Arts & Ammo

Zero Tolerance/More TV

Professor Christopher Ratte is an archaeologist. He needs to watch more TV.

Instead of wasting his time excavating ancient burial sites in Turkey, he should have plopped himself down in the barcalounger and obsessed over American Idol. It might not have made him a better archaeologist, but according to the Detroit Police, it would have made him a better parent.

According to WZZM13, Ratte bought a lemonade at the ball park for his son, a produced called Mike’s Hard Lemonade, without knowing that it contained alcohol.

“I’d never drunk it, never purchased it, never heard of it,” Ratte of Ann Arbor told me sheepishly last week. “And it’s certainly not what I expected when I ordered a lemonade for my 7-year-old.”

Ignorance is no defense. Anyone who watches TV would have seen the ads and been on notice.

A medical examination ordered for the boy showed no signs of intoxication. Still, he was placed with Child Protective Services. They refused to release the boy to his two aunts, one a social worker and the other a licensed foster parent. The boy stayed in foster care for two days, and it was a week before Ratte was allowed to move back into his own home.

The police were imposing a zero tolerance standard without regard to the realities. Mark Steyn recently wrote on two other instances of zero tolerance. A first-grade student in Woodbridge, Virginia slapped a classmate on her bottom. The school called in the police:

[A]t the ripe old age of six, he’s been declared a sex offender by Potomac View Elementary School. He’s guilty of sexual harassment, and the incident report will remain on his record for the rest of his schooldays — and maybe beyond.

And then this:

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit recently heard oral arguments in the case of Savana Redding. Back in 2003, Savana was an Eighth Grader at Safford Middle School in Safford, Arizona, when the Vice Principal, Kerry Wilson, “acting on a tip,” discovered a fellow student to have a handful of ibuprofen tablets in her pocket. The other girl said she got them from Savana, who denied it. She had no tablets in her own pockets or in her backpack. Vice Principal Wilson, whose mind works in interesting ways, then decided that Savana might be hiding the ibuprofen in her cleavage or her crotch. So, without contacting the girl’s parents, he ordered a school official to strip-search Savana. She was obliged to expose her breasts and “her pelvic area.”

Now you can be suspended from school just for drawing a gun (not like Wyatt Earp, but like . . . with a crayon).

Dave Kopel wrote in 2001:

Today’s restrictions go by the name of “zero tolerance,” and for once, this is a government program aptly named. To have “zero tolerance” is the same as to have “no tolerance,” which is the same as being “intolerant” or “bigoted” — the precise opposite of “celebrating diversity” or “embracing tolerance.” And just as we might expect as much from programs that revel in intolerance, “zero tolerance” is used by an increasing number of so-called “educators” to suppress the behavior of students who deviate from today’s politically correct norm.

Yes, but I think there is another dimension to this. We apply zero tolerance primarily where children are involved. Facile rules substitute for parenting and demonstrate how adults can no longer act in loco parentis. Adults have lost their ability to correct bad behavior with reference to any moral standard, and consequently they can justify punishment only when they lack the discretion to take any less onerous action.

Zero tolerance makes it safe for someone in authority to enforce a rule. Without discretion, however, enforcement frequently leads to absurd results.

April 29th, 2008 Posted by Fitzroy | Education, Law | no comments