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Comment by UnoriginalGuy | Hacker News Reader

I was really shocked to learn that most US secondary schools ("K12") have a police officer in them and if you get into trouble the police officer will literally come and "arrest" you.

I don't even know where to start pointing out what is wrong with THAT...

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The US is a massively policed society. As an Australia, I expect to see a police car about once a month. In France, where I have lived for the last 10 years, it might be more like 1-2 times a week. In the US (based on a few weeks holidays that included rural/small town/big cities), I saw multiple police cars every day. I saw two violent arrests in those few weeks, which was the same as I had seen in my life up to that point.

Now maybe I was just unlucky, but Washington DC, and rural Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania are hardly considered hotspots of trouble (well, maybe DC, but I was in the nice parts of town!)

School is meant to prepare them for adulthood and the odds that an American will go to prison are relatively high.

Not really.

> the odds that an American will go to prison are relatively high.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra...)

That "relatively" is important.

(In 2009)

    US:     743 per 100,000 
    Russia: 577 per 100,000
    China:  120 per 100,000
    Canada: 117 per 100,000

Compared to other countries the chances of an American going to prison are higher, even though the chances overall are quite low.

It is if you are black and male.

The large number of Americans in jail are pretty irrelevant to ~you~ and your friends/family not being in jail.

It's quite sad really. Even the most minor infractions will have the police officer(s) (oftentimes multiple) coming after you. These infractions can range from decorating someone's locker (vandalism) to voicing unorthodox opinions.

what opinions?

Here's a uniform dispute, with an NRA t-shirt:

(http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/04/23/8th-grader-suspen...)

(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/21/student-nra-shirt_n...)

It's difficult to know what happened, but something like a child wears an NRA t-shirt to school; people ask him to change it; he refuses; the discipline escalates; police are called.

The HuffPo article says something about a disruption. Usually children are disruptive because the adult in the situation allows them to be disruptive. Ignore the shirt and there's no disruption. Ask him to leave the class and there's no disruption. (I'm not sure of the situation. Maybe he's standing on the desks and yelling about his First Amendment Rights. (And maybe if he wrote a 1,000 word essay on the first amendment and how it protects speech and why Americans love it so much the school may chose to relax the punishment.)

I understand that there may be times when schools need to call the police. A child with a weapon is capable of killing; a child breaking criminal laws needs to be dealt with.

But, assuming this child stayed calm during the sequence, I can't understand why the police are involved.

If I'd had my house or car burgled and I read this I'd be pretty annoyed that police were spending time on this stuff and not actual crimes.

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