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.
Not that it makes a huge difference because it’s messed up for this to happen in any scenario, but was this a student’s personal copy of the book? And some other kid snitched on them? I remember taking my copy of Naked Lunch to school back in the 90’s and I’d probably be expelled nowadays if I was in one of these backwater fundie dominated districts.