NJ Schools Create Snatch & Grab Rule To Take On Cyberbullying

A school district in New Jersey is trying to crack down on bullying in school, but their efforts to save lives might also be a violation of the constitutional rights of their students. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

A school district in New Jersey is trying to crack down on bullying at school, but their efforts to save lives might be a violation of the constitutional rights of the student. You and I probably disagree on this one. I think there are times, well, basically lay the case out.

Yeah. What happened is you had a student several years ago that was just bullied to the point where she took her own life. And it was later revealed that there were complaints. There were other students that had said, look, I'm being bullied online. Here's what's happening. They've got these groups, they've got these, they're posting stuff on TikTok. It's all on the phones. We tried to tell y'all. You did nothing. And now we have a young girl who is dead. So New Jersey says, or the school district in New Jersey says, okay, here's the deal. We now have the ability to take any student's cell phone, look through it, see what you're doing, see what you're posting. And that's the new policy, which certainly raises constitutional issues about whether the district has the ability to just snatch and grab. So, that's where things, you gotta stop the bullying, absolutely.

Well, apparently there are just tons of mean little freakish kids in this district. I mean, the list is endless. I mean, they put together 30,000 complaints, violence, weapons, drugs, bullying. Maybe it's just a freakish little area in New Jersey, but they're gonna win on this. You know why? Because in the constitutional analysis, there's something called police powers. Police powers are so strong, they have to do with health, safety, and welfare. And they may have to dress it up a little bit. They may have to tweak it just a little bit. But the argument that there's a reason that we have to police what's going on is a health and safety issue. And that falls within police powers. Most of the time police powers are going to trump pretty strong constitutional concepts. I think they need this, whatever the hell's going on in New Jersey. I mean, these freakish little kids, like I said, this Adriana, this is an awful story.

It really is.

They went back and they saw that it was clearly an intent to get this child to commit suicide. And so when you have a list of 30,000 complaints, violence, the term is serious violence. Weapons, drugs, bullying, I mean, come on, Jesus Christ. That's just between '21 and '22. That's where they got these statistics. So, I don't know if it plays out everywhere, but New Jersey.

Well, Okay, so I have a question because you know this. I do not. So does a school district, the school board, would they fall under an entity that would be able to exercise police powers? Or is that relegated to local governments or police?

Yeah, it's really relegated to any part of the government. It's not, doesn't call in law enforcement. It sounds like it would, but it's not. And anybody in government has to say, well, police powers are going to trump this. They certainly have the argument to do it. And I think that there's a good chance they could win on this. And if it does, you're gonna see this happen across the country.

So this will probably be one that ends up, we'll talk about it a from now, we'll see it the Supreme Court.

Yeah. Yeah. That's the way I see it.