There has been a spate of events where police in Texas overplays the use of force against upper-class non-white teenagers. Most recently, Mohamed, a 14 year old freshman at MacArthur High School in Irving, Texas, was taken into police custody when he brought a homemade digital clock to school to impress the teachers.
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The case of the 14-year old wunderkind put in handcuffs is making national news, highlighting how racism and Islamophobia are breeding hysteria even in our schools. It’s also spotlighting boneheaded behavior: instead of apologizing to Ahmed, his school dug in and defended the arrest and suspension of their award-winning engineering student.
Support for Ahmed is surging. The hashtag #IStandWithAhmed (https://twitter.com/hashtag/
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Ninth grader Ahmed Mohammed has a passion for robotics and engineering. He builds things all the time. On Sunday he made a clock and took it to show his engineering teacher at school on Monday. Another teacher saw it, said it looked like a bomb from the movies, convened a group of teachers to interrogate him, and called the police. They handcuffed Ahmed and took him to jail where he was fingerprinted, had his mug shot taken, and interrogated without a parent — against the law. Would a Texas student named Brad or Amy have received the same treatment?
Regardless of whether the school’s actions of taking the clock for a bomb and calling the police were paranoiac or due-diligence, the police had no grounds to arrest and handcuff a 14 year old in school without contacting his parents first and assessing the situation properly. The kid did not treat anyone and only showed the clock to a teacher, that assumed without other cause than racial profiling, that it was a bomb. The police knew that the device was NOT a bomb since they interrogated the child for over an hour and charged him with faking a bomb, despite the fact that he always described the device to everybody as a digital clock.
In June 2015, In McKinney, Texas, police broke a local pool party on Friday night, like if it were a burglary of some sort, harassing black kids, but leaving white ones alone, as if they were invisible. A situation between a mom and a girl broke out and when the cops showed up everyone ran, including the people who didn’t do anything. So the cops just started putting everyone on the ground and in handcuffs for no reason. This kind of force is uncalled for especially on children and innocent bystanders. In particular, a police officer put a 13 year old girl face down in the floor for no reason at all. The officer was placed on administrative leave after being filmed aggressively handcuffing, and then pulling a weapon on, a group of black teens.
The harsh treatment of teens that are handcuffed while involved in non-aggressive normal day-to-day activities contrast with the treatment given thugs actually involved in murder and a shoot out at a mall.
Police in Waco charged 170 people with organised crime in what could potentially represent the largest mass arrest on a capital charge in American history. The gangsters were arrested and charged in connection with a deadly shootout between rival biker gangs in Waco, Texas, which left nine dead and 18 injured. However, if one looks at pictures of the arrest, he gangsters were not even handcuffed.