No Tolerance for Zero Tolerance

No Tolerance for Zero Tolerance
by Radley Balko

"The Shoebox" is a mom n' pop sporting goods store in Black Earth, Wisconsin. It's owned by Steve Schmitt, an ardent backer of Badger (University of Wisconsin) sports, a successful business man and, by all accounts, an all around stand-up guy.

Steve, you see, thinks good service and personal care with his customers makes good business sense, an attitude the Finish Lines and Foot Lockers and Champs of the world would do well to notice and adopt. Consequently, Steve often gives discounts on a whim, he lets customers try out hardware before they commit to buying it, and he gladly makes exchanges and returns for no good reason at all.

Callers to one nationally syndicated radio morning show told stories of how Schmitt once let a fellow take a pair of shoes without paying for them because he'd forgotten his checkbook. "Just send me a check in the mail when you get home," Schmitt told him.

Myron Anderson, a 70 year-old retiree told Madison's Capital Times a story about a pair of boots he was looking for that Schmitt helped him out with.

"They didn't have my size, but Steve said he'd order me a pair and send me the boots before I paid any money", said Anderson. "Once I got them, he said to send a check if they fit. I never forgot the service and the trust he had in his customers." But Schmitt's sense of good service eventually got him into trouble. More importantly, it may have cost his beloved Badgers a shot at the national championship.

Schmitt it seems, routinely gave Badger football players the same unadvertised discounts he gave everyone else who bought shoes at his store. He'd have given one to you if you'd asked for it. Once a farmer asked Schmitt if he could put cleats on the bottom of his shoes to give him traction in the field. Schmitt outright gave the man three pairs of cleats.

But the NCAA doesn't much care. See, the NCAA has a rule against such discounts and if that rule's broken, there's zero tolerance for the athletes who get the discount.

Some of the football players didn't even know they were getting a markdown. Others naively assumed that a discount from a friendly guy on a pair of shoes wasn't exactly the same as a wealthy alumnus renting them condos in Barbados. Silly football players.

The NCAA suspended 11 Wisconsin players for three games and fifteen others for one game for accepting the discounts. They were also forced to refund the full price of the shoes.

"They better suspend all the priests, the homeless, the laborers and the truck drivers and the farmers from Fennimore that I give discounts to, too", Schmitt told the Times. "Seriously, does it mean that the UW (Univ. of Wisconsin) athletes can't get the same discount that the common guy gets? That's weird."

I wouldn't call it weird. I'd call it another word. I'd call it what Myron Anderson probably pushed those boots down into a time or two while walking through a Wisconsin dairy pasture.

Wisconsin, ranked fourth nationally at the time, lost three weeks later to Northwestern. They lost a heartbreaker after Northwestern quarterback Zack Kustok tied the game with a broken-play across-the-field bullet to the end zone. One of the Wisconsin players suspended for that game was Jamar Fletcher, an all-American defensive back who many say is the absolute best in the country at his position. It's probably a safe bet Wisconsin would have won with Fletcher on the field.

Zero tolerance, literally, means the following: We refuse to put any infraction into context. We will cling blindly to our rulebooks. We will close our eyes to reason and common sense. The rules will be enforced, and if we look like complete jackasses in enforcing them, so be it.

Zero tolerance was a shameful fraud from its inception, in the drug war, where it was concocted by the Reagan administration to show the world that, when it came to drugs, the United States was really, really, really serious. Combined with an equally ignorant "asset forfeiture" policy, zero tolerance essentially meant that objects -- cars, houses, boats -- could be guilty of crimes. A cop finds pot in your car, you lose your car. Doesn't matter how it got there, this is zero tolerance.

Since then, zero tolerance always creeps back into the picture when "officials" decide a problem has become so severe that reason and measured judgment are no longer sufficient, that only hysteria will relieve the crisis. Often, fear of lawsuits drives the policy.

Consequently, a middle school girl in Illinois gets suspended for bringing nail clippers to class (violation of a "zero tolerance" weapons policy), a kindergartner is suspended for pecking a classmate on the cheek (violation of a "zero tolerance" sexual harassment policy), and an elementary school student is expelled for lending his inhaler to a friend in the throes of an asthma attack (violation of a "zero tolerance" drug policy).

By now, we all know about Andrea Raducan, the Romanian gymnast and top all-around performer at last month's Olympics. Raducan's hours of toil and sweat and years of training were foiled when officials found a banned substance in her system that was traced to the cold medicine she'd been prescribed by her doctor. International Olympic Committee officials acknowledged "the complexity of the issue," that Raducan "didn't intentionally subvert the rules," and that the banned drugged "probably had no affect on her performance."

Still, rules is rules, and IOC bureaucrats, who I'm guessing are birthed in the same sludge as NCAA bureaucrats, stripped her of her medal because the IOC adheres to firm "no tolerance" policy when it comes to banned substances. They had to uphold the integrity of the competition. Never mind that the entire gymnastics competition had already been called into question after someone mismeasured the height of the women's vault by a good six inches.

It's time to nix zero tolerance and start looking at these cases with some perspective and context. The kid on scholarship who accepts three hookers, a bag of cocaine and a BMW from a sleazy alumni booster isn't as guilty as the kid who gets ten dollars off his football cleats from a booster who'd probably have given the same discount to anyone who knows the right way to say "Fon du Lac."

That goes for sports, government and school, too. Nail clippers aren't assault rifles, an Ibuprofen isn't a speedball, and a peck on the cheek isn't a molestation. Such pronouncements may seem obvious to you and me, but sometimes a bureaucrat needs "obvious" to slap his jowls and scream in his ear canal before he'll acknowledge the word exists.