I suppose schools can't be expected to use judgement in place of zero-tolerance policies when the police are treating nine-year-olds as dangerous criminals, even after they discover that no real guns were involved:
A 9-year-old boy was arrested at gunpoint and handcuffed Saturday because he was waving a toy gun over his head while seated on a bench outside a store, according to a Lorain police report.
His mother, Tamyka Saunders of Sheffield Lake, said her son, Thomas Clark Jr., told Lorain police when they approached him outside a Broadway business that the gun was a toy. An officer aimed his weapon at the boy's head, ordered him to the ground, handcuffed him and arrested him for juvenile delinquency by reason of inducing panic, according to the police report.
Saunders, 28, was also charged with obstruction of justice and resisting arrest when she pleaded with police not to arrest her son and to give him a warning, according to a police report.
Okay. The gun was painted black; not a good idea for a toy to be using outside on a busy street. I don't blame the officers for assuming at first that it was real - that's how officers stay alive. But to not let the kid go with a warning when they realized it was a toy? And to arrest the mother for trying to protect her child? We're talking about a nine-year-old here. He probably doesn't understand what he did wrong, and I'm pretty sure the law requires that his mother be there while he's being questioned.
The officer obviously felt his hands were tied and that he had to charge anyone who "induced panic" - but let's take this to its logical extreme. Suppose a five-year-old boy had grabbed a real gun from somewhere and gone outside with it. Obviously, the neighbors would have freaked; one of them might have called the police. The first task for the police would have been to get the gun safely away from the child - but would they have arrested the five-year-old as well? Wouldn't common sense suggest that the right thing to do would be to lecture the child and try to impress upon him the dangerous situation that they created? Does the officer really have no latitude in deciding who to arrest? At what point did we decide that nine-year-olds with toy guns deserve arrest in order to be taught that society might misinterpret their innocent actions?
Posted by kswygert at October 29, 2003 08:13 AM