I first heard about this thanks to an entry in Reason‘s March 2008 Brickbats column.

TEENAGERS who refuse to work, attend training or go to school are to be issued with on the spot fines under government proposals. Any who still fail to comply would then be taken to court where they could face further penalties.

The measures are designed to enforce a new law which will be outlined in this week's Queen's speech. It will say that all teenagers must remain in education, training or employment until they are 18.

The change will be phased in by raising the age to 17 in 2013 and to 18 in 2015. Details of the new age of participation will be outlined by Ed Balls, the children's secretary, in a television interview today and in a speech tomorrow.

The new law will effectively outlaw Neets, teenagers and young people who are not in education, employment or training. In a speech to the Fabian Society tomorrow, Balls will put the proportion of Neets at about 10% of 16 to 18-year-olds.

On today's Sunday Programme on GMTV, he will argue that the change is the biggest educational reform in the last 50 years.

…

To provide places for the teenagers, Balls will announce the creation of an extra 90,000 apprenticeships by 2013 for 16 to 18-year-olds to add to the current 150,000. There will also be 44,000 new places at further education colleges.

Tomorrow he will also issue a pamphlet detailing how the changes will be put into practice: These new rights must be matched by new responsibilities . . . young people are responsible for their participation and this can be enforced if necessary.

If someone drops out of education or training, their local authority will try to find them a place.

According to Balls's department, if they refuse to attend, they will be given a formal warning, in which the local authority will clearly explain their duty to participate and the consequences of not doing so.

The next step will be to issue a formal notice, followed by a fixed penalty ticket. The Neet could then be taken to a youth court and fined, but the sanction will not go as far as imposing a custodial sentence.

— Jack Grimston, The Times (2007-11-04): Teenagers who refuse to work face on the spot fines

What sort of lessons do you suppose this educational reform will be teaching British teenagers, if the Labour government goes through with this plan to use police force, on the spot, against any youth who attempts to exist, even temporarily, outside of the direct supervision of more powerful adults–parents, teachers, bosses, crafts masters, etc.? What sort of a life, and what sort of a livelihood, and what sort of a society, do you suppose that those lessons will be preparing them for?

(Story via Holly @ feministe 2008-02-17. Video thanks to GLAAD 2008-02-13.)

There are a couple of different points to make about conservative reactions to the recent story of a government elementary school in Douglas County, Colorado making some accommodations for a transgender girl in the second grade. Both are well illustrated by the ridiculous discussion of the story by professional blowhard Neil Cavuto on Fox News.

The first point to make is about the first-order issue — how to run an elementary school and what to do if a kid who has been living and attending school as a boy decides that she wants to live as a girl instead. As far as this goes, Cavuto’s reaction is based on a tissue of nastiness, nonsense, and a few plain lies. As far as I can tell, for example, the claim that any student other than this little girl will be using unisex bathrooms is simply false — the school will have its normal girls’ and boys’ bathrooms; the girl in question just won’t be forced to use them. The claim that it will cost millions of dollars also seems to be something that Cavuto just made up out of thin air; the school already has plenty of bathrooms, doesn’t need to build more, and is just reclassifying a couple of already-existing bathrooms — which from the sound of it are probably single-stall rooms in the teacher’s lounge, or something similar — for this girl’s use. More broadly, the entire discussion is premised on the positively bizarre notion that the school should be ragged on for bending over backwards to suit this girl’s delicate sensibilities, just so long as they don’t follow the Genital Correctness Busybody Blowhard Brigade in deliberately trying to make the kid’s life more unpleasant, e.g. by refusing to call her by her chosen name, or by forcing her to use the boys’ bathroom when she doesn’t want to use it, or by refusing to intervene against bullies as they would with any other child being bullied for any other reason, or by harassing her, punishing her, or throwing her out of school for wearing the wrong set of clothes. Apparently it’s the acme of liberal hypersensitivity and authoritarian political correctness run amok, and indeed it’s robbing children everywhere of their childhood (!), if you should ever fail to go out of your way to be as obnoxious as possible toward an eight-year-old kid, who never did anything to you, all in the name of heteropatriarchal gender-role social engineering.

