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12 year old arrested for doodling on desk.
Wow, today is a crazy news story day.
this one is unbelievable.
http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/02/05/12-year-old-girl-arrested-in-school-for-doodling-on-desk/
this one is unbelievable.
http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/02/05/12-year-old-girl-arrested-in-school-for-doodling-on-desk/
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Comments
For as much empathy and compassion I came drum up I don't think I will ever be able to fully understand how different life can be because you are not "white". But we all have our own troubles and difficulties in life.
I bet the police who did it wont face any disciplinary consequences whatsoever.
It isn't.
Unbelievable.......
If writing on a desk gets one in jail, I would have been in and out of jail all of school. Seriously WTF is wrong with some people. I understand the cops because they are souless
(I seriously am joking about the cops but I have always had bad experiences with people that carry guns)
Palzang
That is just too bad, it is really sad for everyone invlolved. I imagine it would be almost impossible being a police officer and not getting into a pattern of corruption, greed, and violence.
This story is very unfortunate for the young lady, but there are always two sides to the story.
It may surprise people, but teachers are very much responsible for the belongings in their classroom. That means that if kids are leaving gum under their desks or food in the classroom or drawings, etc. the teacher gets scolded for it.
Perhaps the students in this teachers class were constantly causing problems for him and he decided that it was enough.
We cannot take these kinds of new stories at face value, there is always more to it.
It's unfortunate that students at that age can't respect their teacher or their school enough to prevent problems like this from starting in the first place.
The teacher didnt make the decision to arrest her.
Also, if you read the article you will see that she wrote it with a dry erase marker.
Would it be more acceptable if graffiti artists used removable paint on the side of private/public buildings?
I agree that the punishment far outweighed the "crime". It would have been more fitting is she was asked to clean the surfaces of every desk in the school.
in my opinion, yes.
Yes it would be more accpetable. It would still be vandalism but less of a pain in the ass to clean up.
The crime is that the girl got arrested for writing on it. Would it have been fair and appropriate for the teacher to discipline the girl for writting on the desk? yes, but this is outrageous.
Interesting. Can you expand on that? How does the type of paint diminish the nature of the crime to make it more acceptable?
For example, is someone sets fire to an abandoned building, should they get charged with something less then arson?
What the hell? In the UK police don't even carry guns, but in the US you can be shot at to kill?. This is crazy! :eek:
no harm, no foul.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/nation/6875175.html
Same vein. I would have sued too.
Orwellian anyone? Sued, yes. Am I disturbed by this, yes.
Isn't this the same as GPS tracking on cell phones? It's my understanding that they activated these webcams because the laptops were missing (stolen), not to spy on kids, and they were able to recover most of them this way.
I'm sure the parents who would have been responsible for paying for a $3000 missing laptop would have activated the webcams themselves.
Improper behavior at school is way different than at home. And if he did something "improper" at home that is between him and his parents. Not him and the school.
GPS is one thing, audio and video recorders are completely different.
I'll have to agree with you on that one. If the device was activated for the sole purpose of recovering a stolen laptop, then I could understand it's use.
I agree with you there but as a student I would have been very skeptical to use a school computer, not that I have anything to hide
I highly doubt that all or even many of those cases involved missing laptops.
All you need is one perv.
You don't even need that.
I bet every student in that school is thinking of every private thing they've done in front that computer.
Undressing, learning about their bodies, learning about their bf/gf's body. I bet every damn one of those students feels violated. I would.
yup. I guess the school got caught because they mentioned to a student that she was doing something "inappropriate" with the computer. Something they never would have known about if they werent watching her.
No, it is not in the same vein, not by a light year. On one hand you have a little device that sends a signal pinpointing the location of said device. On the other hand you have a device that allows whoever has control over it to peer into the bedrooms of teenagers. This could very easily be used, for example, by a 55 year-old school administrator to capture images of female students in private moments.
Thanks.
But I do have friends and family who are police officers and are good people. I find the "cops are just criminals with badges" comments and sentiments here to be completely ignorant and insulting.
However the teacher has jurisdiction over his own classroom and I think the teacher should handle the problem. On first offense I would give a detention. Repeat offenses (many) I would probably have the security guards escort to the office. My school had something called the alternative learning center. Which is where you go if you misbehave grossly. There you sit and do school work and don't talk etc..
This seems like a glaring example of what can happen when people aren't practicing Right Thinking. By allowing "rules" and "laws" to replace our own sound judgment and discernment, we can veer so far off-track that truly absurd (and sometimes greatly damaging) things are done.
This episode is also a reminder that police officers, for all their bravado, are every bit as fallible, foolish, and ridiculous as anyone else. The badges, uniforms, and guns they wear are only symbols, illusions: in truth they're just ordinary people, no more wise or authoritative than anyone else.
I don't see where that generalization was made. Someone complained about some of the officers in their particular town, which seems a legitimate concern.
I think you'd have to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to realize that the police mentality, at least in the US, is pretty bad and not so much different from the criminal mentality. In fact, many times you can't tell which is which. The news is full of corrupt police committing crimes or taking bribes or helping themselves to drugs and/or money recovered during drug busts or setting up people they think are guilty by manufacturing evidence and so forth and so on. I also have had friends who were cops, and to tell the truth, they were all pretty corrupt individuals as well.
