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There exists, in almost every set of rules made by any organization, a few that are designed simply to cover the organization’s “rear end” (I recognize that “rear end” is poor diction, but the editors would censor the word “[censored by the editors]”). Let’s call these rules CYA rules (short for Cover Your Rear End). Such rules include the classic “no illegal drugs past this gate” sign, as well as rules that we don’t think about in this light, such as speed limits, or, as I touched upon last edition, dress codes. If you want to check if a rule or law falls into this category, just ask yourself whether or not it would be enforced every time someone was caught breaking it. So, for example, if the entire cheerleading team breaks dress code in front of literally every administrator in the school, and none of them are punished, you have yourself a CYA rule.
CYA rules are not just limited to district policy, although I’ve included a list at the end of the article of some good ones that I found leafing through the Student Handbook (which, by the way, is up there with the Bible in terms of books most likely to trigger me). Even federal law is plagued with such restrictions. For instance, you probably knew it’s illegal to deface currency, which means the labs we did in Chemistry where we zinc-plated pennies required us to commit a federal crime. Jaywalking is also illegal, and as a result in order for me to cross the street to get to my bus stop, I have to walk five miles from my house to get to the nearest crosswalk, and then another five miles to get back to my street (this time on the other side of the road).
CYA rules also include some regulations that people generally think make sense, at least at the surface. For instance, pirating music and software, as well as speeding and gambling, is illegal. So why are these laws of the CYA variety? Simply put, even the people who advocate for these restrictions would not want everyone breaking them to be caught. The government could easily stop all speeding overnight—just put a speedometer in every car that would know when you’re speeding and issue a ticket immediately. Going 46 in a 45? You get a ticket. Not just once, but every single time you go a fraction of a mile-per-hour over. We have the technology to do it, but the result would be chaos, and most people would either refuse to pay the tickets or speeding laws would be rewritten amidst public outrage. So too with piracy; if everyone who ever did it were arrested, people would be outraged, and within days our piracy law would be cut down dramatically. On the subject of copyright law, if someone were arrested for singing “Happy Birthday” in public (which until very recently was a crime), people would lose their minds. And I’m sure you can imagine how people would feel if poker night among friends ended with a SWAT team breaking into the house and arresting everyone involved. Note that none of this applies for laws that prohibit murder, arson, robbery, or tax evasion, where people in favor of the laws generally agree that everyone who does it should be caught. I’m sure you can come up with your own examples, and I highly encourage you to leave them in the comments section of this article at ihstattler.com.
These laws exist because people who write rules are lazy. There. I said it. Rather than dealing with the fact that legislation isn’t easy, and that nuance exists everywhere, regulators decide you need to just CYA. It wouldn’t be terribly complicated to come up with an algorithm for who to arrest for speeding. I would suggest some z-score value, so that people have to drive at or near the average rate of traffic. In this model, police at speeding traps would record everyone’s speed for a while and a computer program would tell them who to pull over instead of having them use their personal judgment. The result of the inability of rulemakers to be decisive is that now those in charge of enforcement get to write in the nuance themselves, and sometimes that nuance has more to do with the color of one’s skin than the severity of their offense. Take speeding once again; because legislators failed to make a law that could be reasonably enforced every time someone was caught violating it, police get to decide when someone speeding is worthy of being pulled over. And guess what—being “worthy of being pulled over” has a lot to do with race. The New York Times explains this issue, writing:
“Officers pulled over African-American drivers for traffic violations at a rate far out of proportion with their share of the local driving population. They used their discretion to search black drivers or their cars more than twice as often as white motorists—even though they found drugs and weapons significantly more often when the driver was white.”
We all know how far too many of those traffic stops end. It’s easy for someone with privilege to shrug off CYA laws, but for the victims of the biased enforcement of these laws, the impact can be devastating.
And so it triggers the living heck out of me when my classmates try to tell me that the dress code is never enforced. Because maybe it isn’t for them. But the harsh reality is that, as The Atlantic explains, enforcement often falls heavily on LGBT communities, especially those who are not cisgender.
So to rulemakers everywhere, I submit the following: stop worrying about CYA and start making rules that people would actually be comfortable enforcing.
CYA rules in district policy:
- Almost everything about the dress code.
- No throwing of balls/frisbees in the Quad. Hahahahahaha.
- Seniors may not drive other students during the school day. Good one guys.
- Off-Campus Misconduct rules. These would allow an administrator to punish a student for dress-code violations while walking through the Commons.
- Bans of “electronic games” in the library (when it comes to people violating this rule, the district certainly isn’t “catching them all” if you know what I mean).
- No touching the ground during a school dance. If you drop your wallet, you’re screwed.
- No stacking Chromebooks. There are only two sets of Jenga in the library, and the librarians don’t like it when you get creative.
- The requirement to have a school ID on one’s person at all times.
- The rule against participation in “unauthorized” sit-ins or boycotts, or encouraging others to do so. This rule literally means the school district can punish you for, say, not shopping at Hobby Lobby, and it also means that I can’t tell you not to shop at Hobby Lobby. But I will anyways. Don’t shop at Hobby Lobby, kids.
- Multiple vague rules about disrupting pedagogical imperatives, which essentially give admins the right to punish anyone they want for anything they don’t like.
