A Brief Arrest Record of Time

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By Mark Dennehy: Holy hell – “9th Grader Arrested, Searched for Building a Clock” (on Hackaday.)

A 14-year-old in Dallas, Texas has been arrested for bringing a clock to his school. [Ahmed Mohamed] could be any one of us. He’s a tinkerer, pulling apart scrap appliances and building projects from the parts. He was a member of the his middle school robotics team. The clock was built from a standard four digit seven segment display and a circuit board. [Ahmed] built the circuit inside a Vaultz hard pencil case like this one. He then did what every other experimenter, inventor, hacker, or maker before him has done: He showed off his creation.

Unfortunately for [Ahmed] one of his teachers immediately leapt to the conclusion that this electronic project was a “hoax bomb” of some sort. The police were called, [Ahmed] was pulled out of class and arrested. He was then brought to a detention center where he and his possessions were searched. [Ahmed] is now serving a three-day suspension from school. His clock is considered evidence to be used in a possible criminal case against him.

The teenage geek with the ham radio license in me who built this sort of thing for fun and amusement and who went on to become an engineer and build more fun stuff is particularly miffed at that.

And so are a whole bunch of NASA types (he was arrested wearing a NASA shirt for cryin’ out loud):

Along with an admittedly sarcastic mars rover:

And a science fiction author you might have heard of:

And a mythbuster:

Not to mention the President:

The hashtag’s gone viral:

https://twitter.com/search?q=%23IStandWithAhmed&src=tyah

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64 thoughts on “A Brief Arrest Record of Time”

  1. Unfortunately, to many of the numbnuts holding or running for political office, this is exactly the correct sort of behavior that our officials should be taking. It’s appalling, disgusting and shows just how far stupidity and paranoia are running rampant. Children like Ahmed should be encouraged, not arrested and made to feel like they did something wrong. We are heading towards a very poor, dystopian future if this continues.

  2. The charges have been dropped. I haven’t heard whether the suspension has been lifted, however.

    I hope that the teacher who called the cops makes a full, complete, and abject apology to Ahmed.

  5. Stuart C. Hellinger:

    Yeah, I just read the town mayor’s response. She not only praised the teachers and police but said we wouldn’t have so many school shootings and bombings if more people acted like these teachers. *jaw drop*

    Although, apparently she’s already been in the news plenty for anti-Muslim rants, so this isn’t anything new for that town. Glad to see this get traction since it’s a tragedy that this kid isn’t the only one this sort of thing has happened to.

    But Scalzi’s latest tweet does sum up how well this has turned around:
    “I think the president inviting you to the White House for a thing that got you suspended from school is the most epic mic drop of all time.”

  6. It seems the mayor of Irving, TX has a thing about mooslims…

    And it was the english teacher who got the vapors…sheesh.

    Yeah, this stinks like 3-day old fish.

  12. Reminds me of the gal in Boston with an LED display on her jacket. She walked up to the info booth the airport to check on a friends flight arrival.

    She then stepped outside, where she was tackled by 20+ cops, charged with terrorism (because the info gal was ‘frightened’). She had a felony rap hanging over her head for over a year. She finally had to plead a misdemeanor just to be done with it.

    Same folks who could not recognize a Cartoon network character PCB with LEDs was not a bomb.

    And these are the folks “upholding the law” in the same town as MIT. The mind boggles.

  14. I suppose there is some value in teaching impressionable kids to have a healthy disrespect for Authority… but geez, did the school have to be that thorough about it?

  16. This is the sort of outrage that brings us all together !
    All sides in our long, bloody civil wars can agree on this at least.

    Perhaps we can also all agree on the horrifying quality of high school reading material.
    Nearly anything on offer on this site or on Vox Days for that matter, Puppy or Anti-Puppy, is better than the garbage they are foisting on middle and high schoolers.

  18. I wish I could think Scalzi was wrong, and this was the only case of its kind. Very happy that Ahmed’s story seems to be turning around, however. I couldn’t make a clock like that …

  20. @Jon Meltzer: Personally, I think it is mistake to drag the puppies into this or speculate as to how “they” might respond. Doing so buys into concepts of culture wars and us/them line-drawing that should simply be rejected or, better yet, never raised in the first place.

  21. Space Camp, Cmdr Hadfield, and an invitation to the White House?

    Happy(ish) ending!

    I hope he can transfer out of that English class, though. It seems as if the teacher is either breathtakingly stupid or should be restricted to teaching only white children (or both).

  22. Note that either the teacher knew from the beginning that it wasn’t a bomb, in which case she should be fired for harassing the student and charged with making a false report to police (calling in a bomb threat when she knew there was no bomb), or she actually did think it was a bomb, in which case she and possibly other school officials should be fired for their willingness to risk their students’ safety.

    I wonder whether the teacher had a specific grudge against this student and didn’t want to settle for flunking him, or whether Ahmed Mohammed was the Muslim student who happened to give her what looked like a sufficient excuse to have him arrested and maybe expelled.

