9th Grader Arrested in Houston for making ... a clock.

[zapta]

why did the police handcuff a child? that picture looks so wrong. didn't they feel ashamed themselves to do something ridiculously stupid like that?

For the same reason that electronic engineers design faulty systems and software engineers produce bugs. Every human based system is error prone.

[steve30]

Ahmed should send the clock into the mailbag for Dave to demonstrate to us all .

[GNU_Ninja]

Ahmed should send the clock into the mailbag for Dave to demonstrate to us all .

     

[AF6LJ]

Ahmed should send the clock into the mailbag for Dave to demonstrate to us all .

     

I agree but the odds of him getting his clock back are somewhere between nill and Zero I would think.

[cimmo]

He brought something to school that should not be on school grounds, period.

Bullshit.
He built a CLOCK. He was proud of what he built and simply wanted to show it off.

[AF6LJ]

He brought something to school that should not be on school grounds, period.

Bullshit.
He built a CLOCK. He was proud of what he built and simply wanted to show it off.

I find myself wondering how he got it past the metal detectors.
Most city schools have metal detectors now, it is like going to the airport, except you don't get groped by some TSA pervert.

[Kjelt]

Bullshit. He built a CLOCK. He was proud of what he built and simply wanted to show it off.

Yeah sure that is what YOU now know in behind sight and then it looks rediculous. Police officers have shot people dead because they thought they had a weapon in their hand and it was a toy or something else. That is real life. You make a judgement on things you have learned or know and think you know and that judgement is biased.

Again, look what happened. He built a clock that looked similar to something people might be afraid of or can confuse with something dangerous.
So the first teacher a mature technical educated person recognizes that another non technical educated person could mistake it for something else.
That is why he told him NOT to show it. Think about that!
Then think what you will do if you are sitting on an airplane and someone pulls out a selfmade clock like that.

Is it rediculous? Yes, arresting him is beyond reason and rediculous IMO.
Should he know better? Perhaps, I think he will not do this again, so that means something is not as it should have been.

[Daniel_Reyes]

(I know it's a jerk comment)

The hell it is... It perfectly explains it.  [emoji14]alm:

Having lived there I would disagree.
I would have expected this to happen in the people's republic of Kalifornia.

More people in California would be able to tell its a clock in my experience.

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[Daniel_Reyes]

The population of Canada will spike if this happens and I'll be the first one over the border.

What's the deal with the US/Canadian border?
Can you guys just move there and live/work and vise-versa?

No, but you can vacation 6 months out of the year there so youd have to return to U.S. for a 24 hour period. You can apply for citizenship but you need a desirable skill. They have an online pre approval checklist to see if your profession is desired.

(I know it's a jerk comment)

The hell it is... It perfectly explains it.  [emoji14]alm:

Having lived there I would disagree.
I would have expected this to happen in the people's republic of Kalifornia.

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[cimmo]

Bullshit. He built a CLOCK. He was proud of what he built and simply wanted to show it off.

Yeah sure that is what YOU now know in behind sight and then it looks rediculous. Police officers have shot people dead because they thought they had a weapon in their hand and it was a toy or something else.

And that somehow justifies the actions of those police? Simply because police have been trained to perceive EVERYTHING as a threat and they "thought" a cell phone or camera was a threat, then that justifies the use of lethal force?
Nope. Police who murder unarmed civilians SHOULD be charged with manslaughter - regardless of the circumstances. If the jury wants to acquit, then that is their prerogative.

Again, look what happened. He built a clock that looked similar to something people might be afraid of or can confuse with something dangerous.

And that is the child's problem and NOT the responsible adult's?
So called responsible adults who are so ignorant and fearful that they immediately assume anything they do not understand to be a threat? Why are they - especially the police - NOT being scrutinized for their stupidity?

Then think what you will do if you are sitting on an airplane and someone pulls out a selfmade clock like that.

As someone who is NOT ignorant of what a home made clock looks like (I have a built a dozen or so), I would be fascinated in the story behind it's design and construction. I am surprised that anyone on this forum is trying to argue that being ignorant of electronics justifies being afraid of electronics.

Is it rediculous? Yes, arresting him is beyond reason and rediculous IMO.
Should he know better?  Perhaps, I think he will not do this again, so that means something is not as it should have been.

Why should he (a child) have known better? He followed the advice given to him by the first teacher and kept his clock in his bag. What more do you want?

Yeah, you are probably correct that he will not do this again - I can see this going one of two ways:
1: He leaves the hobby of electronics and just plays an Xbox for his fun.
2: He ends up being so marginalized and persecuted by this outrage that he becomes sympathetic to a genuine terrorist organisation. Perhaps to use his electronics knowledge to build a genuine bomb timer - one without any LEDs, displays or beepers and looks as innocuous as possible. Or maybe he just uses a banana and a mousetrap as a timer?

And let us not overlook the elephant in the room here - the ethnicity and gender of the child. Would a caucasian female who built an identical device have been treated the same?
Why not?

