If This Was Your Best Decision, Welp.

[Content Note: Islamophobia; police misconduct; carcerality. Video may autoplay at link.]

Irving Police Chief Larry Boyd has admitted that the police determined very quickly that ninth-grader Ahmed Mohamed had not brought an actual bomb to school—which, of course, was obvious from the start. As Shaker livi immediately pointed out in comments, the school was never evactuated. MSNBC host Chris Hayes questioned the chief about what was sure a curious damn response if the school administrators and police actually thought Mohamed had built a bomb and brought it to school:

Hayes pointed out that, despite the allegations against the teen, no bomb squad was called to the MacArthur campus, nor was the campus evacuated.

"Once it's determined that this is just a clock or just a piece of electronics, why then the arrest and all of that?" he asked Boyd. "That's very hard for folks to understand."

"I get that. I understand the concern," the chief responded. "The officers pretty quickly determined that they weren't investigating an explosive device. What their investigation centered around is the law violation of bringing a device into a facility like that that is intended to create a level of alarm. In other words, a hoax bomb — something that is not really a bomb, but is designed and presented in a way that it creates people to be afraid."

"Right, but he never called it a bomb, right?" Hayes countered. "He just kept calling it a clock. I mean, it never came out of his lips, he never did something or started showing it around saying, 'Look at this bomb I have.' He said, 'Look at my clock.'"

"There definitely was some confusion and some level of information that didn't come out immediately," Boyd said, adding that in many cases, someone who would make a "hoax bomb" would not be likely to admit to doing so to police.

"With what they had at that time, they made the best decision that they had at that point in time," he told a visibly skeptical Hayes.

What utter bullshit. And, seriously, if that is the best decision that police could make, based on a child building a clock and calling it a clock and showing it off as a clock, that doesn't say much for the Irving police's collective decision-making abilities.

The truth is, this is just another example (see also) of the state-sanctioned harassment and intimidation of Muslims, and another example of how students of color are funneled into the school-to-prison pipeline. It's nothing more or less sophisticated than the entirely typical rank racism practiced and sanctioned by US institutions every damn day.