We have been reviewing various accounts of Bloomberg’s record on education and came across a report prepared by The New York Civil Liberties Union. Readers may not be familiar with the truly horrific practices that Bloomberg has introduced along with his absolute control of the public schools. He has asked to be judged on his public school record. There are so many reasons to show this arrogant oligarch the door, but at his own invitation, we invite you to judge for yourselves what he has done to the schools. We would only add that what follows is a very limited number of episodes taken randomly from only one website after a quick Google search.

Criminalizing the Classroom

At the start of the 2005-2006 school year, the city employed a total of 4,625 School Safety Agents (SSAs) and at least 200 armed police officers assigned exclusively to schools. These numbers would make the NYPD’s School Safety Division alone the tenth largest police force in the country – larger than the police forces of Washington, D.C., Detroit, Boston, or Las Vegas.

Because these school-assigned police personnel are not directly subject to the supervisory authority of school administrators, and because they often have not been adequately trained to work in educational settings, SSAs and police officers often arrogate to themselves authority that extends well beyond the narrow mission of securing the safety of the students and teachers. They enforce school rules relating to dress and appearance. They make up their own rules regarding food or other objects that have nothing whatsoever to do with school safety.

On occasion they subject educators who question the NYPD’s treatment of students to retaliatory arrests. More routinely, according to our interviews and survey, they subject students to inappropriate treatment including:

• Derogatory, abusive and discriminatory comments and conduct;
• Intrusive searches;
• Unauthorized confiscation of students’ personal items, including food, cameras and essential school supplies;
• Inappropriate sexual attention;
• Physical abuse; and
• Arrest for minor non-criminal violations of school rules.

A few typical cases

Carlos

Throughout the morning, police personnel hurled invective and threats at the students they were charged with protecting. Officers threatened students with arrest for refusing to turn over cell phones, for stepping out of line, and for refusing to be scanned. Officers cursed at students and scoffed at educators. When a student wandered out of line, officers screamed, “Get the fuck back in line!” When a school counselor asked the officers to refrain from cursing, one officer retorted, “I can do and say whatever I want,” and continued, with her colleagues, to curse.

The threats of arrest turned out to be more than bluster. Several Wadleigh students were hauled to the 28th Police Precinct that morning for minor non-criminal violations of school rules. Among them was Carlos, an eleventh grader and Vice-President of the School Government Association. Carlos, who worked thirty to forty hours each week after school and needed to communicate frequently with his mother about his whereabouts, did not want the police to confiscate his cell phone. When he became aware of the police activity in the school, he chose to remain outside in order to call his mother and ask her to pick up the phone, which she agreed to do.

As Carlos stood outside the school, a police officer approached and asked for identification. Carlos explained: “My mother’s on the way. She should be just up the block. You can talk to her.” In response, the officer said to a second officer, “What are we going to do with this smart aleck? The second officer replied, “Take him to the precinct.”

The officers handcuffed Carlos, seized his cell phone, forced him into a police vehicle, and took him to the precinct without informing school officials or his mother. At the precinct, Carlos was ordered to remove his belt and shoelaces and was forced into a cell. Meanwhile, Carlos’s mother – who did not find Carlos waiting for her when she arrived at the school to pick up his cell phone – began a frantic search for her child. Many phone calls later, she learned that Carlos had been arrested. When she arrived at the precinct, officers returned Carlos’s phone to her, but refused to release her son into her care. Carlos was released only after his mother had finally left the precinct. Upon his release, the officers issued him a summons threatening that if he did not appear in court, a warrant would be issued for his arrest. The charges were ultimately dropped. What happened to Carlos and the other students at Wadleigh Secondary School on November 17 was not an aberration. In fact, this scenario takes place in New York City schools every day.

Police personnel assigned to schools are often inadequately trained to work in school environments. Officers bring into the schools attitudes of bellicosity and suspicion that are of questionable value on the streets and that are entirely inappropriate in schools. Officers often assume authority that extends well beyond the narrow mission of securing the safety of the students and teachers. Instead, they enforce school rules relating to dress or appearance, and make up their own rules regarding food or other objects that have nothing whatsoever to do with school safety.

In addition, the current arrangement renders educators powerless to curtail inappropriate behavior by police personnel by assigning officers to schools without placing them under the authority of principals and school administrators. SSAs and school-assigned police officers are not employees of the Department of Education (DOE), but rather of the NYPD; they report not to educators, but to police officials outside of the school system. This institutional structure makes New York City’s school policing program out of step with virtually every other large school district in the country, where school safety officers are generally under the supervision of educators, not police departments.