The second point to make is about a second-order issue — whether or not the local government in Douglas should be taking a role in promoting one way of running a school or interacting with transgender students over others. Cavuto tries to invoke the issue implicitly by repeatedly referring to tax dollars, and although his specific claims about millions of tax dollars are obvious bullshit, there is a legitimate point buried under it. It should not be the local government’s business to promote either a tolerant or a punitive school environment for this kid — because while I think it’s stupid for any school to harass this kid or try to force her into the right gender identity, I also think that it is tyrannical for any government to force local taxpayers to pay for projects that they personally find abhorrent (whether because they are being forced to pay for violations of their own religious beliefs, or for any other reason). Nor should local parents be forced to enroll their kids in a school that allows openly transgender students to participate in classes. Again, I think that’s a stupid policy to make, but is tyrannical for the government to force parents to put their children in environments that they deeply believe that their children shouldn’t be in.

If we had an argument to the effect that local taxpayers should be able to withhold funding from schools that establish policies they consider wrongheaded, or to the effect that anti-trans local parents should be free to withdraw their kids from this school and make other arrangements (homeschooling, parochial schooling, or whatever), without having to jump the government’s normal punitive bureaucratic hurdles, and without being forced to continue paying for a school that they no longer feel to be fit to educate children, then I would be perfectly willing to take their side on that one — I may disagree with everything that they want to teach kids, but I’ll defend to the death their right to teach it. But, of course, principled small-government conservatives that they are, Cavuto and the rest of the GCBBB are constitutionally incapable of making that kind of second-order argument. Instead, we find a lot of phony-concern hand-wringing from letter writers about local government and school authorities promoting gender confusion, deviance, professional help, a lifetime of pain, etc. (As far as I can tell there’s no evidence that the girl is at all confused; she seems to be pretty clear on what she wants. And there’s no reason to believe that her decision to live as a girl promises a lifetime of pain, unless and except to the extent that other people, i.e. these same busybody blowhards, go out of their way to make it painful. There’s no promise here; only a threat.) But it is no more the job of government authorities to promote conformity to traditional gender roles and their assignment based on biological sex, than it is their job to promote the opposite; it would be just as immoral as them to force me to pay for harassing and penalizing transgender children who would otherwise be happy as clams until they fit back into their proper gender, when I consider that abhorrent. Cavuto, meanwhile, shows his principled conservative bona fides by arguing that no matter how many transgender kids there may be in elementary schools, they are far from the majority. We live in a country where majority rules, which apparently, to his mind, means that when 99% of kids follow traditional gender norms for the sex they were assigned at birth, it must be the government’s job to direct school authorities to treat the remaining 1% like shit, so as to spare the 99% from the terrible confusion of possibly learning something. The majority rules, the minority drools, and if you don’t like it they’ll force you to pay for their Right-wing social engineering anyway. And, oh yes, you will pay.

Further reading:

• GT 2007-12-08: Lazy Linking on Liberatory Learning
• GT 2005-10-07: Small-government conservatives
• GT 2005-03-09: The Most Depressing Photograph in the World
• GT 2001-12-10: Gender terrorism in Nashville

Cops are here to protect you by looking in on an upset young man who locked himself in a room with a small kitchen knife, then drilling a hole in the wall and spraying pepper spray to force him out from the room when he wouldn’t come out voluntarily, then shooting him to death when the pepper spraying forced him out of the room, because he brought out the small kitchen knife that he had taken in with him.

All for his own good, of course. It became necessary to destroy Scott Rockwell in order to save him.

Cops are here to protect you by using handcuffing and arrest to put an end any argument. Even if you’re a firefighter who’s busy trying to rescue an auto accident victim.

Cops are here to protect you by dumping you out of your wheelchair onto the jailhouse floor, and breaking two of your ribs. Just to make sure you weren’t lying, when you told them you can’t stand up because you’re paralyzed from the shoulders down.

