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.
Unfortunately, that’s not the tradeoff the police department offers. And we do need to distinguish between relative and absolute values. Relative to myself, having a multi-thousand dollar bike loss isn’t all that big of a deal, and I have insurance anyway. For others who depend on their bikes as their primary mode of transportation and who don’t have the ability to just walk into a bike store and slap down a credit card without thinking twice, it’s a much bigger deal. For those people, their lives are impacted as much as a car theft would on someone else.
I do get that we have limited resources and they need to be used for more serious violations, but by that same token book banning isn’t one, and would not have required an officer to physically investigate. This is about purely fascistic thought control and book banning. Honestly, I would have preferred that cop go track down a stolen bike ring.
I agree with all of this. Especially the part about insuring against risks you cannot afford. How much was your policy? I imagine it’s less than $100 per year.
I have to confess that I don’t remember. I carry riders on my other policy for high value items like my camera gear and bike. It all goes into a lump sum that just gets auto paid annually.
But you’re right - they’re fairly inexpensive to insure.
“Pro Tip” I learned looking up camera insurance - don’t get specific item insurance, if for whatever reason you’re not doing a home insurance rider contact an insurance agent to get you a Inland Marine policy (I have no idea about the naming). I got like $11,000 in coverage for ~ $150 a year, with a $100 deductible. Covers theft and me breaking it accidentally.
EDIT: And how this relates is it seems like you can schedule just about anything with a serial # and declared value via the agent on the policy.
