Security concerns trump common sense

I know things have changed since the school massacre at Columbine High School in 1999 and the terrorist attacks in 2001. We're more concerned about security now, and we should be.

Collectively, we lost a part of our innocence in those incidents, and whatever was left evaporated last year at Virginia Tech.

Every time another like incident happens, we dive headlong into the negative column of innocence, reason and common sense.

Since innocence, reason and common sense are now gone, we seem to be unable to make the rational, human-centered, father and mother-like decisions that should be made regarding small security issues.

In fact, we turn what should be minor discipline issues into security issues.

What should be issues of mentoring, coaching, leadership and discipline instead become legal issues. Valuable law enforcement resources are consequently used for stupid things instead of investigating crime and catching criminals.

Take the case last year of an elementary school girl in Ocala, Fla. This fifth-grader had brown bagged her lunch. She brought a knife to cut her lunchmeat.

Several teachers noticed her possessing a "weapon," so school officials called law enforcement.

Did the teachers consider doing what they would hope someone would do with their own children? Did they think to approach the little girl, remind her of the rules and merely take away her knife?

Based on news reports, they instead took the easy way out (for them) and called the sheriff's department.

Sadly in many cases nowadays, once law enforcement gets involved, it's too late for reason.

The ideal of the beat cop sternly but wisely instructing valuable lessons to those who need the guidance might have truly been an ideal. But, it's an ideal that makes a lot of sense. I personally like the Sheriff Andy Taylor model.

Instead, the sheriff's deputies responding to the "emergency" couldn't reach the girl's mother and arrested the girl.

They could have, instead, confiscated the knife and sent the girl back to class with a stern, parental-like warning that schools are no place for knives.

The sheriff's office passed the blame for this overbearing and frightening arrest to the school's administration, which cited a zero tolerance policy.

Apparently, they also have a zero tolerance policy for leadership.

Now, in Havelock, what should have been a minor discipline problem has resulted in a teenager charged with possession of a concealed weapon when he was "brandishing" a deadly BB gun?

The 14-year-old boy was arrested at Walter B. Jones Park with an unloaded air pistol. This boy faces adjudication and disposition hearings and could even be confined to a so-called "youth development center" - a reform school.

What's next? Putting kids on their faces for possessing cap guns?

It wasn't too many years ago that my brother-in-law was caught by the Havelock Police shooting rats at night with a flashlight and .22 caliber rifle at the town dump. He was given a stern warning and escorted home to face his parents.

He later became an Army helicopter crew chief and a North Carolina highway patrolman because the police used reason, compassion and fatherly leadership.

Admittedly, I know nothing about the arrested 14-year-old. He could be a hardened criminal with a mug shot hung on every post office wall.

More likely, though, he's a young boy who likes air pistols and merely needed a bit of stern guidance from a fatherly police officer and a ride home to face his parents. Instead, he was arrested.

I'm sure they will argue this point, but this was a case of discipline, not security. Regardless of Columbine and Virginia Tech and 9/11, the security situation in Havelock has not changed enough to warrant this lack of leadership on the part of the police.

The Havelock Police, like the Monroe County (Fla.) Sheriff's Office, could learn something from the Andy Taylor model.

Barry Fetzer is a retired Marine whose column appears in the Havelock News every other week.