I was in a lockdown just the other day while substituting (albeit for a drug search, not "violence.") The lost instructional time - however long the lockdown took plus the rest of whatever class happens to be right after it - over something so meaningless must be hair-pulling for the teachers.
I have to remind myself to be sensitive over things like that because I'm not as associative as other people. That song wouldn't make me think of 9/11 even the day after.
I guess it's a matter of context, because it's immediately what I thought of after hearing it relatively soon after. The guy in question was pretty much self-centered and only cared about what he wanted to play, not what others might have thought. To this day, because of that, I still associate the song with the event.
It is actually tied to that event, but not the way you think. Many troops in Afghanistan used it and similar songs as part for psychological warfare, to demotivate enemy troops and deprive them of sleep (their culture didn't have anything resembling heavy metal, so just think of how they must have perceived such songs, dialed up to 11).
Interesting. I had no idea that it was tied to that, but I guess it makes sense as the song is quite graphic.
"Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer." Though I'd argue that any n - ten, one hundred, ten billion - is better to let escape. The student was arrested without cause. I'd definitely say that his essential liberty was sacrificed. (Not to mention anybody who was detained because of the lockdown - be they visiting adults or students who were scheduled to leave the property for whatever reason.)
Yes, I too am a fan of Blackstone, although he was talking about convictions. For what it's worth, I meant it was better for the school receptionist to overreact than underreact. I wasn't commenting on the arrest (I actually missed that), I was just thinking of the lockdown. I had no problem with her calling the police, trusting them to better exercise good judgment. I agree there's no probable cause for an arrest based on these facts.
Just today a student was suspended for tackling and disarming another student on the school bus who'd pulled out a gun and was about to shoot one of the other passengers. The school said he was "involved" in an incident with a weapon, so they suspended him. With that logic all the police officers should be in jail for being "involved" in an arrest. As for the student with the ringtone, did the police verify that he wasn't infringing on the copyright to the song? Since he was allegedly the one singing it, he's probably not paid into any royalty stream and thus could possibly face huge fines and jail time. He's lucky the police didn't find any nail clippers or they could probably add on "armed copyright infringement" and slap another five years on his sentence.
It made sense to me. Granted there is no such crime of 'armed copyright infringement,' but I understood each point being made, to the extent it was a joke about our overly litigious and overly regulated society.
Considering all the school shootings since Columbine, if I were the receptionist I would be uppity too. She did the right thing, even if it turned out to be a mistake. The times between when Fresh Prince was on and now are so significantly different that you can't be too careful.
While the arrest seems like overkill, in defense of the receptionist reporting the message to police in the first place, this was not a ring tone of the actual Fresh Prince theme with music. It was just the student himself speaking the lyric “And all shooting some b-ball outside of the school” as a voice mail message. Not to pass snap judgments on a 19-year-old who's still in high school, but perhaps he's not the most articulate person, and I can easily see how "b-ball" and "people" could get mixed up in a poor sounding recording, especially when it's just spoken without musical accompaniment, which would make you question its seriousness. Plus, leaving a message with your intentions to shoot up a school or workplace is not unheard of for mass shooters. So, I don't blame her for taking precautions, especially in this day and age.
^ They do sound similar, but that's not how the song starts, even the main part of the rap. Anyhow, given her shaky grasp of pop culture, did she make a good decision? Yes. Would taking one or two minutes to get a second opinion before calling in all sorts of police, diverting them from other places, and causing all sorts of alarm have been an even better decision? Yeah, I think so. Moot point, though.