Keep Cops Out of Schools

By CHASE MADAR

New York City, which has the largest school system in the US, with almost 1.1 million students, chiefly from working-class families, is a case study in the failure of get-tough policies to bring order and safety. The city, faced with violence in schools, transferred responsibility for security from the Board of Education to the New York Police Department (NYPD) in 1998. This transformed the School Safety Agents (who now number 4,500) into police personnel, answerable not to teachers or principals but to the NYPD. The shift helped then-mayor Rudy Giuliani look tough, and current mayor Mike Bloomberg clearly likes the way it establishes his law-and-order credentials.

Since the NYPD takeover, the police and the Department of Education have annually boasted of the decrease in in-school crime. With metal detectors and a heavy police presence at 22 of the most dangerous IMPACT schools, the police claim a major drop in crime. Few believe these statistics. A 2007 report by the City Comptroller found pervasive underreporting of violent incidents throughout the school system. Though condemned by the police and Department of Education, the report was endorsed by the teachers’ union, principals’ union and Teamsters Local 237, the powerful chapter that includes the School Safety Agents. Although schools remain among the safest spaces for adolescents, the drop in crime is no more dramatic than in the city as a whole.

What the security has created is a new disciplinary system in which barely trained security guards are the highest authority at many schools, overruling teachers and principals on discipline. The result is often new violence and disorder. A security guard handcuffed two four-year-olds for refusing to take a nap on 17 November 2006. Another security guard handcuffed a misbehaving five-year-old and had him sent to a psychiatric hospital for a forced evaluation on 17 January 2008. State Senator Eric Adams, marking the liberal outer limit of governmental reaction, suggested metal handcuffs were too severe on a five-year-old when velcro handcuffs would do.

These are only the most sensational examples: NYPD statistics, obtained through a Freedom of Information request, show that between 2005 and 2007 some 309 students were arrested and booked for non-criminal offences like trespassing and loitering. Many more students are handcuffed for short periods without being brought to the police. Standard youthful bad behaviour, without a gun or a knife, which used to be punished by a detention or a trip to the principal’s office, has become a criminal offence.

Teachers’ and principals’ tentative efforts to prevent acts of arbitrarily severe punishment by security guards are often countered with the threat of arrest, or worse. An honors student at East Side Community High School in Manhattan was arrested on 9 October 2007 for trying to enter the school a few minutes early for a meeting with a teacher. When her principal tried to step in, guards handcuffed and arrested him too. The arrest of teachers and principals who try to shield students from police personnel is now a nearly annual occurrence. Veteran principals and teachers complain privately (for fear of career-destroying reprisals from the Department of Education) that they are now subject to the arbitrary authority of guards often not much older than the students. As Ernest Logan, head of the New York principals’ union, puts it, the sporadic arrests of educators are “just the tip of the iceberg”.

http://www.counterpunch.org/madar07162010.html

When the cops were finally brought in to one of those schools, it calmed down considerably.

I think the answer is to have officers working in schools who are employees of the school district. Bringing in local LEO is just another form of privatization.

Its own fleet of police cars, too. That strikes me as strange.

They make a huge difference and work hard to keep our schools safe.

I agree it's a sad sign of the times.

That's why I support homeschooling.

Homeschooling. It's not just for right-wingers anymore!

then if they had served in the heaviest fighting in Vietnam.

- then and only then....

called an SRO (school resource officer). It's insane. Our schools in Mufreesboro, TN are not plagued with violence. These officers are beyond unnecessary. Simple matters that should be dealt with through ordinary discipline, now always involve law enforcement and very often criminal charges. A second grader was expelled and her parents charged with a felony over a bottle of Tylenol. One of my son's best friends was charged with criminal assault because of a fight with some other students, who had been picking on him. A parent at my daughter's middle school was arrested and charged because he was passing out fliers in the parking lot before school. In a sane world, all of these incidents should have been handled by sitting down and talking. The only things that matter to our public school's administration anymore are to pass the damn comprehensive achievement tests and avoid lawsuits. That's the entirety of their priorities.

the cops are there, and they are going to stay, unless there's a demand to remove them.

And the cops are there for a reason--the reason must be removed, first, and then the outcome will be to remove the cops.

The reason cops are there is overcrowding, under-teaching, and using the schools as prisons for unwanted youth instead of as a privilege of citizenship.

Mandatory attendance was a high-minded, foolish policy, since it wasn't followed up with actually teaching each student where he/she starts and taking each as far as he/she can go.

The schools want to be factories, turning out identical widget-workers. This is creating a lowest denominator effect, which demotivates every student. Since there are no factory jobs left, this is a product without a market.

Society doesn't really need that much conformity. It needs actualized adults.