Cops are here to protect you using pain compliance, for example hitting you with 50,000-volt electric shocks at least three different times to make you do what they tell you to do, even when you pose no threat of violence to anyone, when you already have your hands cuffed behind your back, and when you are already surrounded or even pinned down to the ground by three armed professionals.

Cops are here to protect you by pinning a 13 year old boy to the ground and choking him for the crime of skateboarding. Then grabbing a teenaged girl in a chokehold for trying to walk away from the scene. Then wrestling down another teenaged boy who tried to protect her from getting manhandled. Then arresting the lot of them on the grounds that failing to immediately obey a cop’s arbitrary orders is a violation of city ordinances against disorderly conduct.

Cops are here to protect you by threatening a 14 year old boy with juvi for backtalk, threatening to smack your mouth for attitude, wrestling him to the ground to steal his skateboards, screaming in the boy’s face for being addressed as dude, and then turning around to threaten another teenager who happens to be filming their professional conduct.

Cops are here to protect you by trashing your college art project and threatening to beat the hell out of you for using public space in ways that confuse and enrage them.

Please note that if you or I or anyone else without a badge and a gun acted like this, the people around us would more or less universally conclude that we’re belligerent and dangerous lunatics. In fact, if you or I or anyone else without a badge and a gun acted like this, and it was caught on camera, we would soon be in jail for on a charge of assault and battery. When someone with a badge and a gun acts like this, and it’s caught on camera, with a very few exceptions, the worst that ever happens is that they might get fired. The most common response from the powers that be is either to do nothing at all, or else to give the pig a paid vacation and a verbal reprimand. Meanwhile, state legislators propose laws to withhold records of the abuse as classified information for reasons of state security. Fellow cops and freelance sado-fascist blowhards can all be counted on to make up any excuse at all, even in defiance of the clear evidence of their senses, in order to get the pig off the hook, no matter how obviously out-of-control the cop may be and no matter how obviously harmless or helpless his victim.

The mainstream newsmedia writes stories with clauses like this:

The skateboarders, who were violating a city ordinance, are claiming police brutality and some say the pictures back up their claim.

The video shows a 13-year-old being held to the ground by his throat. It also shows a girl being held in what appears to be a chokehold.

— KTHV Little Rock: Video Brings Controversy To Police Department

Other cops say things like this:

Hot Springs Police Department spokesman McCrary Means says, If a subject becomes confrontational, the officer has a right to defend himself. There are certain steps: first of all a verbal command. Like I said, if that subject becomes combative, that officer needs to do all he can do to get that subject under control.

— KTHV Little Rock: Video Brings Controversy To Police Department

Please note that Hot Springs Police Department spokesman McCrary Means believes that police officers have a right to grab you and beat the hell out of you in order to defend themselves against a verbal confrontation.

And freelance police-enabling blowhards write in with letters like this:

In regard to the YouTube video in which the Baltimore police officer seems to go overboard in his actions regarding a teenage skateboarder, I’d point out that teenage boys typically resent authority, often continue to do the wrong thing even after repeated instructions to stop and are, in general, a minor menace to society until they grow out of their teenage years.

When they’re doing something wrong, you can ask them to stop over and over again, and they’ll often simply ignore you until you get loud or otherwise assert your authority.

As the uncle of two teenage boys, I have no doubt that the officer reacted in a normal manner and that he should not be subject to disciplinary action.

Jerry Fletcher
Waldorf

And:

When YouTube recently showed a video of a teenage skateboarder being manhandled by a Baltimore police officer, public reaction was swift and severe.

Mayor Sheila Dixon called him a bad apple and the officer was immediately suspended.

I find this rush to judgment without a complete investigation disturbing, especially as the alleged victim had little more than his feelings hurt.

Police officers put their lives on the line every day, and the lack of public support for these men and women, especially from the mayor’s office, is an embarrassment.

Might it be possible that these kids were just punks harassing a veteran officer? And if these upstanding skater dudes were so in the right, why didn’t they file a complaint against the officer?

Let’s hear the whole story before destroying the career of a dedicated public servant.

