounding way to reject "Let the
punishment fit the crime."

~~~
tankenmate
Indeed. I live in Northern Ireland; not a place known for its entirely
peaceful neighbourhoods. But even here I would be shocked about a police
officer arresting a student for starting a waterfight for example, even if it
did result in damage to property that was not excessive. I have colleagues who
wonder why I wouldn't want to move, along with my family, to the US for work.

~~~
pizza
I'd like to say that most people have common sense, wherever in the world they
happen to be, and that these stories are only news-worthy because they're
rare.

~~~
DanBC
But these extremes have recalibrated people's expectations of what's
acceptable. Is it okay to have police in schools if they're not zip-tieing
children?

I think it's baffling to have police officers stationed in schools.

~~~
rayiner
Here's the thing: I don't think Europeans can appreciate how totally and
prevasively dysfunctional our inner cities are.[1] Inner city schools are rife
with gang activity. Teenagers shoot each other up all the time (usually not
directly in the school though, but the fights that lead to shooting often
start there). Just last month in Chicago, a woman was shot in the chest while
holding a child because a gun fight broke out on an alley by an elementary
school.[2] Posting police might not be the best response, but its not
baffling. Who the hell would want to teach at some south side Chicago schools
without an armed police officer nearby?

And when the suburbanites hear about kids accidentally getting shot in gang
hits in parks,[3] they want police in their schools too, never mind that the
dangers are far less there.

[1] Chicago is the deadliest major (1m+) city in the U.S., with ~18-20 murders
per 100k people per year. But it pales in comparison to small/mid-sized U.S.
cities like Wilmington, DE (38 per 100k), New Orleans (53 per 100k), or Flint
(65 per 100k). In comparison, London is 1.4 per 100k, Berlin 1.0 per 100k,
Toronto 1.7 per 100k, and Paris is a hell-hole at 4.4 per 100k. In the
neighborhoods where getting shot is a real threat, the murder rate is far
higher than the above numbers per capita.

The list of top 50 world cities by murder rate has U.S. cities like St. Louis
hanging among company that is almost entirely cities in Brazil, Mexico,
Columbia, Iraq, and South Africa, or Honduras:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate).
Compounding the average rates is the highly segregated nature of violence in
American cities. As an aside, this is apparently mostly just a list of
battlefields for the drug war. Except Detroit and Mosul, which I think are not
so much on major drug trade routes like say Baltimore, but rather are simply
parts of failed states...

[2] Last year, 319 Chicago Public School students were shot, 24 fatally so:
[http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-06-26/news/ct-met-
cp...](http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-06-26/news/ct-met-cps-student-
violence-0625-20120626_1_cps-students-students-shot-safe-haven-program).

[3] [http://nation.time.com/2013/01/30/chicago-girl-who-
performed...](http://nation.time.com/2013/01/30/chicago-girl-who-performed-at-
obamas-inauguration-killed-in-shooting).

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gruseom
I wonder how much the massive adoption of zero tolerance policies has to do
with the name "zero tolerance" itself. It sounds indisputable. Why should we
tolerate things like weapons or drugs in schools? Those things are bad. If
you're against "zero tolerance" of them, it sounds like you're in favor of
tolerating them.

The truth is that there are many ways of not tolerating those things, and
"zero tolerance" is an extreme one that causes harm. If it were named more
accurately—"extreme enforcement", say—this would be easier to see.

~~~
whiddershins
Until 1947, the United States had a Secretary of War. Now we have a Secretary
of Defense. A lot can be hidden in a name.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Secretary_of_War](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Secretary_of_War)

~~~
tptacek
The renaming of the Secretary of War to "Secretary of Defense" has an
interesting history that is not at all to do with manipulation of the
language, but rather the fact that the War Department and the Navy were
separate bureaucracies prior to WWII.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3rhQc666Sg](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3rhQc666Sg)

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darkchasma
I cannot think of a single occasion where zero tolerance is not the drum beat
of the fool.

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D9u
How about zero tolerance for police misconduct? How about zero tolerance for
appointed government servant's lying to Congress?

After all, these individuals should be held to a higher standard than the rest
of us if they want to impose their will upon us without our explicit approval.

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cheald
> _police misconduct_

How about an officer who has to break the law/procedure to expose corruption
or save someone's life?

Life is rarely so black-and-white; zero tolerance strips us of our ability to
use reason and discretion based on the arrogant assumption that our rules and
procedures are perfect and infallible, which is just silly.

~~~
hnnnnng
If cops have to break the law to save someone then the law is at fault. But I
cannot, for the life of me, think of any such scenario. As for exposing
corruption or being a whistleblower, there are many who want to modify laws to
make it easier(Infact, Obama's stance on it during his elections is a
prominent example.), but by definition, whistleblowers are fighting against
the more powerful and/or the rich which has made it a losing battle.

~~~
cheald
> _If cops have to break the law to save someone then the law is at fault._

Yes, this is precisely the point. Zero-tolerance assumes that the law cannot
be at fault, when we know full well that it can be. Ergo, until the law is
perfect and unerring, zero tolerance is flawed.

~~~
spiritplumber
Doesn't the notion that [any system less complex than the cosmos] is never
wrong violate one of the incompleteness theorems anyway?

~~~
tomjen3
No, it just means that there are things that are true but cannot be proven
given the axioms of the system if the system is powerful enough to express
Peano arithmetic. It has very little to do with laws, as they don't really
prove anything (that is for the jury/judge to do).

