Reason 1,254,989
Thursday 10 January 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized
Cops arresting students with impunity and charging them, for doing such horrible things as talking loudly, farting, and wearing things that cops deem dangerous. Vice:
More than a third of American sheriffs’ departments and nearly half of all police departments have officers assigned to local schools, according to Department of Justice statistics from early last decade. Students today are arrested in school for offenses that include talking back to a police officer, doodling on a desk with an erasable marker, farting, and being an eight-year old throwing a temper tantrum. In other words: criminalizing childhood misbehavior.
[. . .]
Few students, according to the NYCLU, are arrested for serious felonies. And importantly, the mad gunmen the NRA seeks to deter are rarities: Of all school-age children murdered in the United States, according to a 2001 study in American Psychologist, less than one percent actually take place at a school.
“We’re definitely opposed to having armed guards in schools,” says NYCLU senior staff attorney Alexis Karteron. School police by and large “aren’t there to deal with this extraordinary situation of an armed gunman coming in, so what they end up dealing with is minor incidents that really should be treated as disciplinary matters. And they end up being converted into criminal matters.”
In New York, 95 percent of the 882 arrests made by the NYPD School Safety Division in 2012 were of black or Latino students. Meanwhile, sixty-three percent of summonses were for “disorderly conduct,” a catchall charge in both the street and classroom.And a 2009 study found that the rate of students arrested for disorderly conduct was 100-percent higher at schools with police on-campus than at schools where the cops have to be called in to make an arrest—suggesting that officers criminalize misbehavior that could likely be better resolved without handcuffs.
Kupchik, who studied both urban and suburban schools, found that the criminalization of students impacts white, well-to-do students too. One suburban principal he studied established a rule that mandated arrests for any students caught fighting.
“They’re not as good at the softer side of things,” says Kupchik. He compliments most police officers he met during his study for being well-intentioned and caring people but laments that administrators and teachers now outsource complicated disciplinary matters to people who are neither counselors nor educators and lack the necessary training. “They don’t know what to do with a crying 15 year old.”
“Cops are really trained in street tactics that aren’t entirely appropriate in schools,” adds the NYCLU’s Karteron.
The criminalization of student conduct was part of a broader push for Zero Tolerance policies that took off after heightened concern over youth violence in the mid-1980s and intensified in the wake of the 1999 school shooting at Columbine High School.
School police help enforce a regime that deals out suspensions for transgressions ranging from signing a gospel song with friends at lunch, making out with a love interest, or blowing spit balls. Schools now also require drug tests for an ever-expanding set of extracurricular activities that now includes middle-school sports and even chess club, Future Farmers of America, and band (though a California judge in 2009 ruled drug testing for the latter set unconstitutional under state law).
Suspension rates have more than doubled since the 1980s, according to a Columbia Teachers College’s Hechinger Report article. And Zero Tolerance mirrors the criminal justice system’s racial disproportionality, with black youths three-and-a-half times more likely to be suspended or expelled than white students.
The very same liberal establishment outraged over the NRA’s proposal has, with conservative support, made police officers commonplace in many schools over the past two decades. It was the Clinton Administration that initiated federal funding for school-police partnerships.
I won’t have my child subjected to criminal penalties for being a kid.
2013-01-10 » madlibertarianguy