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.
The problem with the principal refusing to escort the officer is then they are obstructing a police investigation, and that is a crime. It isn’t fair to put this burden on them, the blame lies squarely with the police chain of command.
In fact the root problem of all things police is that once police decide to do something, even if that thing is illegal, interfering is a crime.
This is how we end up with people being charged with resisting arrest, and no other crimes that would warrant an arrest. This is also how we end up with a bunch of people live streaming George Floyd’s execution, because stopping a cop from killing someone is a crime.