A backpack is suspicious yes. Once its been ascertained to be something left due to carelessness and filled with nothing more than a couple of books and an iPod, then further questioning of the individual, without further cause is eyebrow raising. Getting her arrested is ridiculous.
Checking the device out is reasonable. Asking the student why he brought it is reasonable.
Arresting him hour later, claiming it was a hoax, when you yourself have admitted that it was harmless and that he had at no time made a threat?
Yeah thats unreasobale and prima facie motivated by malevolent intentions.
There are a lot of different issues being conflated here:
Are no-fake weapons policies reasonable? Maybe, maybe not. But this wasn’t a fake weapon.
Is criminalizing hoax bombs reasonable? Maybe, maybe not. But this wasn’t intended as a hoax bomb.
Is reacting with extreme caution to a potential bomb reasonable? Maybe, maybe not. But by the time the kid was handcuffed, nobody thought this was a potential bomb.
Are zero-tolerance policies related to fake weapons reasonable? No. And this wasn’t a fake weapon.
If you’re comparing it to other cases, you need to compare it to a relevantly similar case, in which someone builds something that is not dangerous, that they tell everyone is not dangerous, that upon examination does not appear to be actually dangerous, and that they’ve displayed for a legitimate reason other than tricking people into thinking it’s dangerous. If any of those factors are missing from your comparison, it’s not a good comparison.
If the student had left the clock sitting somewhere, and a teacher had spotted it, thought it was a potential bomb, and immediately evacuated the classroom and called in the bomb squad, and it was then discovered that it was not in fact a bomb, but a clock, and everyone was upset by the disruption but relieved at the outcome, and the kid had then gone back to class, the story might still have gone viral, but people wouldn’t be up in arms about stupidity and racism.
That’s not what happened. The fact that long after everyone knew it was a clock, the school called in the police and had the kid arrested has nothing to do with actual fears of a viable threat.
The good news is that the reaction to this story has been overwhelming support for the kid, and anger at the apparent racism of the school and police department.
Yes, one thing that rubs me wrong is that the “hoax bomb” law apparently makes it entirely subjective to call something a “hoax bomb”. Even AFTER it being determined nothing was wrong, they still went ahead with treating it as a bomb hoax until public outcry rose.
I linked something in the other thread: hoax bombs are, according to the law, only illegal if they’re used with intent to threaten, harass, etc. Absent criminal intent, there’s nothing illegal about making, possessing, or displaying one.
Funny, I was just thinking along those lines. I’m betting you could find an alarm clock that actually looks like a bomb. I’d google it, but I’d probably end up on a watch list.
He wasn’t just suspended. He was arrested. If the principal had brought him to the office and told him that his science experiment was not appropriate for school (a strange comment as I type it), and that he was being suspended because he brought inappropriate materials into the classroom, I don’t think there would have been the huge outcry. Maybe some eyerolls in reaction to the suspension, similar to how we might roll our eyes if the kid with the toy gun was suspended. But I doubt that it’d garner much more publicity than that.
But to involve the cops and handcuff him? As noted by others, there was no real belief that it was a bomb. The belief was that he was making terroristic threats by having this thing in his backpack…even though he wasn’t threatening anybody with it or even pretending it was a bomb.
To analogize to the backpack, it’d be like somebody put their backpack down next to their feet while watching a foot race. The cops come up to the person and accuse him of hiding a pipe bomb. The person stridently denies it, opens the bag and shows that its full of innocuous stuff. He never abandoned it, and it plainly is not a weapon. Nevertheless, he is arrested for making a “terroristic threat”.
I don’t care about being on a watch list, so here is a link to an alarm clock that looks like a bomb. It costs $30.
Like all of the other pictures of bombs with timers, it is connected to what looks like explosives (either clay type stuff or stick of dynamite looking stuff). His clock looks absolutely nothing like that; there’s nothing to detonate.
Clearly this kid isn’t a terrorist, but who’s to say what a bomb looks like. We have to take our shoes off because of shoe bombs and we’ve even had an attempted underwear bomber. Dynamite and big round bombs with the word BOMB on them are a thing of the past and cartoons. Seriously, unless you are a bomb squad technician you probably don’t have a qualified opinion for what a bomb could look like.
A fair point. But it begs the question, why didn’t the school contact the bomb squad if they were suspicious as to what this is? The fact that they did not, along with the fact that they let it sit in the school for hours without taking any evasive action, tells me that they were highly confident that it wasn’t a bomb, and that he wasn’t arrested for being suspected of bringing a bomb to school, but rather arrested for being a kid who brought wires and a digital read-out to school, which they assumed was a prank intended to scare people. Never mind that he never threatened anybody with it, left it alone, or ever claimed it to be anything other than a clock.
So then why, when the very first teacher saw the clock, didn’t she immediately get all the kids out of the classroom and dial 9-1-1? ****No one ****at any time thought that this clock was a bomb.
Who knows? The school hasn’t spoken out publicly with specifics regarding their response and they may not legally be able to do so since a minor was involved, therefore we only know what the news reports. Its likely that we don’t have the full story.
I’m curious to see how other students feel that were in the class.
Is it possible the Irving School District and the Irving Police Department are staffed primarily with Islamohobic, panicky idiots? Sure.
But I must pont out that:
The “clock” in this case (pictures have been provided) doesn’t look anything like a clock. I don’t know WHAT it looks like. But this is not a case in which any sane, reasonable person would have told the teacher, “Chill out! What are you worried about? It’s just an ordinary clock like dozens you’d see on the shelf at Target!”
The young Muslim student in question is the son of a publicity hound, a man who runs for President of the Sudan every few years.
COULD this be a simple, open-and-shut case of bigoted teachers pushing the panic button for no reason? Yes. But this could also be a case of an Islamic activist sending his son to school with a gadget and an agenda.
My son is a gadget builder, and has Middle Eastern friends who share his interests. If, say, one of his Iranian buddies were threatened with arrest for building a Lego robot, I’d join in the outrage. But I’m not wholly convinced yet that’s all we have here.
I distinctly recall alarm clocks that looked like, well, a classic Big Ben attached to a pile of dynamite. Coily wires and all. “Then the real aliens landed, and it wasn’t funny any more” - or something.
I found a faux bomb in one rental house. After several years, I went to store some junk on the sheet boards across the upper garage rafters. I climbed up the ladder, and there was the alarm clock, wires, and taped brick of [del]dynamite[/del] road flares. Scared the piss out of me until I looked closely with a flashlight and could read the road flare markings.
Or it does alarm and suddenly your walking in a beautiful meadow all alone.