Great Barrington has drawn national attention after an incident in early December in which police, acting on an anonymous tip and with the permission of school officials, investigated whether a copy of “Gender Queer,” a graphic-comic style memoir by Maia Kobabe, was part of a teacher’s lending book collection at the W.E.B. Du Bois Regional Middle School.
While the outcome of the search, according to news reports, yielded no book, the teacher who was targeted has taken a leave of absence after the incident, and the community is rightly outraged.
The police department has allegedly apologized for its part, and town officials have similarly promised to conduct a transparent investigation, but each has tempered some of that contrition with the age-old qualified defense of “just doing our job.”
Numerous spokespeople have cited an “inability” to pick and choose the “crimes” they investigate as a kind of magic eraser for police overreach as they look into the criminality of reading material.
School officials have repeatedly been quoted as saying they feel obligated to allow police access to school grounds when asked because they feel a cordial and necessary partnership with them in the event of an emergency. As if school authorities have no reason to question, let alone second-guess, outside authority.
Even those who we might hope would be friendly toward the democratic ideals of freedom of speech and expression, have come out and asked what all the fuss was about.
“Personally, I don't think the police did anything wrong. I think they responded to a call, I think they're obligated to respond to a call, they didn't go in there with a SWAT team and armed officers. I think some people are trying to capitalize on this in a very negative way because of what's going on in Florida, in some other states. But I think the police did their job,” is what Massachusetts State Rep. Smitty Pignitali (D) told WAMC.
The American Civil Liberties Union has asked for records pertaining to the investigation and has requested the town to take corrective action that includes instructing school staff that law enforcement's response to concerns about educational material is not only inappropriate but also deeply concerning. Anything less would not only allow but condone the use of police forces to harass and discriminate against certain community members.
Like the teacher who was targeted by an anonymous phone.
The book in question, a coming-of-age story about identifying as non-binary, was published by Oni Press in 2019 with an initial run of only 5,000 copies. Two years later it had become not only a useful guide for young people in their exploration of self-identity, but also one of the most challenged books in the United States.
According to the American Library Association and free speech advocate organization PEN America, who track the escalation of censorship and book bans in classrooms and libraries nationwide, the book was targeted for attack by conservative groups, parents, school boards, religious leaders, and politicians across the nation.
According to PEN, censorship has shown a marked increase during the 2022-2023 school year, much of it driven by new state bans (as well as a few prolific and sometimes anonymous tipsters) that seek to label books that deal with race, sexual orientation, and gender as “explicit, harmful or age-inappropriate.”
Police Investigations of school libraries are not just a waste of police resources, it is a misuse of them. It is quite literally using the power of the state to intimidate, and curtail the rights to speech and expression of citizens.
And if police are not able to discern from a tip line what constitutes criminal activity in a school library maybe there should be some kind of home triage unit that could decide for them.
Because if you buy the explanation that police can't pick and choose what they investigate, I suppose you might also believe that schools shouldn’t be able to determine what constitutes education, or that medical staff aren't allowed to decide for themselves what constitutes a medical emergency.
Oh wait …
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