"In the Michigan Shooting, What Is the School’s Responsibility?"

The NYT asks. 

First, a teacher found Ethan Crumbley searching online for ammunition. The next day, there was an alarming note on his desk: “The thoughts won’t stop. Help me.” School officials met with Mr. Crumbley, 15, and his parents, informing them that he needed to begin counseling within 48 hours. After his parents resisted bringing him home, administrators allowed him to stay in school....

The parents have been arrested and charged with involuntary manslaughter. Isn't the school more  responsible? 

Catherine J. Ross, a law professor at George Washington University and expert on student rights, said she found the school’s reaction “truly astounding.”... If the parents refused to take Mr. Crumbley home, it was the legal and ethical responsibility of the school, Professor Ross said, to “remove the student from the classroom and put them in a safe place — safe for other people and safe for themselves.”

By "put them in a safe place," I think Ross means put Ethan Crumbley in custody. He apparently begged "help me." It sounds as though he struggled with an uncontrollable impulse. I understand the school wanting to defend itself after the fact, but what's more important is for schools to take action to protect the students who are trapped there and endangered by other students. 

This is part of a larger issue of government declining to keep the peace and attempting to convince us that it cannot keep the peace, something I wrote about last month, after the Rittenhouse verdict and the Waukesha massacre, here:

"When is a racial hate crime not a racial hate crime? When it doesn’t advance the left’s, and the Democrats’, narrative."

"When white teenager Kyle Rittenhouse shot three white men who were violently assaulting him, it somehow got treated by the press and politicians as a racial hate crime. President Joe Biden (falsely) called Rittenhouse a white supremacist, and the discussion of his case was so focused on racial issues that many Americans mistakenly thought that the three men Rittenhouse shot were black. But when a black man, Darrell Brooks, with a long history of posting hateful anti-white rhetoric on social media drove a car into a mostly white Christmas parade, killing six people and injuring dozens, the press was eager to wish the story away. (The New York Times buried it on page A22.) Even when a Black Lives Matter activist connected it to the Rittenhouse verdict, observing 'it sounds like the revolution has started,' the media generally downplayed it." 

Writes Glenn Reynolds's column in the NY Post.

"A growing movement questions the practice of requiring defendants to post monetary bail to ensure that they appear at their court hearings...."

"Many of those jurisdictions now use risk assessments to decide whether to detain defendants or release them without a monetary requirement. Those tools, which consider previous offenses and the defendant’s likelihood of being a flight risk, are themselves controversial: Some advocates have expressed concern that racial and socioeconomic biases are baked into them. Bail-change advocates argue that court systems should err on the side of releasing defendants, who are presumed innocent. [Alexa Van Brunt, director of the MacArthur Justice Center Clinic at Northwestern University] said pretrial detention increases a person’s likelihood of committing another crime by stripping them of jobs, educational opportunities or custody of their children. Defendants who are held are more likely to plead guilty, even if they did not commit the offense, Van Brunt said, because they want to get out of jail."

From "The Wisconsin parade suspect was accused of a car attack weeks ago. Here’s why he was out on bail" (WaPo).

ADDED: I'm reading the comments over there. There's this — which begins with a quote from the article — from Gibbering:

He was also convicted of a sex crime in Nevada after impregnating a minor, officials say.

That’s called rape, WaPo. Thanks for demonstrating this whole problem. Crimes against women don’t count. Rape them, hit them with cars, neglect support payments, strangle them, abuse them, rob them, whatever. Doesn’t matter. It almost never matters.

AND: Here's the NYT approach to the same material: "Waukesha Suspect’s Previous Release Agitates Efforts to Overhaul Bail/Darrell Brooks, accused of plowing his S.U.V. through a Wisconsin parade, had been freed on $1,000 bail for a different charge in Milwaukee County, where there is a backlog of cases":

"You get to post bail after driving your SUV over your child's mother??? What about the deterrent of keeping a crazy man in jail pending trial? It couldn't have made the woman he ran over feel safer knowing this crazy man was out o[n] bail. A thousand dollars? Life is cheap in Wisconsin."

That's the top-rated comment at "Suspect’s bail draws questions as investigations begin into Wisconsin parade tragedy" (WaPo). 

From the article: 

Michele LaVigne, a former director of the Public Defender Project at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told The Post that setting Brooks’s cash bail at $1,000 is not necessarily unusual and that bail amounts can vary between jurisdictions and courtrooms. 

When Brooks was arrested earlier this month, she said, officials weighing what bail to request probably considered the seriousness of the charges and the fact that he was already out on bail in the earlier case and had continued showing up for court appearances. 

