Wauwatosa East Student Arrested for Texting

A 14-year-old girl at Wauwatosa East High School was arrested for texting.

From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

The officer's report says the student refused to stop texting during class after a teacher told her to stop and then told the resource officer she didn't have a phone.

She continued denying she had a phone, forcing the resource officer to walk back and forth to the classroom twice and find other students who saw her using it, according to the report.

The student then kept denying, so the male school resource officer had to call for a female officer to conduct a search, the report says.

And the student laughed as the female officer explained that she found the Samsung phone in the student's clothes, hidden near her buttocks, according to the report.

The student, the resource officer notes, "is known to me and the administration based on prior negative contacts."

The officer gave the student a $298 ticket for disorderly conduct and kept the Samsung.

It's a different world.

I can't imagine a police officer being called to search a student and then issuing a $298 ticket for this sort of classroom behavior.

Wauwatosa Police spokesman Lt. Dominic Leone notes Wauwatosa East has a policy against texting during classes and said the situation would not have escalated if the student had followed the officer's instructions.

"The arrest was more for her behavior than for the texting," Leone said. "All she had to do was put the phone away and that would have been that."

It's nuts to have POLICE disciplining students for a matter like this.

She was texting with a phone. She didn't have a weapon. She didn't have drugs. No one was being threatened physically.

The girl was breaking a school policy, not breaking the law.

Her parents should have been called, not the police.
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The Smoking Gun has the incident report.