Change.org: 'Birmingham: Stop Pepper-spraying High School Students'

Submitted by Matt on Sat, 2012-01-21 01:22

Petition here. Overall point of effort very well-taken. But something doesn't feel quite right. I signed the petition, but with a 'signing statement'. I include it as the first comment of the story. Petition excerpt:

'I once trusted the Birmingham Public Schools. I sent my children to school thinking they were safe and protected. I found out different.

My 17-year old-daughter Gloria was sprayed in the face with pepper spray by a Birmingham police officer assigned to protect students in the school.

She wasn’t being violent and she certainly wasn’t a threat to the officer. Gloria was upset because a boy had pushed her. While she was confronting the boy, the police officer grabbed her from behind, pulled out his canister of pepper spray, and sprayed her in the eyes, face, and mouth. My 15-year-old daughter Patrice saw her sister sprayed and ran to her side. As Patrice reached Gloria, the officer sprayed Gloria with a second burst of pepper spray. The second burst also hit Patrice in the face.

When I saw Gloria, I couldn’t believe how red and swollen her face was. She was crying out to me to help her and I couldn’t do anything. She had red welts all over her face and her eyes were red. Days later the welts turned to black scabs that took two weeks to go away. Every time she washed her face, she cried again because water only made the pain worse. For weeks she refused to come out of her room and fell into a deep depression. It was a nightmare knowing my child suffered physical pain and depression because she reacted emotionally at school. She’s a teenage girl, not a criminal.'

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Comments

Don't know if they published it, but here it is anyway:

"I agree this is crazy. The officer should have gotten between them and only used force if one or both failed to heed the call to desist. It is insane that use of this kind of force is now applied to minors. And as for risk-taking, the officer is in an inherently risky job. If he does not want to risk being assaulted in the course of duty, he ought to resign. It's a question of what you choose to do with your life. That aside, some are writing that it's outrageous that a boy was pushing/assaulting a girl and then when she turned to confront him, she was sprayed. Let's assume that is a fair and accurate assessment of the situation. I stand in support of an end of course to this abuse of authority but what I don't support is the outrage associated with the fact that the boy was the assailant and the girl the assailed, then the victim of police abuse-- as such. What I do support is an end to police abusing their discretion in this fashion, and of course I support teaching our children not to use violence against each other except and only in self-defense-- period. So indeed the boy was in the wrong here. But it is in fact a double-standard that people are *more* outraged when girls are victims of boys' violence than they are when boys are victims of girls' violence, which according to gov't studies is true at about equal rates for both sexes. In other words, there isn't as one commenter wrote here a misogynist double-standard at work. What is at work is an unacceptable standard for overall tolerance for police excessive use of force (esp. on unarmed minors) *and* a double-standard that has people much faster to start petitions on Change.org decrying this kind of action when the victim is female and the assailant male. Tell me, would people be as outraged if the sexes in this case were reversed? No, most wouldn't-- and they would feel righteous about holding that double-standard, coming up with all manner of rationalizations for it. THAT is the double-standard at work here."

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Submitted by Matt on Sat, 2012-01-21 01:27