Education

Band-Aids on School Violence:
Do Police in Schools Help or Hurt?

By Lisa Spinelli

May 2004

Dorset Patterson, an 18-year-old Thomas Jefferson High School student, said he was walking up a school staircase one March afternoon singing “One Sweet Day,” in preparation for a chorus concert. A new school safety agent at the Brooklyn school told him to stop singing. Dorset ignored him, and the agent told him to “watch his back,” he said. A few hours later, the senior said a number of agents surrounded his lunch table and escorted him to Room 248 for in-school suspension.

“The officer was screaming at me in front of all the other officers,” said Patterson, his dark almond-shaped eyes squinting with frustration.

“They arrest you for everything now,” said Patterson, who maintains a B-average and manages the girls’ soccer team. “Now, every time I see that officer, he tells me, ‘I’m watching you.’”

Thomas Jefferson High School is one of the 12 public schools that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg identified as “impact schools,” or high-violence schools last January. The mayor claimed that the crimes at these dozen schools made up about 13 percent of the total number of serious crimes in New York City schools last year. As a result, the 10 high schools and two middle schools received a total of 150 police officers and safety agents. They perform sweeps of the buildings’ hallways and stairwells at least twice a day. In April, four more schools in the Bronx and Brooklyn were added to the list.

By some measures, the police presence seems to be working. The number of violent incidents between students throughout the schools has dropped 9 percent since January, from 3.3 to 3.02 incidents per day, according to a Department of Education report released to the New York Times. But the number of citations for minor, non-violent penalties has soared by 72 percent. Infractions such as wearing a hat and talking back to officers increased from 8.6 to 14.8 percent per day. Students and teachers interviewed for this story argued that some of the extra officers are targeting too many students for petty issues that would be better resolved without police intervention.

“There were too many disruptions, but they were not usually violent,” said Fred Landron, an American History teacher at Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson has been closely watched since 1992 when two students were killed in the hallway over a gold bracelet. “Students played a lot of pranks. It is a common misconception that the pranks were usually violent.”

The Brooklyn high school is operating close to its maximum capacity. Thomas Jefferson accounted for 115 of the 3,151 criminal, non-violent and violent infractions reported last year by the teachers union.

Patterson, a Trinidad immigrant, was not arrested for the singing incident, but it will be recorded on his permanent record as an infraction, he said. An infraction includes disobeying or being insubordinate to an officer, according to the city’s new disciplinary code. The school’s principal failed to return phone calls regarding the incident.

“He’s a nice kid,” said Vascilos Sioukas, the girls’ soccer coach and physical education instructor at the 1,600-student high school. “He doesn’t get into any more trouble than any other kid his age would.”

Other students reported that officers were unnecessarily rough with them. William Johnson, a 15-year-old sophomore at Thomas Jefferson, said that he was standing in line to board a bus when a police officer started physically pushing the children who he believed were taking too long. Johnson said a girl in front of him told the officer to shut up. The officer slammed the girl against a brick wall and handcuffed her. The school’s principal again failed to comment about the incident. “I know they are just trying to do their job,” said Johnson. “But sometimes they take it too far.”

The city’s Public Advocate, Betsy Gotbaum, visited Thomas Jefferson High School last February and found that armed police officers were “adding tension to an already tenuous situation.”

Students at the extremely overcrowded Christopher Columbus High School in the Bronx also feel this tension between officers and students every day. The school has more than 3,700 students, making it nearly impossible to move around between classes. The school tried to remedy the situation by setting up a split schedule for freshman and the rest of the school. The first session block of classes starts at 7:05 a.m. and ends at around noon for all non-freshmen. Ninth graders come to school from noon to almost 6:00 p.m. Throughout the day children squeeze by each other in the cramped hallways in a mad five-minute dash to get to their next class. If they are late, it’s another citation.

“The way they talk to us is uncalled for,” said Shakean Crawford, a 14-year-old Christopher Columbus freshman.

A number of teachers interviewed agreed with students that the added enforcers come down on minor issues too often. “Usually the children are cited for really petty things, like do-rags or CD players,” said David Wade, an English teacher at Christopher Columbus. “The agents will go from classroom to classroom with a garbage can and peek into the windows to see who is wearing a hat. It’s ridiculous.”