  23. Put me in charge for a day, and the teacher would be fired, as would the cop and the mayor. Their pensions would go to the kid so he can buy more cool stuff.

  24. I wonder whether the teacher had a specific grudge against this student and didn’t want to settle for flunking him, or whether Ahmed Mohammed was the Muslim student who happened to give her what looked like a sufficient excuse to have him arrested and maybe expelled.

    I think it sounds more as if, sure it isn’t a bomb, but still it’s technical stuff, and since he’s like all Muslim and all, making a clock is just the first step towards making a bomb.
    So nip it in the bud.

  25. I checked on Google and nobody’s created one yet. We need a picture of Kali facepalming with all of her arms.

  26. I won’t say only in Texas because there is Arkansas, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi and on occasion Florida where shit like this happens.

    But I am IN Texas (I’m from the Pacific Northwest; I just work in space in Texas–for the last twenty mumble years). And just up the road more or less from Irving. And since my little uni is one of the MAJOR producers of teachers, principals, and superintendents for this area, odds are good that one or more of the Irving school personnel involved are from here.

    And oh fuck, an *English* teacher.

    *whimpers*

  28. It’s not just southern states. Kids get expelled from school or arrested for stupid, stupid things all the time. Writing a story about shooting a dinosaur. Biting a pop-tart into the shape of a “gun”.

  30. I’m so glad that some good things are happening for Ahmed after this.

    But as Scalzi put it–you know perfectly well he isn’t the only one. How many other kids were jailed or suspended for their science projects or over some other harmless thing because they happened to be kids of color?

    And more than that, a lot of the discouragements that girls and kids of color get about STEM aren’t actionable. Things like people assuming that your brother or a classmate made (“helped you with”) your project, teachers assuming you’re dumb or telling you to answer fewer questions in class, that kind of thing.

    STEM fields are important and they need as many people as possible–a good first step would be to stop assuming kids of color and girls can’t / shouldn’t play.

  33. I keep telling myself that the USA, having over ten times the population of Australia, I should expect ten times the blitheringly stupid. But this along with the folks in Louisiana who called the police about terrorist signs along some roads is depressing.

  35. To be fair, the Pop Tart thing is misreported a lot. The kid had had a lot of classroom behavior issues and when he made a Pop Tart into a gun and started bothering other kids with it, that was his final strike after a lot of problems. That’s why the school won’t back down — as one official said, if he’d made a cat and started annoying the other kids with it, the outcome would have been the same. (It was the kid who said it was a gun, not the teacher.)

    Ahmed Mohamed, on the other hand, was no kind of discipline issue, and why the hell didn’t the school just ask the engineering teacher if the thing was harmless or not instead of calling in five cops to harass the student? Surely the engineering teacher could have pointed out that there was nothing in the box that could possibly explode — ergo, it was just a circuit board and some wires, aka A CLOCK?

    My favorite response so far is this one:

    Attention Idiots: Not Everything With Wires Is A Bomb

    I also really liked this very dry comment from the CNN article:

    “Irving Police spokesman Officer James McLellan told the station, “We attempted to question the juvenile about what it was and he would simply only tell us that it was a clock.”

    The teenager did that because, well, it was a clock, he said.”

  39. Oh, God. That boy could, very easily, have been shot dead. There certainly seem to be a lot of people who wish he’d been shot dead.

    He probably did something which Fox could call a a terrorist gesture involving fists…

    And I’ve been trying to go to sleep but you keep posting interesting things…

  41. There are indeed many things wrong with US school systems.
    The bureaucratic mode of organization is something the US does poorly. It just does not suit the people.
    That’s why my charities are Catholic parochial schools.
    These are usually run with common sense.

  42. “Naive accident”, my fat pink ass. Racism (at least the overt kind, like this) is never an accident. Racism is a deliberate choice, and it’s one that the authorities in Irving seem to be making over and over again. At what point do these things stop being “isolated incidents” and start becoming a pattern of behavior? Do we have to wait until a dark-skinned kid is actually killed? Would even that be enough?

  43. There is no silver lining to this, no happy-bloody-ending.

    He was handcuffed. He was photographed handcuffed. This photo was splashed all over the Web by “journalists” who think spreading nasty gossip about a minor who committed no wrong is “journalism”.

    He was taken to a juvenile detention center. He was locked in a cell.

    Forget de jure, look at de facto. They may say he was “detained” rather than “arrested”, which is a legalism used when trying to duck responsibility for having committed an act otherwise considered criminal if one isn’t wearing a pretty uniform.

    If you’re in cuffs, you’ve been arrested de facto. If a door is locked, you’re inside it, and you don’t have a key, you’ve been imprisoned de facto. This is kidnapping under all the “authority” of having pieces of metal pinned on shirts.)

    His suspension was not revoked and will remain on his school transcripts which will be used to decide if he will be accepted to university.

    His name will appear on watch lists.

    Mug shots were taken. Fingerprints were taken. They are now in the files of the Irving Police Department, the Texas Department of Public Safety in Austin, and the FBI. They will never be removed.

