http://www.nationalpost.com/m/news/b...jessie-sansone
Plenty of mistakes made, but no lessons learned in treatment of Jessie Sansone
National Post, National Post
Saturday, Mar. 3, 2012
Police in Waterloo, Ont. arrested, handcuffed and strip-searched 2012/02/29/matt-gurney-tone-deaf-waterloo-police-claim-sansone-arrest-not-about-guns after his four-year-old daughter drew a picture in school of her daddy shooting monsters with a gun. He does not own a gun and was later released with apologies by police. But school and child welfare officials insist they did the right thing and would do it again. No one but the teacher ever saw the picture (it was erased), and her word was automatically taken over a parent, who wasn’t even asked for an explanation before being dragged off. Despite the deep concern we all have with child welfare, shouldn’t schools and other authorities at least show a modicum of respect for parents before assuming they’re crazed abusers?
Barbara Kay in Montreal: I had a similar situation once that I handled very differently. I was the editor of an anthology of creative writing for high school students. One girl sent in a beautifully written, but disturbing story about a girl who murdered her mother in revenge for some perceived grievance. The killing was graphically described in detail. My committee and I wondered if we should do something about it. In the end, we called the mother and told her about her daughter’s story. The mother was surprised but assured us there was nothing wrong in the household. At that point I suppose I could have called child services, but I felt the mother was forthcoming and without guile, and my instinct was to drop it.
I decided that if every kid that wrote a piece of bloody fiction in future was aware that his or her writing would result in an invasion of the state into the household, with who knows what results, it was better to assume that the kid was just a brilliant writer. Which she was. She actually won first prize and read it aloud at the launch, to her mother’s embarrassment but also – since she had a sense of humour – her delight in the irony of the situation. The girl went on to win a Rhodes scholarship and is now a doctor with a beautiful family. I have to wonder how upsetting and guilt-making it would have been for that girl if the CAS had become involved in her act of creativity.
The teacher’s instinct should have been to contact the mother and explain that she felt uneasy. The mother would have laughed and explained it was a toy gun the kid was describing. End of story. We have been so trained to believe that we have to involve Dear Government Agency in every aspect of our professional lives if we are the slightest bit unsure of what to say or do. And we have all been turned into such alarmists that we don’t think rationally about what the odds are for the kind of harm the teacher envisioned. If the mother’s reaction elicited suspicion, then it might have been more rational to inquire more deeply. Even a simple conversation with the child probably would have elicited the correct info
Lorne Gunter in Edmonton: The reactions by all three institutional actors – the school, social services and the police – were all way over the top, so much so that it calls into question their ability to make such judgment calls. If you can’t distinguish a minor threat to safety (or, in this case, no threat at all) from a major menace, then you’re just as likely to underreact to a serious threat as you are to overreact to an insignificant one. And underreacting is more likely to result in serious harm.
But what’s more disturbing is the unwillingness of anyone in authority to admit a mistake and take the rap. That calls into question the wisdom of entrusting any of them with such power over parents and other citizens in the first place.
The police have kinda, sorta apologized. And they claim to have launched a “thorough review” of their officers’ actions. But they are still not admitting they overreacted, either. In fact Regional Police Chief Matt Torigian keeps insisting that he and his officers were right to err on the side of child safety.
Neither the school nor the school board is giving any indication of backing down, either. But the worst butt-coverers are the child service’s agents. Alison Scott, executive director of Family and Child Services in the Waterloo region sniffed to the QMI Agency, “I am really sorry that the family is as upset as they are, but we followed proper standards and procedures. I do not see any need for our agency to apologize for fulfilling our mandated responsibility.” Really!? Your procedures call on you to take the word of a four-year-old and a junior kindergarten teacher over that of a parent and call in police immediately, without further investigation or even a call to the parents to ask their side?
What is enraging about this is how Ms. Scott fails to see how despicable it is treat someone like a criminal without any evidence at all. (The innocent words of a four-year-old and the hysterical misapprehensions of kindergarten teacher don’t qualify as evidence.) Jessie Sansone went to his kids’ elementary school last Wednesday to pick them up and ended up charged with possession of a gun (he doesn’t own one). He was meet by three police officers who ‘cuffed in front of everyone before even questioning him. He was pushed into the backseat of a cruiser, driven to the station, questioned for hours, had his kids taken into protective custody and his home subjected to an hours-long search, all before he had a chance to give his side of the story.
