It may be my filter bubble or media bias here in Europe but I read more about bizarro cases (t-shirt with a gun motif, maple leaf drugs) and less penalties because of harassment.
Fighting bullying is a necessity I don’t see as strictly enforced as other items on the zero-tolerance list. [And while we’re talking about haters they are juvenile haters. Criminal prosecution can be disastrous, aren’t there better ways to educate them?]
And we’re back to the problem of lazy thinking again, aren’t we? You actually have to rub two brain cells together to figure out that a t-shirt is not the same thing as a gun. That’s hard, man. 
Another thing to add about America in general is that historically (as in, prior to the age of The Oligarchs), our legislation has been largely reactionary. The reaction has almost always been a knee-jerk that kicks the pendulum way out of whack. It often takes 20 years for the body politic (sometimes longer) to come to their senses on any given bit of knee-jerkery. We’re due to have revisions in Zero Tolerance laws (yes, it is the law in many states) and policies, but we’re not quite at the tipping point. One more case like Ahmed Mohamed’s will probably get us there as long as there’s a similar amount of media attention.
I keep hoping only one more case will get us to the tipping point, but my hopes keep getting smashed.
I have one kid still in High School, and my spouse is on an advisory committee that receives reports on all school incidents within the district. This is what we’ve learned.
At least 90% of incidents are unreported outside of the system. Most families do not allow their kids’ names to appear in the papers.
Rich kids of any color walk, but the majority of poor kids are non-white.
Zero tolerance is increasingly being applied to all rules infractions, not just weapons and drugs.
Is it fair to compare zero tolerance to the broken windows theory? My understanding is that the latter is nowadays widely disregarded as base for policing and is not anymore accepted as best (or even working) practice for LEAs. Broken window was “codified” in the 80s, zero tolerance in the 90s - so a 10 year delay between the fade-out of the two ideas?
Is there a difference?
I don’t know. Maybe in the sense that they both morphed into something insane?
It seems like originally, the broken window theory was about the idea that if people cared enough about their neighborhood to fix up the street appearance, criminals would find a less cared-for place to do business, but then it rapidly morphed into some kind of weird magical thinking that “if I punish people for having broken windows, then criminals will no longer exist.”
And originally, the zero tolerance policy was supposed to establish a line where we’d stop treating children like children - that line being at the point where guns were being brought to school with intent to do harm - but then it rapidly became “if we punish tiny infractions incredibly harshly, children will become perfectly behaved.”
Nah, I guess they really aren’t that much alike. Is it fair to compare? I dunno.
My angle was more the needed and developing mindset of the two concepts, both seem to encourage hard bounderies between the ‘guardians of the order’ (police, teacher, other officials) and the unknown but potentially dissenting rest (citizens, pupils, uninvolved third persons).
Mostly on-topic is an essay by Bruce Schneier discussing the psychological stress when living constantly alert and under the assumption of danger.
(I [grumpily] tend to agree that you’re right - zero tolerance and broken window were used in very different backgrounds and are dissimilar)
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