[Ian.M]

Unfortunately there are evil people out there who's greatest desire is to radicalise young Muslims and use them as cannon fodder in their Jihad.

Any reasonable person in authority, when confronted with a teenager with a suspicious device should immediately evacuate the area,  alert the police,  and attempt to peacefully move the teenager away from  the device, preferably without alerting them as to the reason for the evacuation.  The ONLY exception would be if they are confident that they know the teenager well enough to determine that they have not been radicalised and are not mentally unstable, and if the person in authority is technically competent to determine the device does not actually pose a threat, and can do so without risk, in which case confiscation and a parent teacher conference *may* be a more appropriate way to deal with the issue.

Maybe the first teacher mishandled the situation because they didn't want to get the incident permanently on the student's record.  However, once anyone else noticed the suspect device, the whole response from the authorities was entirely predictable.

If you know you may be mistaken for a member of a group of interest to the security services, even though you are totally innocent and law-abiding, if you want a peaceful life it is strongly advisable  to *NEVER* do, or say anything that may make them perceive you as a threat or otherwise act in a suspicious manner. 

The kid has certainly learned from this, but to avoid the wrong lessons being learned, he should now be encouraged to present his device at a school show-and-tell, *WITHOUT* a case on it.

 

[AF6LJ]

(I know it's a jerk comment)

The hell it is... It perfectly explains it.  alm:

Having lived there I would disagree.
I would have expected this to happen in the people's republic of Kalifornia.

More people in California would be able to tell its a clock in my experience.

Sent from my SM-G900P using Tapatalk

You seem to be of the opinion that Texas is populated by people who ride horses to work, have shoot outs at high noon and seem to forget that Freescals semiconductor is a major employer in Texas.

I don't know that I could agree with you.
A quarter of the citizens of Kalifornia can't speak English, another quarter are on welfare and another quarter are state employees sucking the life out of the rest of us. 

[Len]

For comparison: Joey Hudy is white and doesn't have an "Arab" name, so he was invited to the White House to show off a gun that he made.
https://youtu.be/e53UPiFDH0k

[septer012]

An example of stupid people messing with this youth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=122&v=3mW4w0Y1OXE

[Rasz]

I ran a business in elementary(! 10-12 years old) school selling self designed junk. All pre 1989 Poland, so still under Soviet occupation = no good western toys in shops.

 It started when I build cable remote controlled buggy from: tape deck parts for motor and cogs (gearbox reduction was all made and designed by me using those cogs, nails, pcb and epoxy, I was so frickin proud of it ), pcb for base plate, thick copper wire for frame and front steering, scotch tape rolls pushed into bike rubber tube for rims with tires, flat ribbon cable to the remote, plastic box filled with two 4.5V batteries and glued dip switches as the remote  . As soon as I showed it off on the school playground one of the rich kids offered me a ridiculous sum of money, something like 1/5 my mums salary at the time. After that I made one more electric toy and switched into electronics. I discovered CD4000 series chips manufactured locally(CEMI) and fell in love, had whole notebook that I manually filled with handwritten datasheets and designs

Long story short my bestseller was a CD4060 based TIMER that I marketed as a TIMED DETONATOR ('just like in the movies' TM). With a blinking led and everything, last stage of the counter was connected to transistor driving crushed flashlight bulb, designed to detonate firecrackers. Of course as part of making it extra double cool I sanded off all the markings from the components, giving it that extra terrorist touch.  

Thankfully nobody used it with actual bomb (afaik).

[linux-works]

http://www.fark.com/comments/8858582/Kid-makes-a-clock-to-impress-his-engineering-teacher-ends-up-in-handcuffs-because-its-clearly-a-bomb-Being-named-Ahmed-has-nothing-to-do-with-it

https://hackaday.com/2015/09/15/9th-grader-arrested-searched-for-building-a-clock/

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/15/09/16/0339206/9th-grader-may-face-charges-after-homemade-clock-mistaken-for-bomb

story gone hugely viral; all the blogs and 'media' are covering it, now.

the country and the world will discuss this.  I wonder, will we grow up a little and learn from our mistakes or will we double-down on the derp (as is said in the parlance of our times) and refuse to make a learning moment from this?

my bet is that they'll double down and dig in.

[zapta]

Yet another example where the significance of a benign and relatively harmless local incident is inflated by social media.

If this is one of our top priority problems, we are in very good shape.

[kingofkya]

If only theses idiots knew how cheap pcbs are... i modestly intelligent person can copy a schematic in and get something that "dosen't look like a bomb" produced. And none of the idiots would have any idea what it does.

Like others have said just think of how manny material a basic chemistry book can tell you how to make. That would easely fit in say a capacitor or lithium cell and no one would be the wiser...


Well at lest he has a story for what ever collage he applies to:P

[LabSpokane]

Yet another example where the significance of a benign and relatively harmless local incident is inflated by social media.

