Deviation Actions
I already wrote about the weakness of zero tolerance policies before when I was talking about school dealing with bullying, but I'm a bit flabbergasted to find out people are still discovering zero tolerance policies lead to failure. So I'm going to lay this out as to why they fail and I'm going to use the three largest examples in their implementation, guns, drugs, and bullying.
Back in the 90's there was an experiment that was implemented by M.A.D.D. pressuring political leaders in a zero tolerance program for drinking and driving. They did not create any new laws, what they did was whenever someone blew any level of alcohol in their system at a checkpoint that person had their licence suspended for twelve hours. This trial only went on for one Christmas season. Then at the end of the season they checked the numbers to see how effective it was in preventing road fatalities. The result made no changes at all, in some places the death tolls got worse. So what went wrong? One of the mistakes of zero tolerance programs is the assumption of infinite resources, that once you change the rules that no level of tolerance would be allowed then all offenders could be arrested. If you actually had that ability then you wouldn't have had the problem that led to you trying zero tolerance in the first place.
When they examined the numbers thoroughly in the drinking and driving program what they discovered is most of the deaths caused by drinking and driving are caused by the most extreme offenders. Not by people who are close to the legal limit or a little over. The most extreme offenders often reoffend and have figured out how to function within a system that has random checkpoints. These are the people who are on the look out all the time for checkpoints because they are constantly breaking the law. Since the checkpoint system was dedicating itself to trying to pull over every single person who so much as had a single drink, all of the police resources were being used up in taking minor offenders off the road, leaving the extreme offenders unchallenged.
This is what happens when you enforce zero tolerance policies. Instead getting everyone who breaks the rules what happens is the people who enforce the rules have all of their time and resources gobbled up in chasing down soft targets while the major offenders will go unchallenged more than ever.
Now lets take guns, drugs, and bullying. When you implement a zero tolerance policy on any one of these three things do you think for a moment that you just created a rule that bans these three things? Guns, drugs, and bullying have always been against the rules on school grounds. The most extreme offenders have not been wandering around freely waving guns, dishing out drugs, and beating the daylights out of students. The most extreme offenders have figured out how to function within a system without getting caught. Now that you implemented a zero tolerance policy what's going to happen is your teachers are going to run around the school like a bunch of headless chickens chasing down meaningless soft targets, making it easier for the most extreme offenders, who have already figured out how to avoid you or this problem wouldn't be happening.
On top of that zero tolerance policies are such a head-up-your-ass policy where idiots can pretend they're accomplishing something. When I say zero tolerance policies on guns don't work, do you really think I mean let kids bring guns to school once in a while and let it slide? No. Guns have been and always should be illegal to bring to school. But zero tolerance policies cause teachers to go apeshit and phone in SWAT teams because kids are drawing pictures of guns. A school winds up on the evening news with a gun scare because Timmy has a piece of Lego in his bag that sort of look like a gun (but not really). That's just taking common sense and shamelessly casting it to the wind. We have zero tolerance, that means we act stupid. Meanwhile there's a drug dealer behind your bleachers who sold a stolen tech 9 to an emotionally disturbed bullied kid, but you didn't see that because you're too busy heroically chasing down pieces of Lego.
Now let's take the zero tolerance policy and turn it on it's head. What If I told you I was going to implement a policy where all I was going to do was dedicate all of my time and effort in going after only the worst of the worst, and let everything else slide? No discipline for minor to medium infractions. All I care about is finding and punishing the worst baddies. A lot of people would probably not care for this policy. People would say you would have a breakdown discipline, that offenders must be dealt with on some way. That may be true, but my policy would actually gain you greater results in preventing the worst infractions than zero tolerance because I would actually stand a chance in catching a meaningful offender instead of chasing around soft targets.
Whatever policy you have in dealing with anything that causes hardship it must be a policy of measured response. Don't call the cops because some kid with allergies brought antihistamines to school. Don't go apeshit over making fanart of their favourite third person shooter video games. Don't call a SWAT team all because two friends have fun talking smack to one another in the hallway. Measured response, deal with a situation appropriately and give it no more attention than it requires or deserves.
