Put Armed Cops in Schools And This Is What You Get

I have yet to hear or read one single example of a child in a school doing anything that justifies deadly force.

TechDirt via Crooks and Liars:

Another incident that highlights the troubling aspects of placing cops in schools has surfaced. The sheriff's office's (which supplies the deputies to the school) story has changed several times in the space of few days, but the end result is inarguable: a 17-year-old student is in a medically-induced coma as the result of its officer's actions.

At one Texas high school, the use of a Taser by Randy McMillan, a sheriff’s deputy/school resource officer, on 17-year-old Noe Niño de Rivera has resulted in the student being put in a medically induced coma. The family has filed a lawsuit against McMillan, the school district, and the county, and alleges Rivera was tased after trying to break up a fight.

According to the court documents, the teen was walking backwards from school officers who were trying to break up a fight when he was tased, falling backwards and suffering a brain hemorrhage. The sheriff's office maintains that the student acted aggressively and refused to back off when ordered to by officer Randy McMillan.

I cannot imagine how the fuck school officials can justify this.  Or how parents can accept it. Or taxpayers tolerate the million-dollar payouts.

Anybody else notice a common thread in these tasering stories? The victim is almost always helpless - beaten or manacled - or backing away when the cop shoots.  Real brave, assholes.

Cop Beats Sleeping Student

What do you expect? Cops are paid to arrest people, and not gently. You put them in schools, they're going to find excuses to arrest people, and not gently.

From Firedoglake:

Hoover, AL:  A high school student “who has diabetes, asthma and sleep apnea” fell asleep while reading, a police officer was called who “slapped her backpack” and then shoved her “face first into a file cabinet”, and handcuffed her.

Anybody want to bet this girl is white and/or the cop is black? Bueller?

Still All About Race

Everybody who thinks this girl - facing felony charges for popping the top off a water bottle - would be facing the same charges if she were white, stand on your head.

And stack greasy BBs.

Because if she were white, she'd be getting an award from Gov. Bat Boy for scientific innovation.

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From Ned Resnikoff at  All In With Chris Hayes:

A teenage girl could face up to five years in prison for “discharging weapons or firerarms” on the grounds of Bartow High School in the town of Bartow, Florida. Kiera Wilmot, 16, was arrested by local police and taken into custody after causing a small explosion on campus.

There were no deaths, and no injuries. In fact, the only property damaged by the explosion was an eight ounce plastic water bottle. That’s because the “weapon” Wilmot detonated was a mixture of toilet bowl cleaner and aluminum foil, which she mixed together in the bottle as part of an apparent amateur science project

Nonetheless, Wilmot—who has consistently good grades and no prior criminal record—is being brought up on felony charges, and will be tried as an adult

“It’s emblematic of a national issue,” Bro/Sis Executive Director Khary Lazarre-White said on Wednesday’s All In w/ Chris Hayes. “Over three million cases of expulsion and severe suspensions across the country, and it’s a zero tolerance policy that is expelling children for the kinds of things that got us sent to the principal’s office or talked to by a teacher, at worst, when we were in school.”

These aggressive measures disproportionately affect black students like Wilmot. A full 40% of the students expelled from school each year are black, and 70% of in-school arrests are either black or Latino, according to data collected by PBS. In California, about a quarter of all expulsions are for “willful defiance,” according to data from the office State Superintendent for Public Instruction.

Nonetheless, recently a handful of public figures have called for even more of a police presence in America’s public schools. In the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, National Rifle Association Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre demanded “armed police officers in every school in this nation.”

How To Stop Tolerating Zero Tolerance

If you know a teacher, you've probably heard that person railing about the idiocy, the destructiveness, the danger of zero-tolerance policies. Everyone in teaching has a story about the good kid ruined by the cop who dragged her off to jail for offering a friend an aspirin.

But now a school in Georgia has proven a different way works better.

A startling case in point is the juvenile court system of Clayton County, Georgia, which was buckling to the point of collapse in 2004. In the mid-'90s, after police officers were placed in the schools, the number of kids charged with crimes jumped 600 percent. By 2003, it had jumped another 400 percent. The increase wasn't due to felonies--the cops were enforcing a "zero tolerance" policy against disorderly conduct or disruption.

Juvenile Court Judge Steven Teske saw the problem. School police and probation officers could not do their jobs because the court was overloaded with minor cases that didn't belong there. "Technically, the behavior may be a crime," Teske said, using the example of a kid who gets into a fight to protect his sister. "But it shouldn't be, in the context of adolescent youth behavior."

So Teske brought together school officials, law enforcement, prosecutors, parents and heads of child-services programs. "I am telling you zero tolerance is not improving safety," he told them. Not everyone agreed. But it was obvious that too many kids were getting arrested. Teske proposed something rather ordinary: give kids warnings and a workshop on behavior before dragging them into court. The committee discussed it before a neutral arbiter.

Nine months later, Clayton County had a system that worked. As of 2008, the county had reduced the number of referrals by 68 percent, and in turn had seen another improvement: serious weapons charges were down 70 percent since 2004 (from sixty-three incidents to seventeen). Teske attributes the drop to the fact that officers are spending less time shuttling to court and more time gathering "intelligence" so future incidents can be avoided. Last year, instead of arresting a student who had gotten into a fight, Officer Robert Gardner talked to her. She spoke about a drug dealer's house two blocks from the school. The information led to a search, which yielded two AK-47s, two drums of ammunition, seven handguns, a shotgun, five pounds of pot and $7,000 in cash.

Everyone wants safe schools. But the Clayton model may prove that the best, most cost-effective way to neutralize violence is not by arresting kids. By paying attention to everyday circumstances, the potential for extraordinary tragedy is defused.

SNIP

Maybe there's a lesson here. Paying attention to young people prevents day-to-day injustice. And young people who aren't treated like criminals are less likely to become them.

Read the whole thing.

Then send it to every teacher, every principal, every police officer and sheriff's deputy you know.