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linuxhansl
This comment sums it up nicely:

"Conditioning the next generation into docile, subservient servants by using
fear as a tool."

Yep. At least some students and parents are not being bullied and file
lawsuits, which is really the only reason why we even know about these
incidents.

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dendory
Police has been using fear for quite some time now. Those who terrorize others
in order to obtain their goal are called terrorists by definition. Many police
officers are terrorists.

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AmVess
Zero tolerance policies are intellectual cowardice in specific, and overall
cowardice in general.

There are far too many spineless dolts in charge these days.

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spiritplumber
I probably would not have finished school if this stuff existed in my country
at the time. Then again, I remember the school's attempt to put me on Ritalin
very vividly -- it ended when my mom flat out decked the school nurse after
coming over to discuss it. Do not mess with seemingly gracile Italian moms.

~~~
cranefly
That's not great is it? Imagine if your mother was the one 'decked'.

~~~
spiritplumber
It'd have come down to who had the bigger / more militant family, I suspect.

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DanBC
Officers appear to have forgotten that they need the support of the population
to police, and that without the support of the population they cannot do their
job.

Having armed officers in schools feels _bizarre_ , especially taking into
account the reduction in violent crime.

> Combined, these two factors have resulted in criminalization of acts that
> were once nothing more than violations of school policies, something usually
> handled by school administrators.

Even without the severe examples listed in the article this criminalisation of
normal teenage behaviour is terrible. Teenagers don't have fully formed brains
and haven't learnt how to behave in society. That's why we restrict their
abilities to do things (they can't vote, buy alcohol, have sex, join the army,
etc etc).

~~~
mapt
Anecdata from one story: "Of the remaining 80 still in the running for a spot
in the next police academy, about 60 percent have military experience, Gish
said."

The military don't train for the expectation of support of the population.

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retrogradeorbit
Recommended viewing on this:
[http://www.thewaronkids.com/](http://www.thewaronkids.com/)

~~~
pivnicek
That looks very interesting. Thanks for the link.

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smsm42
Zero tolerance means zero thought, zero reason, zero understanding and zero
compassion. Why anybody who subscribes to such values would be let anywhere
near a school? I'd ban anybody who institutes a "zero tolerance" policy -
instead of exercising one's own adult judgement on a case by case basis - from
ever working in education. And of course any such policy should be immediate
ground for termination of administrator instituting it - as they're
essentially turning themselves into non-thinking robots. Who needs non-
thinking robots in charge of schools?

~~~
jcromartie
> Who needs non-thinking robots in charge of schools?

Somebody does, apparently. At least that's the feeling I get when I see the
proliferation of this kind of idiotic policy showing no sign of slowing down.
The non-thinking robots in positions of authority and instruction are more
likely to churn out non-thinking robots as a result. That may very well be the
goal.

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microcolonel
Makes me wonder how people could be so heartless as to put their children in
state indoctrination(slaughter?) camps.

Then again, with the prevalence of physical abuse against young humans, it
comes as no surprise that practically nobody cares, and when they do, they
rarely take steps to create assurances against it.

What about their parents giving “officers of the law” and politicians
unlimited exclusive license to use abusive force against humans, rape children
around the world, destroy the power of free economies to mitigate poverty, and
improve the health of humans?.

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CurtMonash
Schools are the extreme of wanting to be seen to enforce the rules equally on
everybody. Reasons include:

1\. They're government or other not-for-profit organizations.

2\. Unlike others, with which people interact only occasionally, they're
experienced for 1000s of hours each by many, many individuals (and vicariously
by those individuals' parents). Unequal treatment will be noticed.

3\. Schools think it's part of their MISSION to teach adherence to rules.

The result is inanity.

My favorite dumb example is the girl who wanted her prom date to be her
21-year-old soldier brother, who wasn't allowed because 21-year-olds couldn't
be prom dates in general (too old). The whole thing should have been settled
with one phone call to his commanding officer, making sure he was under orders
not to behave inappropriately. (Why that approach? Because the whole argument
for letting him in was that he was a soldier, we should support our troops,
etc.)

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cafard
When the history of our time is written, a major theme should be the recursive
multiplication of finer and finer rules to regulate what should be handled by
common sense and good will.

I do know a kid who got a misdemeanor charge for a hallway scuffle at a public
high school. It was settled with probation before judgment and the requirement
to attend an anger management course; but it should have been handled by a
detention and forgotten. He is now a teacher at the same school, and if he
ever goes into administration might bring some needed perspective.

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dendory
It's like they're trying hard to showcase to the future generation that
they're living in a police state..

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mtgx
I think this is also a side-effect of the private prison system, which
constantly needs more and more prisons to have "growth" as a business.

~~~
hga
Private prisons are a really small part of this as far as I can tell. They
e.g. don't touch at all upon the size of police forces and judicial systems,
in most places those would have significantly downsized if they'd followed the
sharp decrease in crime over the last couple of decades or so.

You might want to check out _Arrest Proof Yourself_
([http://www.amazon.com/Arrest-Proof-Yourself-Ex-Cop-
Reveals-A...](http://www.amazon.com/Arrest-Proof-Yourself-Ex-Cop-Reveals-
Arrested/dp/1556526377/)): it presents a thesis that what I've taken to
calling the police-judicial complex needs a steady diet of the "clueless" to
keep all those people employed. What this topic discusses would just seem to
be extending that.