Ray, a well-spoken and somewhat shy 17-year-old junior at Christopher Columbus High School who did not want to reveal his full name, spoke of his frustrations with safety agents after a recent altercation with one. One of Ray’s teachers was out sick one day, so his class was shuffled from the classroom to the auditorium to the library and back to the auditorium. Fed up, Ray said he approached a safety agent to ask what was going on. The officer “cursed me out,” Ray said, which led to a verbal altercation between them. Ray ended up in the Dean’s office, defending the officer’s charge of “verbal abuse” against him. “Sometimes they are worse than the kids,” he said.

Many teachers, especially the new ones, feel safer with the officers around, said Varleton McDonald, principal of Christopher Columbus. And most of the children agree there are fewer fights in the hallway. “I feel safer,” said Johnson. “I haven’t seen that many fights since they came.”

City schools experienced a 25 percent increase in assaults on high school teachers from 2002 to 2003. One of these incidents occurred last October and involved an unnamed teacher at Christopher Columbus and an ex-student. The former student pushed the teacher onto the floor during an argument, said Wade. The teacher hit her head, but she did not suffer any major injuries.

“It’s a quick fix,” said Wade of the added agents. “Overcrowding hurts everything from the resources available to the quality of instruction. They need to address the overcrowding and lower the student/teacher ratio.”

Some teachers, like Wade and Laura McCandlish, another English teacher at Christopher Columbus, believed that this pushing incident was the main reason their school’s name was added to the impact schools list. “It’s more of a political thing,” said Wade. “The media brought a lot of attention to the school with this incident.” Christopher Columbus High School only had 18 criminal incidents reported last year.

“It’s not so much the number of incidents here, but the overcrowding that is our problem,” said Lisa Muffei-Fuentes, principal of Christopher Columbus High School. “But more security agents are always welcome here. That can never be a negative thing.”

Daniel J. Flannery, an associate Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice Studies at Kent State University, wrote in 1999 that student diversity and overcrowding together exacerbate tension in schools.

Gotbaum concurred that overcrowding in schools is one of the leading causes of school violence. She said that Thomas Jefferson High School would most benefit from more alternatives and resources to deal with the overcrowding at the school rather than added police officers. Gotbaum favors an off-site solution for those children who habitually cause conflict within the school.

There are two such centers in Brooklyn, one in Bushwick and the other on Belmont Avenue. Gotbaum considers both centers a temporary cure to the long-lasting problem of overcrowded high schools, but she said they are better than a police-state school.

Christopher Columbus has grown by over 21 percent in just the last two years, making the school a dangerous 158 percent over capacity levels. Gotbaum and students at schools like Christopher Columbus would like to see permanent intervention programs for elementary students that would work to change their disruptive behavior before they start high school.

At least half of the 10 high schools on the impact list had over 3,000 students enrolled as of last October. The larger schools are also spending less money per student than the smaller public schools in the city. In 2002, the Department of Education estimated the cost per child at Manhattan Village Academy, a liberal arts alternative school in Manhattan with 433 students, was more than $11,000. In contrast, the average cost for a student at Christopher Columbus was $8,340, and the average cost per student at Thomas Jefferson was even lower at $8,321.

At Manhattan Village Academy, which has only 314 students, and where there were no reported criminal incidents in the last two years, an academic advisor is appointed for every 10 to 12 students, a near impossibility at a school the size of Christopher Columbus. Even Hector Geager, Manhattan Village Academy’s principal, is an advisor that meets with his students once a week to discuss academics or anything else. “We are a family here,” said Geager. “I welcome them at the front door every morning to set the tone from the beginning of the day. If I see one of them sad I ask them what’s wrong. It’s easier with smaller schools to do this.”

The mayor did announce last month that 60 smaller public schools will open by September of this year. He hopes to open a total of 200 smaller schools by 2009—creating safer school environments and lower student/teacher ratios. Forty-one of the schools set to open in September will be high schools. Thomas Jefferson is on the list to be split up, but Christopher Columbus will remain in its police-enforced state for at least another year to come.

The officers “have to stop acting like there are gods in the school,” said Ray, “and stop instantly putting cuffs on us. They need to start doing stuff to make it not so overcrowded.”