    Even if President Obama gives a direct order to override the standard prohibition against anyone having ever been arrested to have access to the White House and the First Family, the Secret Service will still get their own copies of the mug shot and fingerprints from the FBI for their own files.

    These flies will not be “expunged”, as criminal files are never destroyed, ever — all being “expunged” means is that after another court proceeding in which his name will be on another, separate public record as having been in trouble, they will move his file from the cabinet they can access any time they like to the cabinet across the room they only open when they think nobody is looking.

    When he’s an adult, if he does anything noteworthy, the news article will not fail to have an account of his juvenile humiliation, the public embarrassment being dragged out and used to tell once again the fairy-tale of being considered innocent until proven guilty.

    (Similar case from the past: as a teen I read a newspaper story about a man in Kansas City who had robbed a bank, served his time, built an honest construction business, became a millionaire, and tried to make amends by giving large amounts of toys to underprivileged kids every Christmas. I read the same story the next year. I read it the year after that. Every single year, the newspapers wrote stories in large, friendly letters about how this man who was trying to do good was a felon, labelled for life, never letting go of it and just reporting the current news of the charitable work, or better yet, not making fake news out of it at all. They had to have their “rags-to-riches, criminal-goes-straight” story no matter how much grief it continued to cause him and his family even three decades later, despite his efforts to help his community.)

    He will never be able to simply answer “no” to the question “Have you ever been arrested?” on any professional licensing application.

    Sovereign immunity laws will very probably protect the school board, the city, the police department, the principal, the uniforms who kidnapped him, and the idiot-with-a-certificate “teacher” from civil liability regardless of their actual physical responsibility, so he won’t be compensated for the current and future wrongs being done him.

    His life has been permanently damaged no matter how many cool tweets he gets.

  45. Irving Police spokesman Officer James McLellan told the station, “We attempted to question the juvenile about what it was and he would simply only tell us that it was a clock.”

    Translation: “We used all of our standard techniques for sweating a confession out of a perp, hoping that he would make some stray comment that we could use as an excuse for charging him with possessing a ‘hoax bomb’, which is a class A misdemeanor, or maybe even possessing ‘a device designed, made, or adapted for delivery or shooting an explosive weapon’, which is a third-degree felony, under title 10, chapter 46 of the Texas Penal Code. Unfortunately, we got nothing.”

  46. I hope the relevant taxpayers appreciate just how much this is going to cost them at the next elections (is this one of those places where you elect your law enforcement heads?)

  47. One thing to bear in mind (and this is a mini-version of a standard rant of mine) — the US school system is heavily fragmented, and one of the last bastions of truly powerful ‘local government’ you can find. I normally give the long version of this in response to ‘public schools are failing’ because, in fact, most work just fine. Our colleges and workforce are full of the product of public schools.

    Your school system can be run by a bunch of idiots who got into the school board in an election less than 1% of the town participated in. Curriculum is set by the state (Common Core is nothing less than a bunch of states trying to create a somewhat ‘federal’ curriculum but the Federal Government’s education policy is basically a handful of mandates, none of which involve curriculum but do involve stuff like special needs students, disability requirements, etc).

    So, in short, all this takes is one school board hiring one idiot and not reigning him or her in.

    Because your school district truly IS local government. Which means that it’s run by a small group of elected people, at least 20% of whom have a bee in their bonnet about SOMETHING (crazy or not) and got on the Board entirely to push their own agenda. (I got to watch our local school board, here in Texas, spend about 15 years dealing with the 40% of the board who wanted to teach Creationism. It was an educational experience, insofar as I was in HS during part of it and attending the open meetings was easy extra credit for a government class).

  49. (My husband just sent me this; I don’t have the source URL:)

    An open letter from George Takei:

    Dear Ahmed,
    I’ve never met you, and it’s quite possible you’ve never heard of me, but my name is George Takei. I am many decades older than you, but your story and your experience—when you were arrested at your school simply because you brought in a clock for your teacher–struck a chord with me. You see, when I was a bit younger than you, I was also viewed by others as “the enemy” and treated as such, simply because I happened to look like the people who had attacked America.

    Like you, I was just a kid trying to find his place in the world. I loved my country, and I looked forward to all the opportunities and challenges ahead. But my childhood was interrupted by fear and ignorance. When the authorities came for you because they believed you had built a bomb, I was reminded, in a way, of when the army came for us. They ordered us out of our home believing we were suspicious people because of our names, our faces, our ancestry. I spent my childhood in an internment camp because of that fear and ignorance.

    But I want you to know, while America may have done a terrible thing to me and my family, and to 120,000 other Japanese Americans, I have great hope for this country, and I believe we do learn. There was a Japanese word we often said in the camps: Gaman. It means to keep on keeping on, with dignity and fortitude. I think you understand this word already. While certain school officials and police officers may have shown you the worst side of our nation, I understand many others have since shown you the best side. I was touched to hear you say that we all have to be true to ourselves.
    Ahmed, you are now part of the story of America, and many will learn from your fine example. I see great things ahead for you.

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