The Idiocies of Bureaucracies

I'm an optimist by nature, but cruel facts keep bludgeoning me, so I call myself an optmistic pessmist. Here is yet another story that presses home to me the idiocies of humankind and especially the brain dead behaviour of bureaucracies. This is a flagrant injustice, but the wheels of "justice" grind on ignoring the most fundamental aspects of facts, justice, and human motives...

This is from an article published in the Washington Post. You need to read the whole article, but here is the gist of it:

Loudoun County's Freedom High, told me about a rumor that students were sending nude pictures of themselves to one another on their cellphones. We've all heard a lot about "sexting" lately, but a year ago the phenomenon was new to me and, I'd venture to say, to most school officials. Because administrators' first concern is our students' safety and well-being, it was my responsibility to look into the matter.

I called a student I thought likely to have such a picture into my office. In the presence of the school's safety and security official, he quickly admitted that he did. He pulled out his phone and showed us an image of the torso of a woman wearing underpants, with her arms crossed over her breasts. Her head was not in the picture. The 17-year-old student claimed not to know who the young woman was or who had sent him the photo.

I immediately took the picture to the principal, who instructed me to transfer it to my office computer in case we needed it later. Being unfamiliar with camera features on cellphones, I asked the school's technology resource teacher for help, but he didn't have an immediate solution. The student then said that he could text the picture to my cellphone. That left the problem of getting it to my computer, whereupon the boy said that I could send the picture to my school e-mail address.

In hindsight, of course, he could have sent it directly to my computer himself. But it never occurred to me that my actions could be regarded as suspect: I was conducting a legitimate school investigation with children's welfare in mind, and I did so in the presence and with the full knowledge of other school officials.

I interviewed more students with the security specialist, but we found no more pictures and were unable to identify the woman in the photo. We concluded that she probably wasn't a student at the school. I reported our findings to the principal and assumed that the matter was closed.

I left the building quickly that day -- the start of spring break -- to join my wife, Diane, at a doctor's office to discuss her upcoming surgery for a potentially malignant tumor. I told her about the sexting photo, but we had other things on our minds. When I returned to school two days after break ended, I confronted a new problem: The boy with the photo on his cell was now in trouble for having pulled a girl's pants down in class (another teen phenomenon known as "flagging"). I informed his mother that I was suspending him, and in the discussion I also told her about the earlier incident. She was outraged that I hadn't reported it to her at the time. She called me at home that night at 10 p.m. and again at 7 a.m. the next morning, agitated and demanding that the suspension be revoked and threatening to involve an attorney. I told her as calmly as I could that the suspension was for the deliberate act of pulling down the girl's pants. A couple of days later, after an appeal hearing with the principal and me, she shouted at me, "I'll see you in court!"

You really must go and read the whole article to see the folly of a "justice" system which fails at many critical steps because of bureaucratic incompetence or indifference. It is a tragic story. It ends on a "happy" note, but despite exoneration, I suspect that assistance principal will discover that many doors will be closed in the future because a "taint" will hang over him despite his complete innocence. Sadly, this story happens more often than people are aware.

Too often criminals (or, in this case parents with an "axe to grind") can use the legal system against you. Most people innocently believe that the "justice" system is a geared to fairly weight the pros and cons and establish guilt and innocence. But it isn't. It is an adversarial system. Whoever get the State to prosecute on their behalf has infinite resources on their side. The other party is at a distinct disadvantage. It is an expensive uphill battle to fight for your rights. And the sad fact is that the legal system is bureaucratic and not the least interested in sifting facts to find the truth. Again, it is an "adversarial" system. The theory is that "truth will win out". But if you have money, connections, looks, self-assurance or any other quality that gives you an edge over somebody else, then the law will come down on your side more often than on the side of the poor, disconnected, ugly, timorous person. It is a system that has precious little to do with "justice".