Tolerance in Zero-Tolerance

By Fester:

It is sad that we need a Supreme Court ruling saying that humiliation and strip-searches on a middle-schooler on the concerns that she may or may not have Advil or Aleve on her person is an unreasonable intrusion of privacy.  It is worse that this was not a unanimous decision. 

Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon has a good take on the nature of the zero-tolerance fetish that has been expanding throughout our public sphere for my entire life.  It is impossible to actually have zero tolerance on all potentially deviant behaviors, the enforcement and monitoring costs are too high:

it�s important to understand that in zero tolerance land, it becomes
acceptable to freak out over things like a girl having Midol in her
purse or some boy wears baggy pants.  When anything can be treated like
rock solid evidence of criminality, it becomes super easy to railroad
kids that trip up the school officials� prejudices.  Not that I don�t
think the school-to-prison pipeline couldn�t exist without zero
tolerance, but I�m guessing it greases the wheels significantly.  The
irony of zero tolerance is that it�s going to be selectively enforced. 
It has to be.  When you can blow pretty much any behavior up to make it
seem criminal, either everyone is turned into a criminal or you simply
focus all your attention on kids that you had your suspicions about

A good friend of mine is currently going through a federal background and security check for a federal police/law enforcement position.  I have known "Bob" for close to two decades now.  We were thick as thieves.  There were five of us in high school who had each others' back and stuck together no matter what.  As far as I know there is nothing for Bob to be concerned about for the feds to uncover.  He never smoked weed (none of us did in high school) and harder drugs were something that he stayed away from as well.

There was nothing that Bob ever actually got tagged for on his official record besides a few speeding tickets as we ran up to either Hampton Beach in the summer or Gunstock in the winter.  There may have been one failure to come to a complete stop citation but I was quietly drunk and he was flirting with the cop, so that may have been a warning instead of a ticket. 

He never got tagged for anything.  This is despite the fact that the five of us as a group drank more beer than most high schoolers, drove just as poorly as most high schoolers, got into short, decisive and violent fights in front of non-involved witnesses, sent a couple of people to the hospital, wrecked a bar  and engaged in numerous other little slivers of law breaking.  After we wrecked that bar, the owner smiled and said he did not want to
see us for the next couple of weeks as he knew we did not start the
trouble.

None of us got tagged for anything despite the fact that our behavioral patterns should have made us high risk individuals.  And it was not because the cops never noticed what we were doing.  We were hassled often enough (usually with decent cause) but we were not assholes back to the cops, were white, dressed as middle class kids and otherwise we did not ping the "this is worth the trouble" radar for the cops in question.  We knew where the limit of 'reasonable lawbreaking' was and could rely upon the fact that the cops in the area that we grew up in were unconsciously or consciously subservient to the existing political power structure. 

Zero tolerance laws and regulations for some of our behaviors were in full force if you listened to the blowhard city counselors or the town meeting, but the cops would have been overwhelmed on running every kid that we knew into the station for curfew, noise or alcohol violations that they selectively enforced the law.  And the selective enforcement of the law always seemed to land on the people without the political capacity to cause trouble.  Amazing how that turns out.

So my buddy Bob has nothing on his record and a chance at a pretty damn good job that a couple of acquaintances of mine will never have because our behaviors were tolerated in a zero tolerance environment while their same behaviors were not.