E. Mitchell Arion
Goldsboro

If E. Mitchell Arion hasn’t watched the video that he speaks so confidently about, then why keep talking about it when he doesn’t know what he’s talking about? If, on the other hand, he has actually watched the video, he must believe that this hollering uniformed thug is in fact a dedicated public servant whose precious career needs to be handled with kid gloves, even though he watched Officer Salvatore Rivieri going up to one of the people he is supposedly serving, screaming in his face, ordering him around, insulting him, telling him to shut up, threatening him, grabbing him, wrestling him down, shoving him back down to the ground, robbing him of his private property, lecturing him, and getting up in his face about the proper titles to use when the kid addresses his putative servant.

It takes an awfully special kind of dedicated servant to treat you like that.

(Hat tips to Lew, Balko, Anthony Gregory #1, Anthony Gregory #2, Bill Anderson, Anthony Gregory #3, Anthony Gregory #4.)

Further reading:

• GT 2008-02-05: Rapists in uniform
• GT 2007-12-23: Law and Orders #5: Daytona Beach cop takes control at Best Buy by shocking an unarmed, retreating woman
• GT 2007-11-09: You got served and protected.
• GT 2007-10-02: Public schooling

(Thanks to Elinor 2008-02-01 for the link.)

Last year in Halifax, Nova Scotia, a gang of three cops — Phillip MacKenzie, Tara Doiron and Brendan Harvey — showed up to intervene in a fight between a seventeen year old girl and her mother. The mother called them in when the girl threatened to damage some property in the house. By the time the police arrived, the girl was calm and it’s likely that the cops could just have left things be, or spent a little bit of time talking to everyone like civilized people in order to make sure that everything would be alright. But, of course, this is completely unacceptable from the standpoint of the police, when there are Bad Teens on the loose, so instead they escalated the confrontation and tried to force her out of the house, so they could proceed with whatever they imagined they needed to proceed with. She argued with them, which a fair number of cops seem to have been trained to treat as a criminal offense, and when the cops decided to arrest her for daring to talk back, there was what the papers call an altercation. When an altercation goes on between a 17 year old girl and three armed, professional cops, what that means is that she struggled briefly and the pigs responded by tackling her, and then, just for good measure, blasting her twice in a row with a 50,000-volt electric shock from their tasers while she was lying helpless in her own bed. After having three armed cops gang up on a teenaged girl to beat and shock her into submission, they then charged her with resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer — the first charge a bogus non-crime when the arrest itself was completely arbitrary, and the second charge an apparent exercise in dreadful farce.

Of course, when The Matter Is Investigated by the police, they will either (a) act as if the cops did nothing wrong, fabricate some incredibly tortured military-necessity excuse without questioning whether the goal of arresting the girl ever needed to be accomplished in the first place, and cite some incredibly vague Official Procedures for the use of force, as if that unquestionably ended the argument; or else (b) failing that, issue some mild administrative sanctions against the cops and write the whole thing off as Yet Another Isolated Incident. In fact, the case is entirely typical — because a massive sense of entitlement; a habit of barging in where you’re not needed and refusing to leave until things are settled to your own satisfaction; a contemptuous indifference to the perceptions, interests, needs, or consent of those you are putatively there to serve and protect; a strategy of needlessly escalate confrontations; a habit of using belligerence to take control of situations that your own actions have made hostile; the casual use of techniques that inflict incredible pain on your victims in order to make them comply with arbitrary orders; a willingness to hurt or arrest your victim in order to end an argument; and an expectation of more or less complete administrative, civil, and criminal impunity, no matter how senseless your orders, no matter how needless your use of violence, and no matter how obviously helpless or harmless your victim may be — are part and parcel of the environment that cops do their dirty work in, from the first day of training to the buddy-thug culture of their departments to the cultural excuse-making and overt legal privileges that insulate them from the expectations that anyone else would be held to outside of the world of rampaging statist power-trips. We already know that cops have no problem electrifying prepubescent children and alleged salad-bar thieves; no problem serving and protecting the hell out of 82-year-old women as part of a care check or repeatedly shocking a young man sleeping in his own house; no problem beating the shit out of teenaged girls in order to arrest them for not cleaning up spilled cake well enough or being out too late at night, and then charging the girl that they violently confronted, and who they outweigh by a hundred pounds or more, with criminal assault. So, while this case is outrageous, why should it be surprising? The only thing that’s unusual is that, for once, somebody in the legal system — Anne Derrick, the youth court judge who took the girl’s resisting-arrest and assault case — actually drew back the veil of Law Enforcement, acquitted the girl of all charges, and called the police on their shit:

