Cross-posted at Digital Fourth
“La Cucaracha”, August 26, 2013, by Lalo Alcaraz
Following on from the Sandy Hook school shooting, the “Massachusetts Task Force on School Safety and Security” released a report in July. As you’d expect from a report written with plenty of police input and none from the civil liberties community, it recommends changes that are highly intrusive, probably ineffective, definitely expensive, and likely to benefit police more than they benefit students.
Of course, that’s not how it’s being reported. Local papers, including my own Belmont Citizen-Herald, are portentously explaining how this is all “for the kids” and will “keep them safe” (I’d link to their exhaustive coverage, but it’s not up yet).
The most important thing to understand regarding school shootings is that school districts can’t prevent them. I wish they could, but they can’t. School shootings happen far too much in the US, largely because we spend too little on mental health services and allow, as a matter of constitutional principle, broad access to guns. School shootings also tend to happen more in rural and suburban districts where the schools are pretty much the only place that will grab the attention of the whole community.
Nothing school districts can do will change these things. However, in fear that they ought to be doing something, it’s very possible for school districts to misdirect funds better spent on education, and impose inappropriate systems of surveillance and control.
Let’s look anew, with a critical eye, at what the Patrick administration is suggesting.
First, the report recommends introducing “school resources officers” – often retired police officers – into schools to develop relationships with students, and encourages trainings that would teach “young children not to be frightened of police.” This, in a country where the police kill an absolute minimum of one American per day, and where crises like the one in Ferguson show that visible minorities’ fears of police are very well-grounded.
How about we teach kids the truth instead?
Individual police officers, like other people, are often good at heart. However, police officers in general are not legally required to protect you, and aren’t always on your side if you’re in trouble. They are allowed to lie to you and about you, and can even kill you without going to jail if they feel you’re disrespecting them. If you are stopped by the police, for your own safety, stay polite and calm. If they arrest you, invoke your right to stay silent, and say nothing till your lawyer arrives.
Adding a new, armed, expensive “school resources officer” at a school for “school safety” seems to me like adding a gun to a home for “home safety”: It increases every person’s risk of death or injury. If the armed police officer hurts or entraps or even kills your child, even by accident, will they be held accountable? Bluntly, based on how it’s gone down in other towns, probably not.
Students who “struggle socially or emotionally” will be “identified” and “intervened with.” “Anonymous threat reporting” will allow students and citizens “to report threats of school violence”, and as we all know, kids would never ever lie about that to get someone into trouble they were bullying, didn’t like, or were biased against. Our local SWAT team, the Northeast Massachusetts Law Enforcement Council, which is so hostile to transparency about its policies and procedures that the ACLU of Massachusetts is suing it, will be empowered to intervene on the basis of such reports. As icing on the cake, our local infamous Fusion Centers, who were caught spying on peaceful activists, who failed to thwart the Marathon bombings, and who continue to gather mounds of unverified, often racially motivated gossip on Massachusetts residents, will be given “information on every school in the Commonwealth.”
Great. How many of our kids will end up in the Fusion Center’s “Suspicious Activity” database? Well, how many of us did at least one thing in school that some other kid or some member of the public might conceivably find “suspicious” if they saw it? More or less all of us. In middle school, I chatted with the communists at the school gate at recess, and had long conversations for a few months with a hobo camping in the school grounds. That’s pretty “suspicious.” How about you?
All they need under this new plan is an anonymous report, not reasonable suspicion, or the Fourth Amendment’s stern requirement of probable cause. And once in that database, you can’t ever get that report removed, even if the information about you is shown to be false. That’s the new world of the surveillance state: Nothing that you are alleged to have done, once digitized, can be forgotten. The inevitable result is that students who look or act “different” to others – who are poor, on IEPs, from ethnic or religious minorities, are autistic or depressed, or who simply have unusual taste in accessories, will be singled out, harassed, and written up.
