I can’t even imagine being in school today.   It seems everyone is considered a criminal until proved otherwise.

Problems with over-policing our schools

By Marian Wright Edelman

Imagine being four years old and put into handcuffs because you and your friend wouldn’t take a nap in your pre-K class. Or being five years old, handcuffed, and taken away from your school by ambulance to a hospital psychiatric ward after throwing a tantrum in the kindergarten room. These scenarios might sound far-fetched, but both are true stories that captured the local media’s attention after they happened to children at their New York City public schools. The over-policing of public schools – not just in New York, but around the country – is one more threat to our nation’s children at risk of entering the pipeline to prison.

In New York, the expanded police presence started becoming especially obvious about ten years ago when the New York Police Department (NYPD) took control over school safety from the Board of Education. By the start of the 2005-06 school year, the NYPD employed 4,625 School Safety Agents in New York City schools – more personnel than there are officers in the police forces of Washington, DC, Detroit, Boston or Las Vegas, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) report, “Criminalizing the Classroom: The Over-Policing of New York City Schools.” In addition to increasing the numbers of these school safety agents, who are unarmed but can make arrests, the city also launched the Impact Schools Initiative, in which armed police officers have been deployed in the city’s “most dangerous” schools. Modeled after the NYPD’s Operation Impact program for fighting street crime, the initiative is designed to flood those schools with armed officers and surveillance cameras. Over the last five years, a total of 28 schools have been designated as “impact schools.”

A June 2005 report by the Drum Major Institute found that impact schools were among the most overcrowded and underfunded in the city and serve a student body that is disproportionately poor, Black and over-age for their grade. Another report by Fordham University found that targeting a school as an impact school led to a significant decline in attendance there. This is exactly the opposite of what schools serving poor, at-risk youths should want to happen. But since the NYPD-takeover of school security, many students and teachers have said that their schools feel more like prisons than places of learning.

One English teacher described the scene this way in the NYCLU report: “On this random Wednesday morning, scanners were set up in the cafeteria of the public high school in the South Bronx where I work. Students’ bags were placed on a scanner, they were forced to walk through metal detectors, and any item deemed inappropriate for school – including food, keys and spare change – were taken away. Many students were patted down, some even with their hands on a police car. An overwhelming ratio of adults to students made the cafeteria seem a lot like a police station…[C]an we please not treat already-struggling, inner city teenagers who have gotten themselves to school like they’ve committed a crime?” REST OF ARTICLE