The Associated Press reported on Wednesday that three Phoenix-area schools were put "on lockdown" after a middle-school student reported seeing a person dressed as Batman run across the school grounds, jump over a fence and disappear into the desert. The student described the allegedly caped crusader as being 6 feet 3 inches tall and possibly male. "We're assuming it was male," said a police spokesman, "although they did have a mask on." Authorities locked down the middle school and a nearby elementary school and high school while they searched for Batman, but though they "combed the desert" near the schools, Batman had vanished.
Here are some things we may or may not be able to learn from this story:
- Phoenix police will do pretty much whatever middle-school students tell them to do;
- Phoenix police are unclear as to the best way to determine whether a suspect is male or female, and are not so good with pronouns, either;
- Phoenix has a procedure for putting elementary schools "on lockdown"; and
- We are probably not controlling our borders all that well if we can't find somebody running through the desert in broad daylight dressed as Batman.
The spokesman tried to downplay the latter problem, however. "It's just one of those interesting little stories that we looked into but we couldn't find anyone," he said. Well, they did have a mask on. But hey, don't admit failure yet. Asked in December about a similarly interesting little story, combing the desert for Osama bin Laden, Homeland Security Adviser Fran Townsend flatly denied that we have "failed" to find him. "I don't know that I view that as a failure," she told CNN. "It's a success that hasn't occurred yet."
That's the spirit.
Link: AP via SFGate.com