Can we stop and think a moment about what this means for students who are having violent or suicidal thoughts? The incentives under this system are very clear for that student: Don’t tell anybody. Don’t try and get them resolved. If you do, you’ll be “identified” for “intervention,” be permanently flagged as “suspicious,” and have your name irreversibly added to the surveillance state’s unconstitutional thoughtcrimes haystack. Set up the incentives this way, and you will make students less safe, not more safe.
Apparently, we’re also supposed to fund lots of monthly “school safety” preparedness meetings, and no doubt slide presentations, lengthy reports, conferences, maybe even retreats. Law enforcement will rack up overtime, school administrators and teachers will be taken away from education-related activities, and both will spend time on your dime having to hyperventilate about threats that are unpreventable, highly improbable, or both. Whoever is profiting here, it’s not us.
Last, of course, every single ingress, egress and movement of adult visitors within a school building must apparently be tracked and monitored with cameras and ID cards. It will hamper every single event that any of our schools or PTAs runs. Who cares, right – it’s for “safety”! But think about it: In a school shooting or suicide situation, all cameras will do is document what happened, not prevent it. On an everyday basis, cameras will merely encourage students to conform where the cameras are running, and do their rulebreaking elsewhere.
Maybe that really is what the government means by being a good citizen these days. I don’t agree.
I’m glad to say that I love my daughters’ elementary school. We’re blessed to have a deep culture of trust and cooperation between teachers, parents and students, and a lively culture of free inquiry. That can’t be legislated, but it can be undermined, and these proposals are just the thing to undermine it. We should not accept an oppressive apparatus of surveillance and control just because we’re scared about school safety and want to feel like we’re doing something.
One of the worst performing and most violent schools in Philadelphia, which endured Sandy Hook like casualties spread out over a year, finally got new leadership that removed the cops, the bars, and sent in psychologists and other non-violence coordinators and interventionists and suddenly violence is down and performance is up. Treat students like incarcerated criminals and don’t be surprised if they act like them.
Three jobs required me to go through a metal detector every day. My current job as a law clerk entails lots of file running across the street at Cook County, my internship at the State Department, and my year tutoring in the Chicago Public Schools. That last experience not only seemed most out of place but it was there I was subjected to the rudest staff, strictest searches, and physical pat downs. Daily. And I was a pre-cleared CPS employee. The students got it even worse, and that broken windows theory extended to giving students suspensions for being five minutes late. No wonder the crowded classrooms, demoralized staff, and lack of resources didn’t make much of a dent. And those security measures failed to stem the casualties at that school-one of the worst in the city and the one President Obama gave his major gun control speech at.
…these kinds of security costs that get imposed on people every day? They must be enormous. All to prevent remote contingencies. The truth is that security is largely a racket.
much emotion drives how we feel we need these levels of security to be safe. I’m not convinced that local departments need the kind of military armament they have to properly police their communities. Somehow, too many have convinced themselves they do. This is hometown USA, not Fallujah. It never needs to be assaulted.
I teach in as well as the community I live in. At their best, school resource officer’s are an extension of community policing. At school, our SRO has done a lot to keep kids out of trouble. Kids who do stupid things have gone to him for advice. His presence has also cut down on theft and other crimes. He monitors social media as well.
The way our high school handles it, if there’s a disciplinary issue, it starts with the school administration, which then calls him in if the issue escalates to the point where it must be handled legally. If the SRO is present at the beginning of an investigation that may turn into a legal matter, he will leave the room as a matter of policy, so the kids’ rights won’t be violated.
I work in a suburb, however. The police know who they work for. In the city next to us, the relationship with residents is almost certainly different.
What students do outside of school is their business. If it’s illegal, then the regular police can get involved. Remember what happened with Cameron d’Ambrosio last year?
http://warrantless.org/2013/05/free-methuen-teenager-cameron-dambrosio/
I don’t see why it’s a good idea to have law enforcement pro-actively monitor social media, even “for the kids”. If kids do stupid things and need advice, the last person they should go to is a police officer; they should go instead to a school counselor. That’s what they’re there for. And at least they don’t come armed to the discussion.
