Who Watches the Watchdogs?
Chelsea Fraser, a student at Dyker Heights Junior High, was arrested at school, led out by police, and spent three hours handcuffed to a pole at the station while officers interrogated her. Her crime: writing the word “okay” on a school desk.
The two misdemeanor charges filed by her principal were eventually dropped but Chelsea’s experience reflects a disturbing trend of over-policing in New York City public schools according to the Student Safety Coalition, an umbrella group of several student and civil rights advocacy organizations. “The Department of Education is failing thousands of students,” said Christopher Tan of Advocates for Children, by “reflexively resorting to punitive measures.”
School Security Agents (SSAs) are the unarmed officers employed by the NYPD to diffuse conflicts, scan for weapons and generally keep order at the city’s public schools but critics argue that they do more harm than good by bringing draconian police tactics with no accountability to an educational environment. “Kids can’t learn if they’re afraid to go to school,” said Sally Lee, founder of Teachers Unite. The coalition is pressuring the City Council to create a formal investigation and complaint process, provide more oversight and transparency, and invest in alternatives to criminalization of troubled students.
A major issue in the school safety debate was the ambiguity of the roles and responsibilities of the NYPD and the Department of Education. Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said it was “not at all clear that principals run the schools” and cited chronic difficulties with heavy-handed, ill-trained and thuggish SSAs who insist administrators have no authority over them.
This wasn’t always the case though as school security used to be solely in the hands of the Division of School Safety, a branch of the former Board of Education. In 1998, under pressure from then-mayor Rudy Giuliani, the Board voted to transfer school safety over to the NYPD. Since then the police department has assigned approximately 5000 safety agents and 200 armed officers to patrol the city’s schools.
While the Bloomberg administration and the NYPD attribute dropping classroom crime rates to the SSA program, critics have cited studies from organizations such as the National Center for Schools and Communities that show the claims are inflated at best and flat out wrong in some cases. Contrary to the city’s laudatory remarks, more than 2,700 complaints have been filed with the NYPD concerning abusive police and agents – a particularly alarming number to the NYCLU given the fact that no official process exists for students or educators to hold security agents accountable. Council Member Peter F. Vallone, Jr., chairperson for the Committee on Public Safety said “a written protocol is essential.”
Gregory Floyd, president of the Teamsters Union local 237 – the representative of the city’s School Safety Agents – expressed concern that the NYCLU hadn’t contacted the union while preparing the report critical of their performance. “Not one school safety agent was questioned,” he said. When asked why they had not consulted Local 237, Udi Ofer, director NYCLU Bill of Rights Defense Campaign did not have an answer.
Council Member Robert Jackson, chairperson of the Committee on Education said, “It is a very, very sad day for education in New York City.” Despite the volumes of reports, litany of statements and pages of testimonies concerning school safety, Jackson was appalled that no two agencies were on the same page.