Cops in the Classroom: South Carolina Incident Highlights Growing Police Presence in Schools

[KamaAina]

http://www.democracynow.org/2015/10/28/when_school_cops_go_bad_south

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The incident is the latest in a series of cases of police officers in schools using excessive force against students. In a recent exposé, Mother Jones documented many cases involving officers punching, tasing and even fatally shooting students. On Monday, Spring Valley High School student Niya Kenny, who was arrested after she filmed the assault, told local station WLTX that she was shocked and disturbed by police officer Fields’ behavior.

NIYA KENNY: I was in disbelief. I know this girl don’t got nobody, and I couldn’t believe this was happening. I had never seen nothing like that in my life, like a man use that much force on a little girl—a big man, like 300 pounds of full muscle. I was like, "No way, no way." Like, you can’t do that to no little girl. I’m talking about, she’s like 5’6". And I was screaming, "What the F? What the F? Is this really happening?" I was praying out loud for the girl. And I just—I couldn’t believe it was happening. I was just crying, and he was like, "Well, since you got so much to say, you’re coming, too." And I was like, "What?" And he—"What? You want some of this?" M-mm, just put my hands behind my back....

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Jaeah, I wanted to ask you, one of the things that I’ve noticed, at least in some of the debates that have occurred here in New York City on the school safety officers, is that often the chain of command of these officers does not go to the principal and the administrators of the school in particular, but actually go outside of the school to their own law enforcement agencies, and that creates problems with even the administrators or the principals being able to control the activities of these officers. Did you find that across the country?

JAEAH LEE: Yeah, there’s certainly a lack of consistency as to, first of all, what exactly the role of a school resource officer should be, let alone who they should report to and what the exact protocol is. Often those terms are defined in memorandums of understanding between the school district and the local police department, or just within the school district if they have their own internal police departments. What I have often seen, from talking to advocates and looking at several case examples, is that the officers often seem to be reporting back to their department rather than to the school district. I do—I do often hear that school districts are in close cooperation with officers, but again, the chain of command sometimes isn’t always clear, and as well as the role that they should be playing inside of the school hallways and classrooms is not always clear, either.

Got school-to-prison pipeline?

[Lee-Lee]

1. As I have been saying on many posts here

School systems and admins have been steadily changing the role of SRO's in schools from officers charged with dealing with actual criminal activity and school security into school disciplinarians who get tasked with handling things that are not law enforcement matters and should be handled by teachers and admins.

Make no mistake- the schools are pushing that change because they want it that way. It allows them to shirk responsibility and the work of being the disciplinarian and pass it off, then when things go bad the cops get blamed and nobody bothers to ask "Why did the school call the cops because a kid was texting in class or brought a clock to school?"