Oh, this is just priceless. As reported in an article in the Telegraph, there is a proposal to place children in eleven London boroughs under surveillance by the police, if they’re thought to be ‘at risk’ of committing a crime.

How do you tell who’s at risk? Acording to the article, “children involved in cheekiness, minor vandalism and causing nuisances” will be targeted.

This is, of course, the logic of the whole “gateway drug” argument. Most criminals were “cheeky” or “caused nuisances” when they were children. They’re now criminals. Ergo nuisance-causing must lead to criminality.

The article further states that the children’s behavior will “be monitored at school and on the streets by special squads of police officers and social workers, even though the children have not committed a crime and will not have been warned that they are being watched.”

Oh, yeah, this’ll be real subtle. The kids will never suspect a thing. If you assign cops to tail every child who’s a repeat offender at cheekiness, or minor vandalism, or nuisance-causing, you’ll wind up with hordes of police clogging the streets every day when school closes. More buses will have to be added to routes that students ride, just to make room for all the police.

You see, all children are cheeky and cause nuisances. And just about all of them engage in minor vandalism. It might be more profitable to target kids who are the children of lowlifes, and whose families do not instill in them a decent set of values and respect for others. That might wind up looking like you were targeting racial or economic minorities, though. Better to treat all children as potential criminals. That’s definitely a workable solution.