Schools are increasingly expected to parent students, and are now legally on the hook for activities that happen outside. If a student hurts himself or others based on conversations with peers who happen to attend school with her/him, the schools are now liable. Since few people in the government have the integrity to call out social situations or fund support services, schools have been forced to parent — and that includes monitoring social media.
If you can point to any case where an actual court has held that a school district is liable for a student hurting themselves based on conversations outside of school with peers who attend that school with them, I will moderate my opinions on this. I cannot think of any, so I currently view it as a highly hypothetical risk.
rather than “liable” in the technical sense?
Why didn’t someone notice this Adam Lanza, this Dylan Klebold? Didn’t he have teachers that saw him every day? How could they not notice? Aren’t they supposed to interact with the kids every day? Aren’t they doing their job?
Sabutai may also be referring to MGL c51A, which does indeed hold teachers “liable” in the technical sense if they do not notice that a child is being abused, and someone later decides that they should have noticed.
I’m not saying that no possible argument for liability can be made. Arguments can always be made that something is someone’s fault. The key is to understand whether that’s a realistic legal risk, and a measure of that is whether a court has accepted the argument, right?
There are lawsuits after every one of the “mass shooting” incidents, for example against the school district at Columbine. There was one filed after Sandy Hook, but it was quickly withdrawn. The argument is always, school left the doors unlocked, should have had better security, etc. I don’t think that any of these cases have actually resulted in a judgment against a school district. Many have been dismissed, and some may have been settled. I would imagine that school districts are anticipating that eventually one might go through.
But if no judgments have gone through, then a rational school district should, until one does go through, calculate that risk at zero.
On the other hand, the risk of introducing social media monitoring is not zero – the case of Cameron d’Ambrosio from Methuen shows as much, where the school overreacted to him posting violent rap lyrics and he found himself spending his last four months of high school in jail.
Social media monitoring is the job of parents and guardians, not law enforcement.
What students do outside of school is their business. If it’s illegal, then the regular police can get involved. Remember what happened with Cameron d’Ambrosio last year in Methuen?
http://warrantless.org/2013/05/free-methuen-teenager-cameron-dambrosio/
I don’t see why it’s a good idea to have law enforcement pro-actively monitor social media, even “for the kids”. If kids do stupid things and need advice, the last person they should go to is a police officer; they should go instead to a school counselor. That’s what they’re there for. And at least they don’t come armed to the discussion.
…but if a peer in the network, be it a FB friend or whatever the equivalent is on other platforms sees something threatening I hope they report it. It does become a school matter when the threater and the threatee are schoolmates with the potential of a harmful act being carried out on school time. We definitely encourage reporting bullying now and even growing up we were encouraged to tell an adult if we were aware of harmful behavior. Yes, the guard should be up for false reporting and reports must be investigated. In general I don’t see why quite such a jaded view of police. It seems to me that we hear about times when they abused their authority precisely because it is not the norm.
Your comment is another in your series of “Christopher doesn’t see the problem with X” views of events, informed by your white adult male privilege. Your interactions with cops have all been peachy, so the ones whose outrageous offenses make the news must be the Few Bad Apples. Now, cops see all the worst people. They assume that everyone is lying to them, and they’re usually right. It’s normal for cops to divide the population into Us and Them, where Us is cops and their families, and Them is literally everybody else. That’s why there are those little blue-and-black-striped stickers on cars, so that the cops can tell when somebody is in the Us group. All this makes it easier to lose patience with one of Them and use a lot of force to make them comply with the cop’s desires.
I’m not sure if it was here, but I read a discussion where someone pointed out that the “bad apple” metaphor originates with the “one bad apple spoils the barrel” homily. If you don’t get that bad apple out of the barrel, the rest soon go bad. Currently, bad cops usually keep their jobs. In fact, they are usually not disciplined in any way. Here’s a story going back 50 years to my youth in a Boston suburb, where a policeman who was thrown off the Staties for beating a helpless prisoner then went to work for the police of that suburb. He shot two unarmed teens, one when he was a sergeant, and the other as a lieutenant, and retired as a captain. The parents of those kids raised as much of a stink about it as they possibly could, with no result.