A Halifax Youth Court judge criticized three police officers Tuesday for their arrest of a teenage girl, who was tackled in her own bed and shocked twice with a stun gun last February.

The spectacle of a 17-year-old girl being Tasered in her bedroom is a very disturbing and disconcerting one, Halifax Youth Court Judge Anne Derrick said in her ruling on the charges of resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer.

I find the police acted outside the scope of their authority in arresting [the girl] and that she was entitled to resist and committed no offence in doing so, and I acquit her of the charges before the court.

Derrick also found that the police escalated the situation leading to the arrest.

— CBC News (2008-01-30): Halifax judge slams police for using Taser on teen girl

Meanwhile, the young woman, now 18, having spent an entire year of her life trying to clear away this nonsense, plans to file a complaint with the police department, now that she has finally been vindicated in court. She is also considering a civil suit. I hope that she sues the pigs personally and takes them for everything they've got. Unfortunately, if a suit is filed, what will probably happen is that the police or the local government will settle the case out of court, and then, public servants that they are, they will send the bill straight to a bunch of perfectly innocent taxpayers, while the thugs MacKenzie, Doiron and Harvey go on terrorizing innocent people in the name of public safety, suffering some mild administrative sanction at the worst.

If you're baffled that cops would go on committing these kind of outrages, over and over again, in so many different cities in the U.S. and Canada, never exhibiting any interest at all in introspection or critical re-evaluation of their institutional culture beyond a bureaucratic review of whether cops should be carrying tasers (as if this were some kind of equipment failure!), and never addressing any issues that this might raise other than the P.R. problems that it causes for the police department, well, that’s pretty much why. Why would they ever try to act accountably or responsibly when the existing framework of immunities and legal privileges granted them by the State virtually guarantees that they will never personally be held responsible or called to account for what they do?

According to the ruling elite and the rank-and-file of bellowing Know-Nothing busybodies, all the people of the world must be segregated according to their nationality. If they won’t stay in their place voluntarily, then the government had better make them stay there through paramilitary lockdowns at national borders and rigid enforcement of a state-imposed passbook (visa, passport) system to control where people can live and work, which is to say a system of government permission slips for existing, which provides a mechanism for the state to track and control those who go through official channels, and a mechanism for detecting, arresting, jailing, and exiling peaceful residents from the communities that they now call home when they cannot meet some presumptuous government official’s demand for Ihre Papiere, bitte. Those who stand up for this despicable system of coercion and control — some of whom embrace it whole-heartedly out of unapologetic race hatred or inquisitorial theo-nationalism, and some of whom do the same damage by making half-hearted Sensible Liberal excuses based on an illusory need for control or the chauvinistic ideal of assimilation — are all promoting a government-imposed system of discrimination and rigid segregation in housing, employment, education, and civic life, supported by government surveillance, enforced through government violence, all in the name of an illusory national unity or integrity that depends, at the bottom, on having the government presumptively treat outsiders (even those outsiders who have been living and working inside for years) as more dangerous, more likely to be criminal, more unsanitary, less deserving of security in their persons and effects, less worthy of a happy life, and less deserving of simply being left in peace than the native-born, solely on the basis of their nationality. That is to say, treating them as if their lives and homes and livelihoods were worth less than nothing–just so much foul-smelling garbage to be removed at the first opportunity.

