Boys Will Be Boys?

If they are, then they may be marked as sexual predators and sent to jail. 

For the unbelievable details, see this.

At Patton Middle School in McMinnville, Oregon, students created something called "slap butt day." On one such day in February 2007, according to The Oregonian (July 22, 2007): "Two boys tore down the hall of Patton Middle School after lunch, swatting the bottoms of girls as they ran -- what some kids later said was a common form of greeting. But bottom-slapping is against policy in McMinnville Public Schools. So a teacher's aide sent the gawky seventh-graders to the office, where the vice principal and a police officer stationed at the school soon interrogated them."

A police officer interrogated them?

"After hours of interviews with students," The Oregonian continues, "the day of the February incident, the officer read the boys their Miranda rights and hauled them off in handcuffs to juvenile jail, where they spent the next five days."

Two seventh-graders were read their Miranda rights for butt-swatting?

And hauled off to jail for butt-swatting?

And kept in jail for five days for butt-swatting?

This is worse than a bad joke; it is actually sick.

Comments

[Greg]

While I agree with you on how outrageous this is, this is not the first instance of something like this happening. Back on April 9, 2007 Bob Herbert of the New York Times wrote an op-ed detailing the account of a girl in Florida being arrested, hand cuffed and charged with a felony for having a tantrum in class. After the incident Herbert interviewed the "no-nonsense" police chief who defended the arrest of the girl.

"When 6-year-old Desre'e Watson threw a tantrum in her kindergarten class a couple of weeks ago she could not have known that the full force of the law would be brought down on her and that she would be carted off by the police as a felon," Herbert wrote. "But that's what happened in this small, backward city in central Florida. According to the authorities, there were no other options."

Avon Park police chief Frank Mercurio said "The student became violent. She was yelling, screaming -- just being uncontrollable. Defiant". After Herbert responded, "But she was 6," Mercurio's "reply came faster than a speeding bullet: 'Do you think this is the first 6-year-old we've arrested?'". Mercurio added, "Believe me when I tell you, a 6-year-old can inflict injury to you just as much as any other person."

Herbert went on to note, "Last spring a number of civil rights organizations collaborated on a study of disciplinary practices in Florida schools and concluded that many of them, 'like many districts in other states, have turned away from traditional education-based disciplinary methods -- such as counseling, after-school detention, or extra homework assignments -- and are looking to the legal system to handle even the most minor transgressions.'"