Aisha

Aisha is a fifteen-year-old tenth grader who attends Samuel J. Tilden High School. On January 18, 2007, Aisha left a class a few minutes late with a friend. As the two proceeded to the cafeteria, Assistant Principal Lewis stopped the girls outside the “focus room” (school detention center), and ordered them inside. Aisha began to protest, saying that they were not “roaming the halls” but were on their way to lunch. Her friend advised her to follow Lewis’s instructions. Sergeant Lipscomb, an armed police officer, stepped in, grabbed Aisha’s book bag, and ordered her to the focus room. Although Aisha responded, “That’s where I’m going,” Lipscomb pushed her. Aisha protested loudly and informed Lipscomb that she was going to take down his name and badge number. In response, Lipscomb jerked Aisha’s left arm behind her back at a painful angle, a jolt which also caused her right hand to slam against the wall. Aisha cried out in pain.

Students inside the focus room began to protest, saying tha t the two girls were just going to lunch. Aisha continued to cry. Mr. Fannon, a teacher monitoring the focus room, tried to calm her down. Aisha was forced to go to the dean’s office. There, a female officer removed Aisha’s jacket and searched her. Officer Rivera also searched Aisha’s backpack. Thereafter, Aisha was taken to the police precinct where she received a summons to appear in family court. The summons did not indicate any charges against her. Aisha and her mother returned home that evening to a phone call from Assistant Principal Lewis apologizing for the incident.

Jimmy

Jimmy is a senior at the New York Harbor School in Bushwick, Brooklyn. He is frequently on the honor roll, and has had no encounters with police officers outside of school. In the fall of 2005, Jimmy walked through a metal detector at the school entrance, set it off, and then went to the back of the line to be scanned again. Jimmy went through the metal detector a second time, holding his pants up, since he had no belt on. An SSA ordered Jimmy to remove a wallet from his back pocket. Jimmy complied by turning over the wallet, but the SSA began yelling and accused Jimmy of throwing the wallet at him . Jimmy continued walking, aiming to reach his first-period class, when two other SSAs grabbed him, handcuffed him, dragged him to a small room used for disciplining students, and issued him a criminal summons. Jimmy’s faculty advisor, Noah Heller, arrived at the detention room along with an assistant principal and the principal and asked the SSAs if all of the actions taken against Jimmy were really necessary. In response, an SSA told Heller and his coworkers that they should shut up or be cuffed next.

Weeks later, Jimmy’s case was summarily dismissed in court. On March 9, 2006, Jimmy was playing basketball in the school gym. He took a break from the game to put sports equipment away, but the game ended before he returned to the court. Still dressed in a short-sleeved basketball shirt, Jimmy needed to change into his street clothes, which he had left in the gym. As he tried to enter the gym, he was stopped and denied entry by
an SSA. Jimmy walked around her, retrieved his clothes from the bleachers, and came out to find the SSA waiting. He asked her if she was going to arrest him. She said yes. Other SSAs arrived, and Jimmy was handcuffed and issued a summons. When he appeared in court on May 16, 2006, the charges were again summarily dismissed.

Quinn Kronen and Cara Wolfson-Kronen

On March 8, 2005, at least seven NYPD officers arrived at the New School for Arts and Sciences after teachers called 911 to ask for medical assistance for a student who had been involved in a fight. Several teachers had successfully stopped the fight and controlled the situation before the police responded, and Cara Wolfson-Kronen, a social studies teacher, informed the 911 operator that the fight had been defused. Despite this, one of the officers demanded that the teachers identify the students who had been involved in the fight and said that they would be handcuffed. Quinn Kronen, an English teacher, pointed out that those students were now peacefully sitting in the classroom.

Officer Bowen responded by yelling: “You fucking teachers need to get your shit together. These kids are running crazy. You need to get rid of them.” When Mr. Kronen objected to such language, Sergeant Walter told Mr. Kronen that he had “better shut the fuck up” or she would arrest him. When Ms. Wolfson-Kronen objected, Sergeant Walter said: “That is it; cuff the bitch.” Officers arrested Ms. Wolfson-Kronen, paraded her out of school in handcuffs and forced her to stand outside in sub-freezing temperature without a jacket. They also arrested Mr. Kronen.

The teachers were detained at the 41st Precinct for approximately two hours before being released. The charges against them — disorderly conduct — were dismissed at their initial court hearing, because their alleged wrongdoing did not constitute unlawful activity.

