A cop’s decision to sport a body camera and search a Massachusetts middle school for a book has raised serious concerns among civil liberties experts, a new report shows.
The Berkshire Eagle reported Wednesday on mounting fears after the Great Barrington plainclothes police officer who entered an eighth grade classroom at W.E.B. Du Bois Regional Middle School.
“Police going into schools and searching for books is the sort of thing you hear about in communist China and Russia," Ruth A. Bourquin, senior and managing attorney for the ACLU of Massachusetts, told the local news outlet. "What are we doing?”
For their part, police say they were obligated to investigate a complaint about the book “Gender Queer” by Maia Kobabe, a memoir about gender identity that contains sexually explicit illustrations and language, the report notes.
Anyone who has had their bike stolen or car broken into or otherwise be victim of a crime the police don’t really care about knows this is not the case. You’ll be told to come in and fill out a form, or if you’re lucky you might have someone call you and fill out the form for you. They’re not going to send a cop out for that, and the form doesn’t really get acted on, it’s just for records keeping.
The last time I had my car broken into, they sent an officer out to take the report. They, of course, did nothing with that report, and I found the person who had broken into my car later through reliable sources.
For a while, I had a partner who lived in Harlem. Their apartment was broken into multiple times by forced entry via the fire escape.
I remember the cops laughing as they took the report, which we only filed to get the insurance claims. Nothing was done other than sending out two officers to spend five minutes taking the report. I’m not saying they need to find every stolen laptop in NYC, though. I’m just saying that they absolutely choose how to investigate and resource complaints.
Last time I had my car broken into they told me to file a report online. It took them over a year to send a form letter reply saying they got it.
Yeah I don’t want my police spinning their wheels hunting for a used bike. The police time and resources could pay for a new bike.
Unfortunately, that’s not the tradeoff the police department offers. And we do need to distinguish between relative and absolute values. Relative to myself, having a multi-thousand dollar bike loss isn’t all that big of a deal, and I have insurance anyway. For others who depend on their bikes as their primary mode of transportation and who don’t have the ability to just walk into a bike store and slap down a credit card without thinking twice, it’s a much bigger deal. For those people, their lives are impacted as much as a car theft would on someone else.
I do get that we have limited resources and they need to be used for more serious violations, but by that same token book banning isn’t one, and would not have required an officer to physically investigate. This is about purely fascistic thought control and book banning. Honestly, I would have preferred that cop go track down a stolen bike ring.