Mental Detector.

• Author: Garza, Mariel
• Position: School districts gather information on potentially violent students - Brief Article

Has Johnny threatened another student or a teacher? Does he write dark poetry? Or maybe he plays too much Doom? In Los Angeles County, some schools aren't just noting such behavior. At the behest of the district attorney, they're testing a computer program that they think will help them identify potentially violent students. Called Mosaic 2000, the profiling program asks 42 questions about a kid and then figures out--"scientifically," of course--whether his anti-social ways constitute an "escalating pattern" of problem behavior.

The district attorney's office insists that the information won't be used in a sinister way. In fact, a D.A. spokeswoman says each individual's data will be deleted after the information has been entered and an evaluation completed.

Maybe L.A. schools will choose to store the information Mosaic 2000 gleans, and maybe they won't. But other school districts around the country are saving that type of information for later use. In Wallingford...