Consider the following headline: “Police Handcuff 5-Year-Old After Tantrum“. On my first reading of the headline (and the story), I thought it was outrageous. I mean, they handcuffed a five-year-old!

April 22, 2005 — The videotaped altercation with a 5-year-old girl who was hauled off in handcuffs following an extended tantrum at her St. Petersburg, Fla., school has led to questions about whether the police overreacted.

The incident occurred March 14, and was captured on videotape because Fairmount Park Elementary School teacher Christina Ottersbach had set up a camcorder in her classroom. She wanted to record herself teaching so she could study her methods and learn how to improve, district officials told the St. Petersburg Times.

You know, it seems very convenient that the girl happened to throw her tantrum when the teacher happened to be filming herself to review her methods. I can’t help but wonder if the teacher didn’t actually intend it to give her a way to protect herself if an incident occurred. Our society has an aversion to recording devices that I don’t completely comprehend.

I suspect that the recorder was actually intended to catch this girl’s actions on tape because she’s apparently had these super-tantrums before (from page two of that same story):

“Do you remember me?” one of [the police officers] asks the girl. “I’m the one who told your mom I’d put handcuffs on you.”

Allow me to be the first to admit that I don’t know all the facts in this case, but that statement, by itself, seems to indicate that this story is considerably more than just a kid throwing a tantrum and getting handcuffed.

Obviously, the girl has a history of these tantrums that are so bad that the police are called. Her mother was informed that, if these incidents continued, they’d have to handcuff her daughter.

But, why? Why would you handcuff a little girl? My guess is that they’d had to restrain her in the past (contrary to the lawyer’s statements, simply standing back and watching this girl destroy the room she was in isn’t really an option), and that there was a fear of hurting her. When you physically restrain someone and they struggle, I’d imagine that it’s frightfully easy to accidentally hurt them. The school and the police force may very well have been attempting to protect themselves from lawsuits if they’d hurt the girl.

If the girl’s mother was warned, why hasn’t she done something to change her daughter’s behavior? Has she tried, but failed? Or is this one of those cases where the mother simply refuses to believe that her special girl couldn’t have acted up as badly as they said?

The fact that this little girl was handcuffed is a problem, but is the problem that she was handcuffed, or that her actions got so bad that she needed the handcuffs? From the outside looking in, especially at this distance, it may be impossible for the laypeople (and the pundits) to tell. Was it just a case of overzealousness on the part of the police? Or was the girl’s behavior that out of hand? Should the school administrators have handled the situation better and defused it from the beginning? Or did her parents fail to give her any discipline at home?

Expect that subject line to be used a lot in posts from me for the next few months… For all the things that Star Wars fans like to complain about re: George Lucas, the worst should be that his latest (and last?) Star Wars movie caused Serenity to be pushed back several months. I want my Serenity, dang it!

I hate Quicktime (which, as I understand it, has been integrated into iTunes). I hate Quicktime so much, in fact, that I decided to get a non-iPod MP3 player. I’d never been a big fan of the software, but the more recent releases seem to want to take over everything on my computer, and most of the time, if something looks interesting, but is presented in Quicktime, I’ll pass over it.

For this, though, I’m definitely re-installing Quicktime/iTunes.

Serenity Trailer

Firefly, despite getting the shaft by Fox execs, was easily the best television show that ever aired on that network, and very possibly on television as a whole. I’m looking forward to this movie more than I looked forward to either Spider-Man movie, and anyone who knows me can tell you that I was bouncing off the walls waiting for those.

If you know anyone who’s in a bad mood this week, remind them of the following things, which should cheer up any sane person:

1. Peter David will be writing not only the Hulk, but Spider-Man very soon
2. There’s a trailer available for Serenity.

It’s hard to imagine a bad mood continuing in the face of that, don’t you think?

( þ Photo Matt)

[Unrelated Update: This week's comics reviews are up.]