Follow me live at http://twitter.com/KipEsquire. Powered by Twitter Tools.

ITEM: Another police tasering of a child in a school setting. This time: a 13-year old girl. The officer’s excuse? “[She] is not a normal-sized 13-year-old child. She is 5’4″ weighing 185 pounds and very strong.” This comes less than a month after taser-wielding police killed a 15-year old boy. Flagship post here; most recent post here.

ITEM: The White House has announced that it plans to knowingly breach its fiduciary duty to taxpayers by purchasing 17,600 “green” vehicles from Detroit automakers. The General Services Administration doesn’t actually need the cars (though it will scrap older but still perfectly functioning cars in a classic case of the Broken Window Fallacy). Rather, the administration openly concedes that the sole purpose of the $285 million pork-barrel program is “supporting auto demand during this period of restructuring in the industry.” Previous post here; full archive here. (Via Blagnet.)

ITEM: A major new study of the federal restriction of over-the counter pseudoephedrine (a/k/a “the war on sniffles“) has concluded that the program, meant to curb methamphetamine production, has been a complete failure. (PDF – 45 pages. Via Marginal Revolution.)

ITEM: A reminder that Friday, April 17th is the annual Day of Silence, in which gay and gay-friendly students peacefully protest bullying and discrimination by refusing to speak in class. Previous post here; see also here.

—

PERSONAL UPDATE: Hiatus re-commences this week. Expect little or no blogging. But be sure to follow me on Twitter.

ITEM: A 15-year old boy in Michigan died after being tasered by police, who initially defended the act because the boy” attempted to fight the officers.” If the boy was unarmed, then the use of the taser was almost certainly inappropriate. An investigation is underway. Flagship post here.

ITEM: A federal district judge has ruled that adding “under God” to the Texas Pledge of Allegiance (which is recited in Texas schools) is not a violation of the Establishment Clause. The judge cited precedent suggesting that “under God” is sufficiently non-specific to survive First Amendment scrutiny, as well as the fact that students can opt out of the recitation. Flagship post here; see also here.

ITEM: The New York City Council has extended rent regulation for another three years. To do so, the Council had to formally declare a “housing emergency” — the “emergency” has existed for sixty years now.

—

REMINDER: Substantive blogging will continue to be light for the next few weeks. But I still Twitter up a storm!

Powered by Twitter Tools.

Note: The “#” links at the end of each entry go to Twitter, not to any external link. You should generally ignore these links.

Powered by Twitter Tools.

A special subset of this phenomenon is what I call “Kids in Cuffs,” the unconscionable notion that mundane unruliness by small children in a school setting can ever require police intervention — let alone arrest, handcuffing or especially tasering.

It’s time to revive that category:

The mother of an 8-year-old autistic girl who was arrested after a scuffle with her teachers said it was horrifying to watch her daughter be led away in handcuffs from her northern Idaho elementary school.

Police in Bonner County, Idaho, charged the girl, Evelyn Towry, with battery after the arrest Friday at Kootenai Elementary School.
…
Spring Towry said she got to the school Friday just in time to see 54-pound Evelyn — who was diagnosed at age 5 with Asperger’s Syndrome, a high functioning form of autism — being walked to a police car with two officers at her side.

“She started screaming ‘Mommy, I don’t want to go! What are batteries? What are batteries?’” Towry said. “She didn’t even know what she was arrested for.”

The battery charge was promptly dropped. That leaves unanswered the precedent question of how teachers could demand, and police carry out, the arrest of any child (with Asperger’s or otherwise) too young to have any culpability for any criminal act. No child that young can form the criminal intent necessary to be found guilty of battery.

If — and it’s a big “if” — police intervention is necessary in a school setting to restore order, then so be it: let the police “restore order” — until the parent can arrive to take the disruptive student home. Let the school mete out disciplinary or other corrective action as appropriate.

But for (sometimes literally) crying out loud, leave the cuffs in the holster and keep 8-year old kids, especially those with a little-understood and less-accommodated social disorder, out of Central Booking.

Via Popehat. More thoughts at Simple Justice, Arbitrary and Capricious, Asperger Square 8,