LIONEL PODCAST: School Kids Are Being Arrested for Insane Reasons!
Posted by Lionel on	August 4, 2015	Leave a comment (0) Go to comments
School kids are the latest victims of aggressive and unnecessary police overreaction
Tell me you're not shocked at how today's schools are quickly resembling America's prison system.
Tell me you're not alarmed by the growing number of school children – all too often emotionally and behaviorally disturbed – being arrested, cuffed and frogmarched from schools to waiting patrol cars. And for the most trivial reasons imaginable. Tell me.
Michael Snyder in 19 Crazy Things That School Children Are Being Arrested For In America detailed a variety of abuses that have become all too commonplace. I defy you to not be leveled by the incomprehensible sense of overreaction that is the common thread in all of these incidents. The range of infractions can only be considered ridiculous. What would barely have earned a note to a parent in our more rational days of yore, today all too often results in a trip to the station house.
The latest arrest of two disabled children in Kentucky who were shackled and traumatized for school misbehavior has caused many to focus for the first time on a problem that's plagued the American school system for years. The ACLU has filed a lawsuit on their behalf seeking to declare the officer's handcuffing of the children unconstitutional and a violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act.
I am a licensed practicing lawyer and former prosecutor who has watched our criminal justice system morph and devolve into a system that would make Draco blush. It has become all too often the case for news accounts to be flush with references to children arrested for such trivial acts as burping in class, doodling on a desk and throwing paper airplanes. I have taken the liberty of providing my own indictment of this insanity in my podcast on the subject.
But let's look at the bigger picture. Children are being habituated into a system that breeds and inspires learned helplessness where they are overcome and overwhelmed by disciplinary systems of incomprehensibly extensive violations that they ultimately submit to and refuse to even avoid. And why shouldn't the behavior matrix that we adults are learning daily not be initiated early in the farm system of indoctrination, the American school system? And throw into the mix the particular devastation that these police encounters have on a child who already suffers from emotional and behavioral disability and the result can be – and often is – catastrophic.
We are a system that has yielded rights and liberties to the prison industrial complex. You must certainly have read the statistic which shows that the United States is 5 percent of the world's population but 25 percent of the world's prison population. With the militarization of police, the systematic erosion of Posse Comitatus along with 1,033 programs that in some cases equipped local police forces with surplus military equipment and gear which turns Mayberry into Fallujah, Americans have misinterpreted police and military presence for law and order and security.
In my years of practicing criminal law, I can safely say that I've never seen the case where even a mature adult did not find the arrest process harrowing and traumatizing. Just imagine what that process is like through the prism of a child who may suffer from the inability to process cause and effect consequence dynamics. Why, instead of calling a parent or a school nurse, are schools opting instead to call 911 to have a uniformed cop, often aggressive and undertrained when it comes to emotionally disturbed children, do what he knows best, i.e. to arrest, cuff and transport.
There is yet another aspect that is problematic and that is the fact that instead of Americans become sensitized to this problem described, we're becoming likewise habituated and conditioned by the frequency of these events. They're not having the shocking effect that they should have. Instead of these cases inspiring a call to action and a demand that policies change, especially when dealing with the exceptionally vulnerable, we're chalking them up to the changing times and a more authoritarian zeitgeist.
No one is suggesting ceding authority to unruly ruffians or to embrace a Blackboad Jungle classroom dystopia. But before we saddle children – especially the emotionally vulnerable – with arrest and criminal records that will threaten future employment and educational opportunities let's try something this country needs desperately to reinvest in: Thinking.
19 Crazy Things That School Children Are Being Arrested For In America
#1 At one public school down in Texas, a 12-year-old girl named Sarah Bustamantes was recently arrested for spraying herself with perfume.
#2 A 13-year-old student at a school in Albuquerque, New Mexico was recently arrested by police for burping in class.
#3 Another student down in Albuquerque was forced to strip down to his underwear while five adults watched because he had $200 in his pocket. The student was never formally charged with doing anything wrong.
#4 A security guard at one school in California broke the arm of a 16-year-old girl because she left some crumbs on the floor after cleaning up some cake that she had spilled.
#5 One teenage couple down in Houston poured milk on each other during a squabble while they were breaking up. Instead of being sent to see the principal, they were arrested and sent to court.
#6 In early 2010, a 12-year-old girl at a school in Forest Hills, New York was arrested by police and marched out of her school in handcuffs just because she doodled on her desk. "I love my friends Abby and Faith" was what she reportedly scribbled on her desk.
#7 A 6-year-old girl down in Florida was handcuffed and sent to a mental facility after throwing temper tantrums at her elementary school.
#8 One student down in Texas was reportedly arrested by police for throwing paper airplanes in class.
#9 A 17-year-old honor student in North Carolina named Ashley Smithwick accidentally took her father's lunch with her to school. It contained a small paring knife which he would use to slice up apples. So what happened to this standout student when the school discovered this? The school suspended her for the rest of the year and the police charged her with a misdemeanor.
#10 In Allentown, Pennsylvania a 14-year-old girl was tasered in the groin area by a school security officer even though she had put up her hands in the air to surrender.
#11 Down in Florida, an 11-year-old student was arrested, thrown in jail and charged with a third-degree felony for bringing a plastic butter knife to school.
#12 Back in 2009, an 8-year-old boy in Massachusetts was sent home from school and was forced to undergo a psychological evaluation because he drew a picture of Jesus on the cross.
#13 A police officer in San Mateo, California blasted a 7-year-old special education student in the face with pepper spray because he would not quit climbing on the furniture.
#14 In America today, even 5-year-old children are treated brutally by police. The following is from a recent article that described what happened to one very young student in Stockton, California a while back….
Earlier this year, a Stockton student was handcuffed with zip ties on his hands and feet, forced to go to the hospital for a psychiatric evaluation and was charged with battery on a police officer. That student was 5 years old.
#15 At one school in Connecticut, a 17-year-old boy was thrown to the floor and tasered five times because he was yelling at a cafeteria worker.
#16 A teenager in suburban Dallas was forced to take on a part-time jobafter being ticketed for using foul language in one high school classroom. The original ticket was for $340, but additional fees have raised the total bill to $637.
#17 A few months ago, police were called out when a little girl kissed a little boy during a physical education class at an elementary school down in Florida.
#18 A 6-year-old boy was recently charged with sexual battery for some "inappropriate touching" during a game of tag at one elementary school in the San Francisco area.
#19 In Massachusetts, police were recently sent out to collect an overdue library book from a 5-year-old girl.
Unfortunately, what is going on in our schools is a reflection of the broader society as a whole. Our schools are being turned into prisons because our entire society is being turned into a giant prison.
Our nation is rapidly heading down the toilet, and the children of this nation do not have a bright future to look forward to.
If the police really want to find some criminals, they should start investigating some of the sickos that are in charge of some of these classrooms.
It seems like almost every day now there is a news story about some public school teacher that is involved in some kind of really perverted stuff.
For example, just check out what police down in Los Angeles recently found that one teacher was hiding….
A former Los Angeles elementary school teacher has been arrested for felony molestation of nearly two dozen students, accused of gagging children and putting live cockroaches on some of their faces. Deputies say the crimes were committed on campus.
The lastest horror. The ACLU has filed a federal lawsuit in response to a video which shows a deputy from the Kenton County Sheriff's Office handcuffing a disabled elementary school child to restrain him.
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Rants & Commentary, Uncategorizedkids arrested, schools
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