What’s abnormal is not when a cop crosses the line into improper behavior, but when one is actually held accountable for it. You personally will probably be able to live out your life with no bad consequence of trusting cops. Many people who don’t have your privileges – and kids are most definitely in that set – cannot expect respect and honorable treatment from lawmen.
…but enough about me.
Think about it though – there are 1000s of cops on the beat throughout this country. We hear about some, certainly not all, of the instances of bad behavior. I’m not going to assume that almost all of them are bad, and I know some personally who are not. By all means lets do a better job holding them accountable when they are abusive.
I even point out, in the article, that “Individual police officers, like other people, are often good at heart.”
But the point here is not to judge their hearts. What’s wrong here is the almost complete lack of meaningful repercussions if police do anything wrong.
When we interact with police, they have the power, the gun, and the institutional authority; they have the ability, whether they refrain out of niceness from using it or not, to misrepresent everything about your interaction with them, including in court, and to be believed. Whether the person holding that level of power over you says please while they’re doing it seems rather to miss the point.
“Here is the bottom line”, said Colorado police officer Sunil Dutta in the Washington Post after Ferguson: “If you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/08/19/im-a-cop-if-you-dont-want-to-get-hurt-dont-challenge-me/
Is that really what being an American now requires? Are we about unquestioning submission to authority? Isn’t not being like that one of the things of which we are proud? Or is that just me?
You know that what I’m suggesting we tell our kids is good advice. It’s not worth risking your life or your freedom by behaving differently and engaging with a cop like he’s your friend. They want friends? Maybe they should accept reasonable accountability and oversight, and not armor themselves up like they’re pacifying an insurgency, because that’s not what friends do.
If we set up the incentives that poorly – if we give people unchecked power, arm them more and more heavily, train them to think of suspects as “the enemy”, send them out into the community, and either refuse to prosecute them or find them not guilty every time they are called to account, what the hell do we expect to happen?
Good people, in a bad system, find themselves endorsing and practicing things that they would never dream of, and for valid reasons: They want to protect their friends. They want to provide well for their families. They are afraid of the repercussions of speaking up. They rationalize, and compartmentalize, and try to leave the job behind them when they get in the door.
Still you seem to miss the point.
YOUR experiences, as a white male in a community that is prosperous by the standards of East Somerville, Roxbury, and communities like them (and probably predominantly white or Asian), are simply NOT RELEVANT to what happens to too many children too many times.
Was it necessary for your father to have “the conversation” with you, at age 11 or 12, about the importance of being properly submissive when confronted by an angry cop? How many of your peers were stopped, frisked, and perhaps hauled off in handcuffs, on your collective way to and from school?
Perhaps a contributor to why you don’t understand “quite such a jaded view of police” is that you have so little first-hand experience with ACTUAL cops in an ACTUAL urban setting.
…married, affluent, living in Belmont…
and surprise surprise, I’ve never been stopped and frisked either. But enough work and reading can somewhat overcome the limitations of your own experiences.
…my default assumption is to give people the benefit of the doubt. If you have experienced or witnessed instances of bad policing I will certainly believe you when you testify to them, but stereotypes don’t sound any better in this context than they would in others. Even if you say, “but it happens all the time” I would argue that the times it doesn’t happen are the ones you don’t hear about.
We can’t rely exclusively on personal experience to make decisions like this, the result is no better than pure stereotyping.
The news reports all around us are filled with examples of police departments that are not successfully stopping brutal thugs from joining their forces. It is endemic in Chicago, New York, Oakland CA, and LA. Closer to home, Cambridge and Brookline have been dealing with racism and excessive brutality within their ranks.
There is nearly overwhelming evidence that police departments are NOT punishing police officers who commit these crimes. The results of “internal investigations” nearly always clear the officers involved, and almost never pay attention to the complaints of residents and witnesses. Not every victim of bullying by a racist local cop is a nationally-known professor able to rally presidential support. Most incidents like what happened in Cambridge do NOT result in a Rose Garden “beer summit”.
