2012年9月20日星期四

Safety Policy Creates Prison-like New York City Schools

When Minerva Dickson first saw her high school she thought it looked like a prison. After her first week she realized how right her initial impressions were.

Every day when she arrived at the Thomas Jefferson Campus in Brownsville, Brooklyn, she waited in a line that snaked out onto Pennsylvania Avenue. She would shuffle up two steps passing beneath words from Abraham Lincoln inscribed on the neo-classical pediment: “Let Reverence for the Laws Become the Political Religion of the Nation.”

Next, she reached into her pocket for her identification card and slid it through a machine. When it recognized her, it blurted an approving beep and a green light would flash. When it didn’t, the machine made an abrasive buzzing noise and lit up red.

Clear of the reader, she headed to the metal detectors. There, at least a half dozen school safety agents waited. School safety agents, who answer to the New York City Police Department, wear a police uniform and a shield. A pair of handcuffs dangles from their belts.

Under their gaze, Dickson would remove her jewelry, hairpins, and shoes. She would place her purse and her backpack on the conveyor belt and wait for an agent to nod her through. Another would run a security wand around her diminutive frame while she stood arms out, legs spread.

More than the arrests, the summonses, and the substitution of detention halls with jail cells, critics of the burgeoning police presence in public schools point to the corrosive daily experiences of students like Dickson to explain why the system needs to change. Students have grown to see school as a joyless place where they are treated like perps instead of pupils, critics say.

With the growth of the police presence in New York City in the last decade, students’ have seen their confidence erode not only in school, but other civic institutions, too. Critics worry that poor and minority students more and more see education as extension of a burgeoning police state, one that seems to disproportionately target them.Browse the Best Selection of buy mosaic and Accessories with FREE Gifts. Whether with stop-and-frisks in the streets or in “the Riker’s Island treatment” on their way to class, students say they feel like the government’s push to make them secure in school has left them feeling like inmates instead. And with authority for school safety lodged in the most powerful police department in the world, educators feel like they are helpless to change it.Why does moulds grow in homes or buildings?

On its own,Features useful information about glass mosaic tiles, the 5200 school safety agents in the NYPD’s School Safety Division, and the additional 190 armed officers — stationed in the halls of some of the city’s 1700 schools make up a force bigger than the police departments of Boston, Las Vegas, Detroit or Washington,Capture the look and feel of real stone or ceramic tile flooring with Alterna. D.C. If removed from the NYPD, the division would be the fifth biggest police force in the country. And like members in the NYPD, the agents have full arresting power on and off school grounds, both in the city and the state.

Prospective agents are trained for 14 weeks in the police academy, only a fraction of the six months of training police officers receive. They leave as peace officers, which includes the power to use handcuffs and, when necessary, deadly force.

The New York Civil Liberties Union has a federal lawsuit against the city alleging the agents make wrongful arrests, use excessive force, and detain and handcuff students in violation of their Fourth Amendment rights. Johanna Miller, the Assistant Advocacy Director, hopes the courts will limit the School Safety Division’s authority and give educators control over discipline.

She said recent data reveals a system that targets poor and minority students. There were 2,548 students arrested or cited for a summons for the 216 high school and 209 middle school days from July 1, 2011 to June 30, 2012 — 11 students a day. Of those, 95 percent were either black or Latino.

She said agents often arrest a child instead of trying to de-escalate a tense situation, contributing to what she calls a school-to-prison pipeline. Poor, minority students oftenIn December, 2010, after languishing in various committees, the City Council unanimously passed the School Safety Act. The act mandates that the NYPD release reports on police activity in the schools. For the first time in the country, disciplinary activity of students would be made public as a matter of law. Advocates hope the act serves as a model for reform.

But people in the system say even the most transparent reporting system misses the point. Dickson said there is no way to quantify what she went through attending a high school outfitted like a fortress. She said you can’t put a number on four years of being searched, and scanned, of turning a hallway corner to see a cop staring back.

Although it did not comment on this story, the NYPD’s position on school safety has been clear. In mid-August,This page list rubber hose products with details & specifications. in response to the first public release of school arrests, the NYPD’s chief spokesman, Paul Browne, said in interviews with numerous publications that the NYCLU, “persists in smearing school safety agents and police officers who do good work professionally and in an unbiased manner.” get arrested for behavior that would be treated as a school matter in a wealthier schools.

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