At some schools you cannot go to your locker between classes - you go in the morning, at lunch and after school. This is true in my S’s 7-12 school he teaches at in the inner city.
Fine. Take the clock. Check it out. Question the boy. Ask his parents. But handcuff him? The officer in the latest press conference said, “he was handcuffed for the safety of the school as well as his own safety” - against what??
Hunt, even the police admit that he insisted it was a clock, and never said anything else.
But if I recall correctly, the police also said that he didn’t give a good answer on why, exactly, he brought the device to school.
I guess I have some trouble accepting that a 14-year-old could really be naïve enough to bring a device like this to school and have no idea that anybody would be suspicious about it. Maybe it’s true for this kid.
Not surprising when kids are punished for drawing pictures of guns or pointing their fingers and saying “Bang”. In schools today everything is suspicious, hence the zero tolerance policies for plastic knives and other harmless items.
Playing devil’s advocate, if the school had done nothing and this had been a dry run for a bombing, the school’s administrators would have been blamed.
Didn’t he mention that he wanted to bring the clock to school to show his teachers “what he was capable of” (although that choice of wording sound ominous)?
Maybe in his 14 year old mind, just showing off the device was all he was looking forward to doing. I’m not Muslim, so I wouldn’t exactly know, but how many young Muslims have a mindset that anything/everything they bring to school sets off some bomb alarm?
This kid’s dad debated the Koran-burning preacher, so I would expect him to be more sensitized to these issues than other kids.
I think this was probably mishandled and blown way out of proportion. But I can’t get completely outraged without knowing more facts. This is my personal burden.
Also playing the devil’s advocate. Today’s public school faculty and staff have all been trained to respond (in their own way) to threats. They know when to evacuate. They know when to shelter in place. They know when to call the cops.
So imagine that this kid accidentally left his backpack behind in a classroom. A teacher, wanting to know who it belongs to, looks inside the bag and sees a timer blinking in the darkness.
Should the teacher decide based on partial evidence that the timer is not a credible threat – thereby putting an indefinite number of lives at risk?
Or should the teacher call it in? Of course, the likely consequence of calling it in will be evacuating the school and a massive response by cops and firefighters. Law enforcement stages a simulated response like this on my campus once a year. The stage real responses like this all over the country; usually, it’s a false alarm.
Now imagine you are the principal of Ahmed’s school. You might be thinking that you were within an inch of a false alarm like the one I just described. You might be pretty upset. You might want to make sure that every kid in the building knows better than to fool around with stuff that can easily be misinterpreted. You might want to convince your community that your school takes security very seriously.
I’m really not saying the kid deserved to be cuffed and suspended. I don’t know; I wasn’t there. But maybe it shouldn’t just be shrugged off, either.
I cringe at the times we live in.
The teacher who told him “that’s nice,…now stash it and take it home.” should have been more explicit as to why “it’s not a good idea”.
This reminds me of being in airports with kids after 9/11 and them saying stuff about bombs in a teasing way…they simply didn’t get that we could find ourselves under surveillance for their trivial actions.
Maybe he was. That is something that we don’t really know.
The kid showed the alarm clock to his science teacher. It’s would be easy, if you knew what you were looking at, to tell that this alarm clock wasn’t a bomb, because it didn’t have anything in it to explode. The science teacher knew it wasn’t a bomb.
So the kid explained that he’d shown it to the science teacher. All they had to do was go to the science teacher, discover that the device wasn’t a bomb, and-- done. What did they arrest this poor kid for? What was he suspended for? It’s not illegal to bring a clock to school, and I doubt it’s even against the school’s code of conduct to bring a clock to school.
It’s not an excess of caution to treat a clock as a bomb. It’s stupidity, and that’s the most charitable interpretation.
My little brother was one of those kids who was always building things. Now he’s an engineer, and he still builds things in his spare time. As a kid he built alarm clocks, and I’m sure he wasn’t thinking that someone might mistake his clocks for bombs. This kid didn’t do anything wrong, and he didn’t do anything that boys haven’t been doing for decades. The school and the police should be ashamed of themselves.
The reaction of the President:
Apparently the police dropped charges against him. Here’s a picture of the device: https://twitter.com/KenKalthoffNBC5/status/644180083465281537/photo/1
Hmmm. Does this suggest that he plugged it in during English class?
Plugged in? A device like that wouldn’t rely on an external power source, would it?
To those wondering why this kid didn’t realize that people would jump to conclusions re: his clock, maybe his parents haven’t yet “had the talk” with him about how his race would affect his relationship with law enforcement. Believe me, I understand a parent’s reluctance to do so out of fear of breaking the child’s spirit.
So glad for him that he gets to meet the Prez!
Well, it appears to have a power cord with a standard plug on the end of it. (The picture of the device is lower down on the page I linked.) Although now that I look at it again, maybe that plug is for something else that’s behind the device. I do think it’s notable that this wasn’t a very small object.
Man, this thread is a reminder to me of people and their outlook in this world that I just can’t wrap my mind around.
Kudos to this tweet from POTUS:
Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It’s what makes America great.
Over and out on this thread…
Better picture here: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/09/15/student-detained-police-mistake-clock-fake-bomb/72348060/
I think that may just be a picture of the guts of the device; the whole thing was apparently in some kind of small brief-case shaped box. I saw it described as a “pencil box,” but it was bigger than what I think of as a pencil box.
This may all seem like quibbling, but I think what this think really looked like matters in terms of what the proper response to it would be.
The reaction of politicians is always AFTER the fact. So “cool clock” comment by Obama is a crock. What if it wasn’t a clock after all? Would the White House actually let somebody in with that?
If anybody had a crystal ball we wouldn’t need guidelines.
But I’m pretty sure a little kid’s fingers formed to gun shape isn’t lethal. Not sure where to draw the line but fairly sure that handcuffs were not needed. Just wondering who has any sense these days.
“This kid’s dad debated the Koran-burning preacher, so I would expect him to be more sensitized to these issues than other kids.”–post 26
That puts a new spin on it.