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Comment by kayodelycaon | Hacker News Reader

Strip searching a 13-year-old girl and locking her in a jail cell for a joke? Wow. And they did all this without telling her parents.

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They didn't do it because it's reasonable. They did it to send a message. Ain't no different than the health inspector or building commissioner acting way too big for their britches knowing full well there will be no consequences.

Look at public schools as just another municipal enforcement department tasked with making sure the kids all meet state standards and it makes sense (or at least to the same extent that all the other indefensible shit done in the name of government makes sense).

I remember when in high school in Utah we went on a field trip to a halfway house, for some reason - it was during the time when scared straight was real popular so of course every kid should be scared straight whether they have juvenile offenses or not. It was some sort of law class I think.

Anyway they took us to look at the inmates in the halfway house who were behind bars and then they could come out to the bars and as their part of the whole scared straight exercise they would of course yell stuff at us, which was mainly about how they wanted to have sex with the approximately 16 year old girls on the trip.

Gosh, Utah sure is a morally upstanding place.

This is nefarious.

Absolutely horrifying

A joke which could, out of context, be interpreted to be a threat of violence:

> on Thursday we kill all the Mexico’s

Especially considering the frequency of violence in American schools, can't really blame the school for jumping to conclusions.

"can't really blame the school for jumping to conclusions"

Of course you can blame the school. They were too lazy to look at context and determine if the threat was real and credible. They took the determination of a complex tool as an unquestionable fact. The system supplies the fact that the user's account made the comment. All other facts need to be made by investigation. This statement provides a reasonable suspicion to investigate, but should not exhibit probable cause for an arrest as it requires a threat be credible, incite panick, etc per the specific terrorist threat law. This requires investigation and thought.

> Of course you can blame the school. They were too lazy to look at context and determine if the threat was real and credible

Do you think whoever is doing this at the school is a qualified professional, e.g. a child/teen psychiatrist that knows the kid in question well enough, to be able to determine if the threat was real and credible?

You don't have to be an expert to read the context. In normal terroristic threat cases the people involved are not psychologists. The police aren't using any child psychologists either. The problem here is the brainless reliance on what a system spits outs. The world would have ended by now if we relied on automated systems without using common sense (see multiple ICBM radar false positives during the cold war).

Kids saying shit is now equivalent to 'normal terrorist[ic] threat cases'? Or did I miss something. If you can't evaluate the data, don't collect the data.

"Kids saying shit is now equivalent to 'normal terrorist[ic] threat cases'?"

It's terroristic threats. That's the law most of the school shooting threats would get charged under. The real problem is that most states have automatic reporting laws, which means you have to report anything that sounds like a threat even if it isn't. This is the main difference between regular cases and school cases - you end up with a lot of junk being reported and potentially causing more harm than it was intended to prevent.

A 13 year old girl is not able to make a credible generalized terrorist threat against a large swath of the population, and besides, the first thing you should do when a kid starts making dumb statements like that is check in with them and their parents, not to call the police. Automatic reporting laws that lead to 13 year old girls being strip-searched are not something anybody should want.

There is an easy way to stop 99.9% of all school shootings, and it isn't 'automatic reporting laws'.

Nor automatic weapons for all the teachers.

https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/arming-teach...

https://www.ue.org/risk-management/premises-safety/increased...

I find proximity to weapons a fairly good indicator of whether or not you're at risk of being shot. If teachers were armed that would be the last time my kids went to school.

>Automatic reporting laws that lead to 13 year old girls being strip-searched are not something anybody should want.

Don't worry, the people who want these Orwellian things will find a more "marketable" way of describing it.

Children don't do "threads", that's why they are literally not of age. At most they say stupid shit that would be a threat if an adult had said that. The schools job is literally to teach children to not (want to) say that.

You missed the amounts of kids that committed massacres, which has made US schools understandably paranoid.

We're a quarter way through the century and you can about count the number that did a good enough job to make national news on one hand. It isn't something that a first pass filter ought to be looking for.

What is the false positive rate of this system?

If you want to solve this problem solve it at the root, not by overreacting to teenagers.

Educating children is literally the schools profession. If you are looking for a state employed child psychiatrist it will be in the school.

Being unqualified to make a decision and then still making that decision only makes you more culpable, not less.

And they stuck to it despite the fact that the situation became "serious".

Like if you're gonna do "make the news" shit you oughta at least have someone check your goddamn work first.

It's a threat of violence in context as well.

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