It’s precisely this sort of immorality — the elevation of state control or belligerent nationalism over common decency towards peaceful people — that has been put on display recently in Roswell, New Mexico, with the arrest, jailing, expulsion and exile of Karina Acosta, a pregnant high schooler who was ready to graduate in the spring, because the immigration law, which is nothing but Jim Crow imposed at the level of nationality, forbids her from attending an Estadounidense school, and Student Resource Officer Charlie Corn, the pig-in-residence at Roswell High School, decided to take the opportunity of a minor traffic violation pull her out of class, arrest her, and then snitch on her to La Migra, so that they could jail her and force her out of her home, away from her family, and back into her place.

U.S. immigration officials deported a pregnant Roswell High School senior after she was pulled from class Wednesday by a local police officer regarding a traffic ticket issued days before.

According to Roswell Police Chief John Balderston, Karina Acosta, 18, was given several days to provide proper identification after being cited for a parking violation and driving without a license on Nov. 29 but failed to do so.

RHS Student Resource Officer Charlie Corn, a 10-year RPD veteran, removed Acosta from class Dec. 5 regarding the traffic violation and detained her at the school before notifying U.S. immigration officials of her illegal status, according to Balderston.

Acosta, who is five months pregnant, was transported to the Chaves County Detention Center, put on hold by the INS and later deported to Mexico, according to Balderston.

In the course of an investigation, if we determine that someone is not here legally, we will contact INS and tell them what their status is, he said.

Worried about the deportation of the girl and the future security of other illegal immigrant students at RHS, Acosta’s mother and nearly 50 members of the Hispanic community gathered at the RHS Little Theater, and later the Roswell Police Department, to voice their concerns.

The kids are scared now because this thing happened, so we need your help, said Maria Rodriguez to Balderston during a meeting in an RPD conference room Friday afternoon.

At the meeting, Balderston listened to complaints about Corn, including allegations he targets Hispanics. Balderston agreed to meet further with representatives from the Hispanic community and Corn in an effort to ease relations and eliminate any problems or misconceptions that might exist.

If you don’t trust us then we need to do some more work here, said Balderston, who will retire Jan. 4.

Roswell Independent School District Assistant Superintendent Mike Kakuska said the RISD has officially protested Acosta’s arrest with the INS and the Mexican Consulate.

We are very, very concerned as a public school as to what happened the other day, said Kakuska, addressing a group of about 50 parents who gathered at RHS Friday morning. The police officer, without our knowledge, had this young lady brought into his office here at school and the detain orders were issued through him, not the Roswell schools.

— Richard Jacques, Roswell Daily Record (2007-12-08): RHS senior deported; parents concerned

The good news is that Charlie Corn and all the other pigs-in-residence have been removed from Roswell city schools. The bad news is that Karina Acosta is still stuck in Mexico, away from her family, her home, and her school. And the Roswell cops will do it again, by God, just as soon as they get the chance:

In the lengthy open meeting that lasted more than one hour, Kakuska and other school officials, including RHS Principal Brian Shea, answered questions and notified those in attendance that Corn has been removed as an SRO.

The Roswell Independent School system did not support the decision of this officer to have this young lady arrested, said Kakuska.

In a joint decision by the RPD and RISD, all SROs have been removed from RISD schools. Both Balderston and Kakuska maintain that despite the incident, no contention exists between the RISD and the RPD.

We’re going to work through this and I wish I can say that it’s not going to happen again, but I can’t. The officers are going to enforce the law, said Balderston.

School officials said Acosta was on course to graduate in the spring.

— Richard Jacques, Roswell Daily Record (2007-12-08): RHS senior deported; parents concerned

Just remember: it doesn’t matter to these people how good a student you are, or how hard you’ve worked, or what a decent and productive member of your community you are, let alone — ha, ha — the mere fact that you are an individual, irreplaceable human being who has the right to expect a certain level of dignity, decent treatment, and basic humanity from your neighbors and from your brothers and sisters in other communities. What matters is The Law, and the coerced integrity of a segregated nation, and the power of the world’s governments to each keep their own herd properly corralled and branded. To hell with that idiot notion. Smash international apartheid, now and forever.

(Story thanks to brownfemipower 2007-12-11.)