On March 22, 2005, Mr. Kronen and Ms. Wolfson-Kronen received an anonymous letter signed by “The Brotherhood.” The letter threatened them with physical harm for “messing up with our fellow officers” continuing: “[i]f I were you I’d be planning my getting out of New York fast.” The teachers turned the letter over to a police officer. The Civilian Complaint Review Board and the Internal Affairs Bureau of the NYPD did not reach any conclusions or resolution.

THE CITY’S CLAIM OF CRIME PREVENTION

The Bloomberg administration claims that increased policing in schools is responsible for a significant decline in school crime. But the National Center for Schools and Communities at Fordham University shows that such claims are inflated: Although the DOE reports declines as large as 59 percent for major crime incidents and 33 percent for all crime at the Impact Schools, the numbers on which these percentages are based are so low that even very small numerical decreases create large percentage changes. For example, at Christopher Columbus High School behavior officially classed as violent crime decreased from 17 incidents during the 2004-2005 school year to 10 during the 2005-2006 school year, which represented a 41 percent decline on paper, but only a small decrease in actual incidents.

New York University educational analyst Deinya Phenix provides further support for the conclusion that the Bloomberg administration’s claims about decreases in school crime are misleading. Regression analysis reveals that the decline in crime figures at Impact Schools is not statistically significant compared to simultaneous declines at other high schools. Crime in schools had been declining for years before the Impact Schools program; proving, Phenix contends, that “the most important factor in the decrease in school crime is the passage of time.”

Despite the Bloomberg administration’s willingness to exaggerate small drops in school crime statistics, city officials routinely downplay statistics that show a rise in school crime. Data recently released by the Mayor’s Office show that major crime in city schools increased by 21 percent from July through October of 2006 compared with the same period in 2005.57 Although city officials virtually ignored the data, a close examination of the numbers is worthwhile. The rise in major crime incidents was driven by an increase in grand larceny, typically theft, without threat or force, of items worth more than $ 1,000, such as laptops or credit cards. The 197 incidents of grand larceny which occurred from July through October 2006 — and which caused the rise in major crimes— could not have been prevented or deterred by policing practices that rely on metal detectors.

Indeed, any claims that the city makes about the NYPD roving metal detector program increasing school safety are hardly plausible. From April 2006 to December 15, 2006, NYPD personnel confiscated 17,351 items from students through the roving program. Over 70 percent of those items were cell phones, 29 percent were iPods and other electronic equipment, and a tiny percentage of those items — .3 percent — were classified as “dangerous instruments,” a category which can include pipes, scissors, t-squares, scales, and other school supplies. Another tiny percentage of those items — .7 percent — were classified as weapons, a category which can include knives and box cutters. Not a single gun was found. This means that despite all the chaos, lost class time, and harassment that students suffer from the roving metal detector program, 99 percent of items seized by the NYPD as a result of that program pose no conceivable threat to school safety.

Education experts worry about the message that policing in schools sends to New York City students. Pedro A. Noguera, a professor at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Education, recognizes that safety is a paramount concern in schools, but concludes that over-policing may create as many problems as it tries to solve. Noguera explains: “Schools that rely on security guards and metal detectors to create safety may end up creating an environment that is so repressive that it is no longer conducive to learning.”

Several members of the BOE who voted for the NYPD school safety takeover in September 1998 have since come to regret their decision. BOE member Irving Hamer says that he regrets his vote and hates that he was part of a process that has resulted in the criminalization of school children, particularly children of color. “I couldn’t then and still can ’t understand why you would have an armed police officer with mace and a firearm and clubs and handcuffs in an already safe school,” Hamer says. “There were some schools that were indeed troubled, but not all schools. I did not and do not understand the lack of differentiation between schools with needs and those without.”

Another BOE member, who asked to remain anonymous, states the following about the transfer of responsibility for school safety from the BOE to the NYPD: The ten years since the transfer to the NYPD have confirmed all my fears. I never felt that a school should have armed police officers patrolling it. Schools are not penitentiaries. It bothers me to see a nine-millimeter gun strapped around the waist of an adult in school, and it’s more than bothering to children.

Principals are supposed to be in charge of the schools and should make rules and run the school. Now every school is being invaded by the police.

Everyone including the teachers’ privacy are being invaded. I think the school should go back to the old way and the principals should get control back of the school.

- JESSE CREWS, FLUSHING HIGH SCHOOL, QUEENS