The Case of the Not-Stolen AirPods
Uncanny Valley | WIRED
WIRED
4.1 • 575 Ratings
🗓️ 24 August 2023
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Most of us who went to school in the United States have been threatened with detention for minor infractions like uttering a curse word or showing up to class five minutes late. But in Illinois, such behavior was landing students in more serious trouble. Since a recent state law prohibited school administrators in Illinois from fining students for infractions, those same administrators turned to the police to handle disciplinary actions. A recent investigation by ProPublica found that local police in Illinois were issuing ticketed citations to thousands of middle school and high school students each year. Kids caught fighting, vaping, skipping class, or even “causing a disturbance”—a sketchily defined catch-all—were facing tickets with fines of up to $500, putting financial strain on the their families, causing them to miss school to attend hearings, and adding to the normal stresses of school life. One case, involving a student who was accused of stealing a pair of AirPods, recently went to a jury trial as the student tried to clear her name.
This week on Gadget Lab, ProPublica reporters Jodi S. Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards join the show to talk about their in-depth reporting of the case of the missing AirPods and how police overreach has affected students in Illinois.
Show Notes:
Read Jodi and Jennifer’s ProPublica story about the missing AirPods and follow all of their reporting about how police cite students in Illinois.
Recommendations:
Jennifer recommends putting up a hammock in your backyard. Jodi recommends the Scrub Daddy sponge. Mike recommends the Longreads Top 5 newsletter. Lauren recommends donating to ProPublica.
Jodi S. Cohen can be found on Twitter @jodiscohen. Jennifer Smith Richards is @jsmithrichards Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Mike. |
| 0:01.0 | Lauren. |
| 0:02.0 | Have you ever been accused of stealing something that you didn't steal? |
| 0:05.0 | Yes, when I was much younger and looked like a ruffian. |
| 0:11.0 | Yes, it has happened to me. |
| 0:12.0 | Care to share more? |
| 0:13.0 | No. |
| 0:14.0 | I think the statute of limitations has probably run out. |
| 0:17.0 | What's your question? |
| 0:18.0 | All right. |
| 0:19.0 | What would you have done if you were offered the option to take a plea deal and pay $100 versus going through a years-long legal process to clear your name? |
| 0:30.1 | I mean, that's a really tough call because I would want to clear my name, but at the same time, that sounds like a gigantic hassle. And a hundred |
| 0:39.6 | bucks was a lot of money to me at the time, but to make it all go away and to swallow my pride |
| 0:45.4 | a little bit, maybe. Well, a case involving missing AirPods in Illinois culminated in this |
| 0:52.3 | exact quandary earlier in August. |
| 0:55.0 | And the story is just too remarkable not to talk about on Gadget Lab. |
| 0:59.0 | Great. Let's get into it. |
| 1:00.0 | All right. Let's do it. |
| 1:06.0 | Hi, everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior writer at Wired. And I'm Michael Collori. I'm a senior editor at Wired. We're also joined this week by two reporters from ProPublica, Jody S. Cohen and Jennifer Smith-Ritchards. Hello, and welcome to you both. Hello. Hi. Thanks for having us. Thanks for coming on the show. We're really excited about this. Now, we wanted to bring Jody and Jennifer on the show because the team over at ProPublica has been running an investigation into how police in Illinois have been finding students for infractions or supposed infractions that would normally be handled within a school system itself, and how one particular case around |
| 1:45.0 | AirPods brought more light to this practice. So a little background. In 2019, a teenager in Illinois named |
| 1:54.2 | Amara Harris was accused of stealing a classmates' AirPods. Now, because of the way student discipline |
| 2:00.0 | is handled in the state of Illinois, |
... |
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