After the fiasco of the Muslim student in Texas who was arrested for bringing his clock in to school, we now have the case of a 12-year old Sikh boy again from Texas who was handcuffed, suspended from school, and spent three days in a juvenile detention center because of fears that his backpack that contained a built in battery pack that enables one to recharge a cell phone was really a bomb.
He explains what happened.
The authorities are claiming that the boy did admit to making a bomb threat and that was why he was treated that way. But even if that were true, surely it merits at most a reprimand? We are, after all, talking about young children who may not fully appreciate the fear-driven society we now live in. After all, how long would it take to realize that the battery pack is not a bomb?
What really shocked me is that the school authorities could not be bothered to make sure that the boy’s parents were notified before shipping him off to the detention center.
Singh spent nearly three days in the juvenile detention center. His family, meanwhile, frantically tried to figure out what was going on.
His parents told the Morning News that they were never notified by police that their 12-year-old boy had been arrested. Instead, they began to get worried when Armaan never came home from school last Friday.
Adding to their concern was the fact that Singh has a heart condition that has already required three surgeries.
When Singh didn’t come home, his parents searched their apartment complex and then went to his school. Finally, they called the principal, who told them that Singh had been arrested but said she didn’t know where he had been taken, according to Armaan’s older brother, Aksh Singh.
The family had to resort to calling 911 to learn that Armaan had been taken to the juvenile detention center, they told the Morning News.
Expect another lawsuit.
Well, when the whole country is driven by fear -- left and right -- this is what you get. Because of the strict rules for safety above all else -- especially for the children (“think of the children!”) -- you get ridiculous outcomes. Even mentioning the possibility that maybe we should lower the bar for safety just a tad is unthinkable to say as a politician.
Plus probable rank racism. But I wouldn’t be surprised if this happened with a white kid too because of the ridiculous fear culture that we live in.
“He’s been arrested and we don’t know where they’ve taken him.” These are things that no school should EVER tell parents. And somehow I doubt a white kid would simply vanish this way without the school having any idea where to.
… his backpack that contained a built in battery pack …
And it didn’t come with a warning label about what dumb bureaucrats would do if they saw it?
Where’s the common sense in this? I had never heard of this backpack/charger combination but it took me 5 seconds to find one on Amazon. And it looks like a charger, not a bomb.
Poor kid, poor parents. What a needlessly stressful situation.
So he allegedly made a bomb threat whilst arguing / joking around with another little kid; the kid tells on him; it was demonstrably nonsense, evidently pointless / impetuous, and he’s 12. It would take the teachers only three seconds to work out what was going on.
And yet they call the police who keep him for three days in order to do what? Decide if there’s any way at all that they can justify keeping him locked up? Perhaps this is the new law enforcement approach -- if we know you’re not guilty of anything we’ll just incarcerate you and deny you your rights for as long as we can hold off your lawyers (assuming you have any).
It frightens me that not only do the police have an office inside the school, but that the school effectively washed their hands of him once they’d handed him over the threshold.
In the UK the school is legally “in loco parentis” (in place of the parent, therefore responsible for the child) and it would be completely wrong to abandon the kid to the cops.
In the Texas case of Ahmed Mohammed (the one with the clock), hordes of people scorned his family’s threat to bring a $15million lawsuit, but I hope that Armaan’s family also aims high.
In much of the U.S. (maybe all, but I don’t know for sure) schools are also in loco parentis. For some reason that doesn’t stop some teachers and administrators from being astonishingly stupid. Having at least one police officer assigned to a school is very common, but this incident requires a special kind of stupid and callous. It also makes charter schools and home schooling look like reasonable choices. All the way around, public education suffers, kids suffer, and nobody is safer.
Russia Today is the moral equivalent of Fox News. If they say that water is wet, I would want to get that triple-confirmed before I would believe it.
U.S. is really racist. I bet if a white redneck kid threatened to shoot up his school the authorities would just ignore it.