4.27.2007
The Police State Flexes...
If you have ever given a damn about free speech rights, artistic license, and rational decision-making by school administrators and the police, read this story.
So apparently this student in the suburbs wrote a "disturbing" essay that involved a school shooting, a subject which coincidentally has been in the news lately. This student did not specify any intent to commit a crime such as a assaulting or killing anyone, and intended the essay to be a joke, based on the "free writing" assignment he had been given by his teacher. A joke in bad taste? Maybe. But that should not lead to an arrest!
We have to expend police resources on investigating this? The cops say that "we need to be very vigilant today when we’re dealing with school settings." Or... we could use common sense and realize that someone writing a free writing essay who doesn't have a history of impulsive, criminal, or otherwise psychiatric problems is probably not prefacing a shooting incident. The hyperreactive police can perhaps be excused for acting on their political instincts and fearing retribution from the reactionary suburban public if they did not arrest this individual. Still, what a sad day for education, free speech, and our deteriorating standards of policing.
In any event, the police state would now have us watch what we write, because if we write a story that contains violence or a messed-up protagonist, apparently we become a threat to society.
So apparently this student in the suburbs wrote a "disturbing" essay that involved a school shooting, a subject which coincidentally has been in the news lately. This student did not specify any intent to commit a crime such as a assaulting or killing anyone, and intended the essay to be a joke, based on the "free writing" assignment he had been given by his teacher. A joke in bad taste? Maybe. But that should not lead to an arrest!
We have to expend police resources on investigating this? The cops say that "we need to be very vigilant today when we’re dealing with school settings." Or... we could use common sense and realize that someone writing a free writing essay who doesn't have a history of impulsive, criminal, or otherwise psychiatric problems is probably not prefacing a shooting incident. The hyperreactive police can perhaps be excused for acting on their political instincts and fearing retribution from the reactionary suburban public if they did not arrest this individual. Still, what a sad day for education, free speech, and our deteriorating standards of policing.
In any event, the police state would now have us watch what we write, because if we write a story that contains violence or a messed-up protagonist, apparently we become a threat to society.
# posted by Vanity @ 14:19 