If this is one of our top priority problems, we are in very good shape.

A cadre of stupefyingly ignorant adults are persecuting and emotionally scarring a child for life due to his intellectual curiosity and ethnicity. It's not a small problem. It's indicative of an unjust society. And this continual injustice is radicalizing children and young adults across the globe.

We cannot allow this to continue if we want to be a civilization that aspires to live in peace with others.

Everyone will never love America. But it really is worth talking to someone from a predominantly Muslim region to understand how this type of hatred makes them feel. Once you do, you might have a different mind about letting this continue. Young people deserve love, respect, and hope. They don't deserve persecution and second-class citizenship due to their ethnicity and religious upbringing.

This kind of crap went out of fashion with Nazi Germany, and it should damned well should stay that way.

[Daniel_Reyes]

What's crazy is I took apart a clock for a project about 15 years ago and brought it into the 4th grade and no one batted an eye.

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[zapta]

This kind of crap went out of fashion with Nazi Germany, and it should damned well should stay that way.

Wow!  A kid brought to school a strange looking apparatus that was mistaken for a fake bomb and now we are in Nazi territory. 

The magic of social media.

[TimFox]

You seem to be of the opinion that Texas is populated by people who ride horses to work, have shoot outs at high noon and seem to forget that Freescals semiconductor is a major employer in Texas.

I don't know that I could agree with you.
A quarter of the citizens of Kalifornia can't speak English, another quarter are on welfare and another quarter are state employees sucking the life out of the rest of us.

As you seem sure of your numbers and spelling, can you quote a source for the quartiles?

[Melt-O-Tronic]

That story is nothing more than click bait.  We know nothing of what he actually built or what it looked like.

We have only one side of the story and that side is carefully crafted to instill outrage in people who don't care about the truth.  From the other side, all I've seen so far is a letter from the Principal saying there was no danger.

This bullshit story has an agenda.  Don't fall for it.  The stupid people are the ones who do.

[LabSpokane]

This kind of crap went out of fashion with Nazi Germany, and it should damned well should stay that way.

Wow!  A kid brought to school a strange looking apparatus that was mistaken for a fake bomb and now we are in Nazi territory. 

The magic of social media.

And a white kid wouldn't have been looked at twice. Just admit it. It was about the child, not the device.

And the parallels between the current trend of anti-Hispanic and anti-Muslim political propaganda and anti-Semitism are clear and abundant. 

It's not right. This is not America's promise. This is not equal treatment under the law.

[Kjelt]

Yeah sure that is what YOU now know in behind sight and then it looks rediculous. Police officers have shot people dead because they thought they had a weapon in their hand and it was a toy or something else.

And that somehow justifies the actions of those police? Simply because police have been trained to perceive EVERYTHING as a threat and they "thought" a cell phone or camera was a threat, then that justifies the use of lethal force?

No because Police officers encounter a lot of lethal threats and a lot of police officers are ending up dead before age 40. At the end of the day they also want to go home to the wife and children.
They are doing a job society wants them to do. Society has given them a tool (gun) to do their work. If they use their tool in an accident wrong decision that is not murder. If it was not an accident ofcourse it would be.
It is simple: don't pull a fake gun or something that might be interpreted like that against armed police officers or face the consequences. That is not only in the USA it is also here in Europe. Any sensible person will raise their arms in the sky , do as they are told and show they are NOT a threat. Mistakes happen and the best thing you can do is everything to avoid that they make a mistake.

Nope. Police who murder unarmed civilians SHOULD be charged with manslaughter - regardless of the circumstances.

It is not murder, if it was murder than the police officer should have known it was a fake gun or phone, and still pull the trigger, then it would be murder.
If (s)he has to make a call between life and death (perhaps his own) then the choice is simple and the instructions are also simple, don't take a chance.
So if a police officer makes a genuine mistake then it is not murder, it is a work related accident. The alternative is that police officers do not go on the street anymore or don't respond to armed incidents because they fear they end up in jail if they make a mistake. Crime will rule the streets, if that is what you want.

I am surprised that anyone on this forum is trying to argue that being ignorant of electronics justifies being afraid of electronics.

Who is saying that? Total new point besides the subject. It has nothing to do with electronics, it has to do with appearances, and fast judgments. It could as well have been a wooden gun that he wanted to show to his crafts teacher, it does not matter.
It is all about how it MIGHT look like to someone.
If something looks like shit, it might well be shit and even there is only a 1% chance that it is really shit and the teacher would have ignored it, then the whole school would have been in piles of shit.
But again arresting him was rediculous I agree totally, a short reprimand would have been enough IMO.

And let us not overlook the elephant in the room here - the ethnicity and gender of the child. Would a caucasian female who built an identical device have been treated the same?
Why not?

She might be, she should be. But say that you are right and this played a role, then to answer your question probably because there have been no reports or news about caucasian female children in training camps in the middle of a war shooting unarmed hostages through there heads with AK47's.