2 weeks Ago
An unnamed female juvenile was arrested Tuesday and charged with one count of making a threat of mass harm via social media. The unspecified threat was aimed at the Lockport and Newfane school districts, both of which were obligated to heighten security and try to carry on as usual while the Lockport Police Department and the Niagara County Sheriff’s Office investigated. In the end, it was determined, the threat was “noncredible.
” The girl who’s accused of making the threat — and forcing two school districts and two police agencies to go into crisis mode for a while — was not, and will not be, publicly named by police or the family court where the criminal charge against her will be adjudicated. That is per New York State law as well as conventional wisdom; children are immature mentally as well as physically and should not be held to the same standards as adults. In sharp contrast, in central Florida, a top county law enforcement officer has determined that public scorn is the least that certain juvenile pranksters — and their parents — deserve when they set off alarm bells in their community on a whim.
NBC News reported Tuesday on the decision of Volusia County Sheriff Mike Chitwood to release the name and mug shot of an 11-year-old child charged with making a written threat of a mass shooting last week, following the child’s admission to police that the threat was a joke. Also released was a video showing the handcuffed child being walked into the county jail. “Since, parents, you don’t want to raise your kids, I’m gonna start raising them,” the sheriff declared at a news conference.
“Every time we make an arrest, your kid’s photo is going to be put out there, and if I can do it, I’m gonna perp walk your kid so that everybody can see what your kid’s up to. ..
. We’re gonna have a poster out, I’m gonna show you every kid that’s been arrested and where they go to school. And from there on out, we’re going to publicly shame them and their parents.
So parents, do your job. Don’t let Sheriff Chitwood raise our kids. This is absolutely ridiculous.
” Too harsh? Well, yeah. And no. The thought of an 11-year-old being perp-walked, over the modern version of the phoned-in school “bomb threat,” is pretty awful, especially if you’re one who remembers the old prank, and the accompanying certainty that’s all it ever was.
Here in Niagara County, the names of juveniles who threaten violence at a local school or schools, credibly or not, are not publicized, but the outcomes of their court cases, and school disciplinary proceedings, should be. The Columbine high school massacre changed everything. Since 1999, there have been 417 school shootings in the United States, according to the Washington Post, and by now there’s zero certainty that anyone is “just joking” when they reference the possibility this or that school will be next.
Even a child can understand the gravity of that. And in Volusia County, Florida, at least, parents should understand it better now, having heard all about so-and-so’s 11-year-old kid who was booked on a felony charge, fingerprinted, photographed and locked in a holding cell pending their first court appearance. Society, which truly is the victim in these cases, has a right to know how the perpetrators are being dealt with.
We all need to know that they’re not being handled with kid gloves just because they’re kids. Students and their parents need to know it, too, lest anyone think a pretend threat of chaos at school is a laughing matter, just kid stuff. It most definitely is not.
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