Is this the face of a criminal? Apparently so, because the Pinellas County, Fla., Sheriff’s Office has charged 16-year-old Allie Scott with stalking after she made an innocuous Facebook post.
Allie’s slide into “stalker territory” started with a simple mistake. She parked her brother’s car in the school parking lot in another girl’s parking spot. She was told to move the car, so that’s what she did at the end of the day. When she went to the car, though, she found that someone had scratched the body with a key.
She didn’t name any person who she thought did it, but she posted this on Facebook: “Oh, so you keyed my car. Your karma is going to be a whole lot worse than that.”
The school’s crack administration sprang into action, summoning this evil young woman to the office. Her mother was called to the school, too, in order to deal with the heinous crime. Then they were sent to the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office, where she was charged with the crime of stalking. Allie faces a court hearing next week. She was handed a three-day suspension at school.
This isn’t the face of a stalker, but it is the face of a victim of “zero tolerance” policies run amuck. Some school administrators today are so afraid of exercising any judgement that they’ve developed draconian policies that are applied with one-size-fits-all idiocy, whether the circumstances fit the “crime” or not.
So what exactly is the crime? She didn’t threaten anybody. She didn’t call anybody out. And even if someone knew who she was talking about, how is it a crime to suggest that some kind of spiritual “balance” is going to come back to even the spiritual score? It’s not a real crime. We simply live in an increasingly insane world.
As far as I can tell, the school hasn’t checked surveillance cameras to see who the actual criminal is — the one who keyed the car. But property damage probably doesn’t matter anymore. The only crime is possibly hurting somebody’s feelings.