That sort of overreaction is unconscionable in a democracy – and unforgivable. If it can be allowed to happen to Mr. Sansone without state actors being forced to give sincere apologies, then it can happen to anyone.
Marni Soupcoff in Toronto: The strangest part to me is that even in the kid’s made-up drawing, the father was being portrayed as a protective, heroic figure. So why would that sound any alarms? If you’re going to inappropriately read things in to young children’s fantasies, at least respect the spirit of those fantasies. This one was saying, “Dad’s a good guy who keeps away monsters.”
If fictional Dad had been shooting at kids or puppies or, you know, mom, then maybe I could begin to understand what happened here. As it stands, I’ve got to agree with Lorne that the school, child services and the police have all shown themselves to have very questionable judgment.
And I have to wonder: Is cuffing the parent in front of the entire school a good idea even in cases of genuine concern for the kids’ safety? Won’t that further traumatize the children unnecessarily? And might it not discourage kids from coming forward with real problems in the future if they know the result could be their parents roughly taken down in front of all their peers?
Thankfully, I don’t think ridiculous institutional behavior like this is the norm. My son also happens to be a junior kindergarten student. To my embarrassment, his drawings consist almost exclusively of tanks and fighter jets. And his stories tend to focus obsessively on “bad guys.” But his teachers have never accused me or my husband of fostering violent tendencies — let alone of being a danger to our son. This is not just because our kid has so far refrained from drawing us at the weapons’ controls. It’s because his teachers are, like most primary teachers, sensible and sensitive. They understand that little kids make things up. All the time. And they understand when — and when not — to press the panic button.
None of that will be much consolation to Jessie Sansone, of course. He does deserve an apology.
The police, school and social services at fault here deserve something else entirely.
Matt Gurney in hiding: I guess I need to confess that during my early years, all my drawings were also of tanks, fighter jets, attack helicopters, and the like. Later, that expanded to include starships, which remain my primary doodle. I don’t have a lot to add to what I’ve said already, but I do feel it’s important to make one point explicitly clear. It’s bad enough that every agency involved — teachers, child-welfare agents and police officers — deny it’s their fault. What’s really scary is how each of them is acting like how they acted was necessary. The teacher says she’s obligated to inform child services whenever there is a sign there is a threat (so the original bad judgment was hers). Child services says they’re obligated to report any potential crime to the police. The police say they need to respond to reports of crimes (but there is certainly a range of options available to them, and the Chief has already conceded that strip searching isn’t normal procedure, so Waterloo’s finest have some ‘splainin’ to do). But the maddening thing about all of this is that even though every party has at least acknowledged that this is suboptimal, if we allow them to continue peddling the just-following-procedure nonsense, then this is guaranteed to repeat itself, given comparable circumstancecs. As Lorne quotes Ms. Scott as saying, so long as everyone sticks to their “standards and procedures”, this would keep happening. The only conclusion that can be drawn from that is that the standards and procedures — i.e.; the system — are broken.
Another small point to make: The original mistake, as I think we’d all agree, was the teacher’s overreaction, which in turn set off (and perhaps necessitated under the current rules) the follow-on reactions of the child-welfare officials and the police. But I’m not sure how we can get teachers to show better discretion. It’s not exactly something they test for during teacher’s college, and frankly, it’s hard to think of an occasion where a principal, school board official or union rep won’t go to the wall to defend a teacher who “put the child’s welfare first.” Plus, there’s also the ass-covering reflex. Whether to avoid accusations of negligence, or increasingly to avoid dealing with parents who treat reports of their child’s misbehaviour as personal assaults against their precious little one by evil educators, teachers just escalate any issue to that it’s not their problem. Call in the vice-principal or the school councillor. That way they’re on record as having sounded the alarm, and outraged parents become someone else’s problem. If anyone has any ideas how to turn that around short of public shaming, please share.
Barbara Kay: There seem to be different alarm bells for the CAS when the implied culprit is a mother. Yeah yeah, I know, I’m on my hobby horse.
