Truancy Thugs and Tasers in the Schools

It never occurs to them that by treating kids like animals, they turn them into animals. Or maybe that did occur to them...maybe that's the point.

Will Grigg
LRC Blog -

Jeffione Thomas, a junior at Philadephia’s Frankford High School, is used to being gang-tackled on the football field. He wasn’t prepared to be gang-tackled and beaten by police officers on the way to school. And as is frequently the case when a tax-subsidized simian gets his hands bloody beating a civilian, it is the victim in this videotaped October 29 incident who faces assault charges.

Thomas arrived late for school after oversleeping. Outside the school he ran into several officers from the School District Task Force, who ordered him to get into a truancy van.

“I’m already late,” Thomas replied, quite sensibly declining the offer and continuing into the school without breaking his stride.

Within a few seconds the 5 foot 8, 170-pound teenager found himself at the bottom of a scrum of well-fed police, who protected and served him with such enthusiasm that he had to be hospitalized for injuries to his eyes and teeth.

Thomas, who had been in trouble before but seemed to be turning his life around, missed three football games while recuperating from the thoughtful ministrations of the Truancy Thugs.

While Thomas, his family, and legal counsel deal with the aftermath of his beating, police officers assigned to Brunswick High School in Georgia’s Glynn County are looking to expand the arsenal they can deploy against truants and other miscreants.

The Brunswick News reports that “Glynn County school resource officers — and some board of education members — say they know what is needed to control fights and unruliness at after-school functions, such as football games: the M-26 Advanced Taser.”

“As a deterrent, a Taser makes a great weapon,” insisted Lt. John Grant, a school resource officer, during a school board meeting. His comrade, Sgt. Robert Kocour, eagerly concurred: “A Taser is the best tool for police because it enforces compliance.”

Advocates for deploying the portable electro-shock torture device in Glynn County schools referred to recent incidents in which fights broke out during sporting events. But this is a case of trying to invent a “problem” in order to justify a pre-selected “solution.”

As Brunswick Police Chief Matt Doering points out, a Taser, as a “single-person device,” isn’t suitable for crowd control. This indicates that the school “resource officers” are fishing for a rationale to be given shiny new torture toys.

Tasers would come in handy as a way to compel recalcitrant students to take potentially lethal government-approved psychotropic drugs on their way to DARE indoctrination, or to round up any stragglers who aren’t eager to attend the annual “Red Ribbon Week” assembly to be harangued about the evils of (non-government-sanctioned) violence.

The ever-increasing possibility of students experiencing sudden, unjustified police violence ranks very high among the myriad reasons for parents to remove their children from the government’s mind-laundries.