War on Hand Sanitizer: No Surrender!

Some cops are dumb as posts. Like this guy. The county prosecutor appears to be a little soft in the head, too, for filing charges in the first place.

Denton County [Texas] prosecutors decided Friday to wash their hands of a case against a Lewisville middle school student accused of trying to get high by sniffing his teacher's hand sanitizer. Three days after filing delinquency charges against the youth, prosecutors did a turnaround and decided that the common cleaning gel is not an abusive inhalant under the Texas Health and Safety Code.     

"It's not a crime. Hand sanitizer does not fall within that statute," said Jamie Beck, first assistant districtattorney in Denton County. "The police agency brought it up mistakenly thinking it was."...

Mr. Ortiz said the family's ordeal began Oct. 19, when his son picked up a bottle of hand sanitizer from the desk of his fifth-period reading teacher at Killian Middle School in Lewisville. He rubbed the gel on his hands and smelled it. In the view of school officials, the boy "inhaled heavily," according to Mr. Ortiz, who said his son sniffed the cleanser "because it smelled good."

The youth was sent to the principal's office, and the Lewisville police officer assigned to the school began investigating. "The event happened at the campus," said Dean Tackett, a spokesman for the Lewisville Independent School District. "But once the police took it over, it was a police investigation. They decide if there are charges and what kind of charges."

The other thing that's amazing here is a common denominator in too many of these news stories: the phrase "police officer assigned to the school."

Why are there cops in middle schools to begin with? And if we think it's a good idea to replace the hall monitors of yore with uniformed, armed crimefighters, how about at least restricting the officers' activities to shooting the next Dylan Klebold cleanly between the eyes?

It's easy to see what leads to the incredibly stupid law-enforcement excesses of a case like that of the hand-sanitizer bandit: boredom.

Not the kid's. The cop's.

The tedium of being assigned to a school with a preponderance of reasonably well-behaved kids must be mindboggling. Then, when something — any petty thing — does happen, the officer is likely to throw himself into the situation like a parched bedouin would jump into a puddle in the desert. It's lucky that we haven't yet seen a case of a cop breaking up a cafeteria food fight by emptying his gun into some dastardly 14-year-old pudding-throwers. Give it time, I guess.

Schools are for kids and for teachers. Putting officers with handcuffs and guns in their midst is a solution in search of a problem.

Kick them out.

Comments

[Phelps]

I can't imagine living my life under the constant, unrelenting fear that someone, somewhere might be enjoying themselves.

[George Arndt]

Recently, a student was suspended for kissing his girlfriend on the Bus. (it makes me wonder if they've taken the "abstinence only" education just a tad to far) The K through 12 schools these days won't let any amount of pleasure go unpunished.

We may be fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, but something similar seems to be taking hold in the public schools. Soon, we'll replace the dept of education with the Ministry of Public Vice and Morality. It will be headed by Mullah James Dobson and the Burka clad leadership of NOW.

The Religious Right and the PC segment of the Left both seem to agree that the less freedom in public schools,(and in society in general) the better

[Barry Endsley]

I had a child in a school district in Texas. Every school had some sort of law officer constantly on duty. The Constable courts had to deal with a constant stream of parents bringing their children in with tickets for offenses like "disrupting the educational process". It was good for a lot of revenue.