“Mom, these handcuffs really hurt,” said 13-year-old Chelsea Fraser as police officers escorted her out of Brooklyn’s Dyker Heights Intermediate School in Brooklyn. They took Fraser to the 68th Precinct where she and three other boys remained handcuffed to a pole for three hours.
Diana Silva, Fraser’s mother, waited in the precinct (which covers Brooklyn neighborhoods of Bay Ridge, Dyker Heights and Fort Hamilton) while police interrogated her daughter. Fraser was released and charged with criminal mischief.
Her crime? She wrote “okay” on a desk.
Fraser told her story at an October 10, 2007, press conference on the steps of City Hall, organized by the New York Civil Liberties Union, on a day when the City Council held hearings on over-policing in schools. Her arrest occurred five months earlier in March but her story still resonates about the lives of students citywide.
Teachers, administrators, lawyers and students took turns at a podium on the City Hall steps, arguing that incidents similar to what happened to Fraser were not uncommon. Some spoke about the police presence that can make schools feel like prisons, others simply stood in silent solidarity. “We feel constantly disrespected,” said Quinn James, a former high school student representing the Urban Youth Coalition. “I’ve seen people get handcuffed for having a pen.”
According to “Criminalizing the Classroom,” a report released by the NYCLU, over 93,000 city children every day must pass through “metal detectors, bag-searches, and pat-downs administered by police personnel.” Editor’s Note: Art work at right by Ulysses Kalladaryan.
School Safety Agents often conduct intrusive searches, confiscating student property that poses no threat to school safety, and make up their own rules for student conduct. “SSAs” are verbally and physically abusive and other reports show that they make inappropriate sexual advances, the report said. According the NYPD website and current population estimates, there is approximately one uniformed police officer for every 217 New Yorkers. In city schools, there is one NYPD officer for every 212 students, making the Board of Education’s School Safety Division the tenth largest police force in the country.
Despite this long arm of the law, no official procedure for holding an SSA accountable exists. The NYCLU said that it has received 3,000 complaints about security officers since 2002. NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman has recommended that the Civilian Complaint Review Board be extended to accept complaints from parents and students about rogue security personnel.
But other issues were made apparent. “This is a race issue,” said Jamaal Bowman, Dean of the Martin Luther King High School of the Arts and Technology. “If the Department of Education doesn’t make the necessary changes, then they’re racist too.”
According to the NYCLU, report, 82 percent of students who attend schools with permanent metal detectors are students of color. The NYCLU continues to promote reform that would restore authority over school safety to school administrators. While these may reduce incidents over the short term, it seems that over-policing in the schools has come to reveal deeply rooted flaws in the education system. One questions being asked: Why are children being searched for weapons? The question that should be asked: Why are children attending schools where they need to be searched?
In the country’s largest public school system, less than half of students graduate high school in four years. The NYCLU report disclosed that the largest schools with permanent metal detectors were overcrowded and per-pupil expenditures were half the citywide average.
The problem, of course, is with the schools, not the students. Why not create curriculum less aimed at test scores and more geared toward the experience of today’s young people? How about restoring music and arts programs? How about spending money on teaching tools, like textbooks and computers, rather than the expensive bivouacking of New York’s Finest in city schools?
Dan Allen, a Senior Editor/Senior Producer, can be contacted at dantallen@gmail.com.