Deterring further crime is “not the purpose of cash bail,” LaVigne said. “Cash bail is really, ‘Are you going to show up [to court], or are you not?’ ”

ADDED: I'm just noticing that bail is a subject Kamala Harris went out of her way to bring up during the Vice Presidential debate last fall: "We need reform of our policing in America and our criminal justice system... We will require a national registry for police officers who break the law, we will – on the issue of criminal justice reform – get rid of private prisons and cash bail and we will decriminalize marijuana...."

"Do you know this guy?"/"Absolutely not."

The government — in failing to maintain order in Kenosha — deserves blame for the Kyle Rittenhouse incident.

Here's something you may have missed. I missed it until today, when I was listening to the new episode of the NYT podcast "The Daily": "The Acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse/How a jury came to find the teenager, who shot and killed two people in Kenosha, Wis., not guilty on the five charges he faced."

The episode covered the entire trial. What jumped out at me wasn't the show's focus, but it mattered to me because I care about what government can do to protect citizens from each other.

None of the shootings by Kyle Rittenhouse would have occurred if Joseph Rosenbaum hadn't behaved in a deranged manner. Presumably, Rosenbaum would have done better if he had taken his medication, but he couldn't get his prescriptions filled because the pharmacy was boarded up — closed, because of the riots.

I'm reading more about his condition — here, in The Washington Post — and I see that the plastic bag he threw at Rittenhouse was a small collection of items — deodorant, underwear, socks — that the hospital had given him when he was discharged after a suicide attempt. That's what he had (and lamely threw at Rittenhouse). What he lacked was his drugs: "Hours after he was released from the hospital, Rosenbaum stopped by a pharmacy in Kenosha to pick up medication for his bipolar disorder, only to discover that it had closed early because of the unrest." 

They released a mentally ill man into a chaotic city with a prescription for medication that he could not fill. A suicidal man proceeded to get himself killed at the hands of Rittenhouse and to unleash the ill-fated rush to stop Rittenhouse. There are immense and unknowable costs to letting a city decline into chaos. 

Rittenhouse and every other individual — except a truly deranged person, such as, perhaps, Rosenbaum — are responsible for his own actions. We tend to focus on the actions of other human beings, and the trial was a spectacle commanding us to focus on Rittenhouse. The government puts on that show, and that show distracts us from the failings of government. 

"Why Didn’t [Wisconsin Governor] Tony Evers Prevent the Carnage in Kenosha?" John McCormack asked (in National Review, while the jury was deliberating):

On the afternoon of Sunday, August 23 — three months after the murder of George Floyd and the riots it sparked — a Kenosha police officer shot African American Jacob Blake. The shooting was far more complicated than initial reports indicated: Blake had a knife, resisted arrest after being tasered, and was reaching into his car when he was shot.... But the video of the incident almost guaranteed that riots would occur without decisive action....

That evening, instead of deploying the National Guard to Kenosha, Evers sent out an inflammatory tweet suggesting that police may have behaved “mercilessly” in their encounter with Blake. “Tonight, Jacob Blake was shot in the back multiple times, in broad daylight, in Kenosha, Wisconsin... While we do not have all of the details yet, what we know for certain is that he is not the first Black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country.” 

A few hours later, 100 cars were torched in Kenosha.

It wasn’t until the next morning, August 24, that Evers called out the National Guard — and even then he sent only 125 guardsmen to Kenosha, which has a population of just under 100,000. That night, arsonists set fire to dozens of buildings in the city. On Tuesday, August 25, Evers sent another 125 members of the National Guard. But that evening, the Washington Post reported, law-enforcement agents were “overwhelmed” by rioters and “the only visible law enforcement presence was around the Kenosha County Courthouse, where an 8-foot-high fence was erected around the building, with about 1,000 protesters gathered outside the barrier.” 

Evers had turned down an offer of federal support earlier that day. “I have no regrets because the only thing I said no to was Homeland Security and I knew that would not work out because of what I saw in Portland,” Evers said after the fact. Evers has defended his minimal deployment of guardsmen by saying, “We have fulfilled every request that the leadership in Kenosha have asked for.”....

Evers is at fault and so is the leadership of Kenosha. 

ALSO: More government responsibility for chaos in Wisconsin: "Milwaukee County DA admits it was a mistake to grant $1,000 bail to SUV-driving felon days before he smashed into Xmas parade: Darrell Brooks was freed after running over mother of his child and is now charged with homicide after killing five" (Daily Mail).