All I can tell you is that I get stories all the time of how fathers beg and plead for the CAS to do something about crazy mothers but they won’t budge, yet let a father evoke even a smidgen of suspicion, as in this case (where as Marni points out he is not only not suspicious, he is portrayed as the good guy), and they’re all over the case. last week a father who was returning his son home after his access visit with him. He sent me a video he took of his child with a big bruise on his face crying and begging not to be sent home to his mother, because she scares him and hits him. I have a dozen letters from fathers who have handed over reams of proof that their children are being harmed by their mothers and the CAS does nothing at all.
Remember Elaine Campione who drowned her two little girls in a bathtub? The father fought like a tiger to get the kids away from this mentally disturbed mother. The CAS was well aware of Elaine Campione’s quixotic and alarming history. They knew that Campione had exhibited many signs of psychosis, that she had been hospitalized in psychiatric wards, believed people were out to kill her and kidnap her children, and exhibiting such bizarre and/or negligent behaviours toward her girls that mother-substitutes, including her own mother, had to be constantly parachuted into her household if it was to function at all. Yet the CAS decided the mother was the “safe parent” because she alleged (never-proven) abuse on the father’s part. There is a long list of the children who have died because the CAS would not take them away from women who were clearly a danger to them, and refused to believe it even when proof is in front of their eyes. That organization needs a mucking-out – big time.
So my question is: If the child had drawn a picture of a mother with a knife in her hand and even looking menacing, not protective, do you think the police would have cuffed the mother as she arrived at the school and taken her downtown and strip-searched her? I think not. If they did anything, it would be discreet, gentle and protective of her privacy.
Lorne Gunter: I think what we have here is a perfect storm of political correctness.
There is the zero-tolerance mentality that has pervaded our schools, especially our elementary schools. Policies requiring teachers and administrators to treat every act of violence or even just every tale of violence has robbed educators of their judgment, common sense and discernment. Remember the 8-year-old in Nova Scotia who was suspended for pointing a breaded chicken strip at a teacher and saying “Pow!”? Of the elementary school student who was suspended for having a plastic knife in her lunch box? The politically correct action is to suspend judgment and treat every gun incident as if it were the endtimes.
Then there is the general arrogance of child welfare workers coupled with their bigotry towards men and towards guns. Men are mostly violent according to the mindset of children’s aid workers, so guns are nothing more than tools of oppression used by violent men to enforce their will against their wives and children.
Police, too, have an anti-gun bias these days, especially police in Ontario who seem to lay a disproportionate number of gun-related charges. They lay them with equal enthusiasm against law-abiding gun owners defending their turf or their lives and drug dealers enforcing their territories.
And in this case, there is probably an hysterical kindergarten teacher who is anti-gun, anti-male or anti-Evangelical, or all three. Jessie Sansone and his family quite devote according to reports. It’s not hard to believe a politically correct teacher seeing man, Christian and gun together in the same person jumped immediately to the conclusion that he must be guilty.
But perfect storm or not, almost no action by the authorities in this case was acceptable.
Marni Soupcoff: I thought we’d gotten beyond this sort of overreaction after the spate of unjust child-abuse accusations and convictions in the ‘80s. There is, we were supposed to have learned, a need for actual evidence and due process — even where vulnerable children are potential victims. I guess Columbine helped erase some of those lessons. But wasn’t all the zero tolerance stuff supposed to be focused on the kids themselves? Which maybe made it slightly more palatable since kids were never afforded full levels of due process anyway? And the worst that could happen to them was being suspended from school? The idea that zero tolerance can be extended to adult parents and used as a reason to cuff them and forcibly confine them is a real problem.
Men may have it worse than women, but no parent is safe if children can be seized on such flimsy grounds.
The police? Let’s just say that if this is how they treat a stable and established citizen with the ability to articulate his story to the media, God help the sketchy homeless guy or rambling drug addict who rubs them the wrong way.
And the worst part is that no one involved seems to be any the wiser for this mess. Jessie Sansone will presumably be left alone in the future. It’s not hard to imagine, however, that the police and child services will strike again with another unfortunate family since there have been no admissions of mistakes made.
Pretty scary stuff.
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