There was one who was a county police office in a neighboring county who, on the surface, appeared to be a good guy with a nice family, went to church regularly, and so forth. That is what one would think on meeting him, that is until you noticed the Nazi SS ring on his finger. And when you got to know him, he would tell you what he thought about blacks in general and other minorities in his district. The most troubling part, however, was that his views weren't different from the rest of the department's. The police in that county have been notorious for their brutal treatment of blacks (even by black officers!) for many years. There have been a few well-known cases of young blacks who have mysteriously died in their cells after being arrested. No charges, of course, were ever brought, even though it was clear to anyone paying attention that they could have only been killed by the police. But the reality goes way beyond these few cases that made the headlines.
I also used to live in Chicago, which has one of the most corrupt police forces in the country. Crime bosses like Al Capone ran rampant in Chicago with impunity because they literally owned the police force. All the police in the city, from the chief on down to the lowliest cop on the beat, were on the take. Even though the big crime bosses are history, the force is still as corrupt as can be.
Did anyone see the article in the news a few days ago about how they tracked the guns used by the psychotic individual who attacked the Pentagon police last week and the gun used in a courtroom shooting in Las Vegas? Turned out both guns were tracked back to the very same place - the police department in Memphis, Tennessee! Seems like the department recycles guns it confiscates. We also had a case here in Maryland where some correctional officers were stealing guns from the prison where they worked and were selling them to anybody who had the money.
Of course, being a cop is a very dirty job. You're dealing with the absolute worst in human behavior much of the time, so it's not surprising that it rubs off. Most police officers are ill-equipped to deal with the kind of pressure they're under every day. They do not have the benefit of the Buddha's teaching to rely on, so they have to rely on their own instincts, which usually means they develop an us-vs-them mentality, which only keeps it all going (just look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to see how such a mindset only creates more and more suffering and hostility).
But that's not really my point. The point is the karmic dance that goes on between people, in this case police and law breakers. It essentially is the same thing as the deer and the hunter situation where the hunter hunts the deer and kills it, and in the next life the being that was the deer is now the hunter and the hunter has been reborn as the deer. And so the cycle goes. That's the way karma works. We get into these karmic feedback loops, if you will, that keep us locked into each other's stuff for lifetime after lifetime until the karma is eventually exhausted. That's what I meant by saying cops and criminals are two sides of the very same coin. It's not just cops and criminals, it's any sort of interaction, like husbands and wives, parents and children, predators and victims, masters and slaves, whatever. It's what keeps the wheel of death and rebirth rolling, and we all stay trapped on the wheel because of it.
It's only when we can break through this sort of karmic trap that we create for ourselves that we can stop the cycle. And the only way I know of doing this is by practicing the path taught by Lord Buddha. You can never slay or defeat your external enemies because in reality there are no external enemies. Learning that is the first step.
Palzang
I, too, have felt that police were not far removed from criminals. Police, for instance, are skilled in the arts of lying and deception (presumably because they've found that in the questioning of a suspect, trickery often prompts them to reveal information). "Getting inside the criminal's mind" has karmic consequences: in studying the ways of the "enemy," one's thoughts dwell ever more upon a mentality of dishonesty, cheating, taking advantage of others, etc. And who among us is strong enough in mind and will to resist, over the course of countless repetitions of this process, the subtle transformation of thought and character which, over time, might gradually steer a good mind down bad karmic channels?
What's frightening is that (as you noted) most police probably don't have a very strong moral/ethical compass. I remember a guy I once knew, who said he wanted to be a cop because "he was sick of being pushed around." This statement has always haunted me, because can you imagine what his modus operandi must have been, after he finally became a cop? He must have become "the guy who pushed other people around, for a change"--and the bad karmic cycle went on, only now he himself was the bully.
Thankfully, there are some decent cops out there (your almost entirely negative view of them probably stems from the fact that the parts of the "elephant" you have happened to touch have been the worst parts), and the U.S. probably has much better police forces (generally speaking) than many more corrupt countries. In some ways, our police are getting better, with stricter rules and regulations being imposed, and the ongoing work of watchdog organizations like the ACLU. In other ways, they may be getting worse--like many things in this troubled age.
I do have to say that the situation in Washington, DC, seems to have improved dramatically from the '70s when the police force here was basically a collection of thugs who were imported mainly from southern states to impose a sort of strong-arm martial law during the days of the anti-war demonstrations. I was involved in one, more or less accidentally, when I was stationed at Ft. Meade in the early '70s. A friend and I came down to see what was going on at one of the demonstrations since neither of us were big fans of the war (that was the Vietnam war for you younger folk). We were peacefully listening to Dick Gregory speak when a confrontation between a small group of radicals and the police broke out nearby. The police then decided to tear gas everybody, involved or not, which was way overreaction. I'll never forget seeing a mother and her baby who had been tear gassed and were suffering greatly (they were tourists who had nothing at all to do with the demonstration) trying to get away from the tear gas while onlooking police stood there laughing at them. But things are very different here now. I know that the police department has changed radically in their dealings with the gay community, for example, and now go out of their way to protect them. I have read that similar changes have taken place in their relations with the black community, which used to be very bad. Now it's a lot better. So endemic problems can be changed in police forces if the will is there to do it.
Palzang
totally stupid thing I've heard. He is a kid and he hasn't killed anyone.
I think it is possible for others to sue them.
the cop should have common sense not to arrest the child.