The situation with Aaron MacFarlane, now an FBI agent in the Boston office, exemplifies the reality of what happens. Mr. MacFarlane was a participant in a notorious gang of uniformed thugs in the employ of the Oakland CA police department. When neighborhood activists were finally able to bring a successful civil suit against the Oakland PD, that suit was settled out of court (with secret terms, of course). Mr. MacFarlane was a part of that settlement. He received a very generous pension and early retirement, based on a suddenly appearing “full disability”. Six months later he was hired by the Boston FBI office. Shortly after that he killed an unarmed witness, in police custody, with a fusillade of shots. Mr. MacFarlane was then cleared by the Florida “investigation” that followed. There was ZERO interest from our own Attorney General in learning the truth of what actually transpired. Mr. MacFarlane remains on duty in the Boston office.
Our constitutional protections are a crucial bulwark against this kind of official corruption. It is as important for young people as it is for the rest of us — perhaps more so, because so many young people do NOT have strong parents and support systems to help them fight back when they are wrongly accused.
This entire emphasis on stronger and more intrusive police authority is, in my view, wrong, ineffective, and terrible for our society.
My work, professionally, is to oppose and undermine the surveillance state, and to defend the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. This means that I have interesting colleagues, volunteers, and, increasingly, friends, who have been at the sharp end of what the police and the intelligence services do.
I could tell you some stories. But as you yourself indicate, it would do no good, because you believe for some reason that we’re more likely to hear about bad behavior by police officers than good behavior, and that therefore the residuum of stories you haven’t heard must be preponderantly good. In truth, police are more likely to hide bad behavior than good. They’re not shy about their successes, and the print media and the TV news and the civic leadership happily participate in glorifying law enforcement. Do you know, for example, how hard it is to get the press to cover last year’s murder of Army Specialist Denis Reynoso?
http://warrantless.org/2014/01/whitewash/
I know, because I have tried to get them to cover it. And you’ve probably heard nothing about it.
What is the evidence for your default assumption that police – with all their lack of accountability, and with all the abuses already uncovered – still deserve the benefit of your doubt? There has to come a point, even if you’re not there yet, where you would acknowledge that what you can see is evidence of a degree of institutional sickness. What, for you, would it take?
I don’t feel I need the evidence you ask for in your final paragraph. It is simply IMO the right thing to do, but it doesn’t mean we should not be vigilant.
…prevents you from ever making the judgement that an institution has a systematic problem beyond a few unethical people?
Does that apply to the Catholic Church, the Republican Party, the finance industry, the health insurance industry, the payday loans industry, the Mafia? Or do you extend this moral blindness only to the police?
Christopher made the same arguments about the Catholic Church. He offered similar arguments about Probation Department scandal and, if I recall correctly, the Michael McLaughlin/Housing Department scandal.
I don’t know that the others have come up. For better or worse, Christopher appears to be consistent in his application of this principle.
…but what I’m not fine with is assuming that everyone who is part of the system is also part of the problem.
I specifically talk about the good hearts of “many” police officers. What more do you want me to do, bring them round fresh-baked cookies and pat them on the head?
I see no reason to think that it is reported more than, say, domestic violence or rape. In both cases, you have an offender who has a great deal of societal power, and the resources to help bring cases forward are grossly inadequate. There are many reports of police simply refusing to accept complaints of unlawful behavior by brother officers. Above all, the situation in other developed countries makes it clear that there is something desperately wrong with how our law enforcement is evolving. For example, in Germany in 2010, the police force used sixty bullets. Sixty, in total, across the whole country, during a whole year. Our police, on the other hand, can pump that number of bullets into one recalcitrant suspect, and have. Nor is it the case that our criminals are particularly worse. It’s our response which is worse, and it’s based on a view of suspects as being dirtbags worthy of neither respect nor life. If our police felt otherwise, they would be killing far fewer people.
I have come slowly to my view of police, over a considerable length of time. I do not come to it lightly. Everything I say about the police is legally entirely true, and is backed up by the actual decisions of US courts, which ?I link to in the article above.
I was myself a victim of very serious bullying in school. I do think that students should feel safe to report bullying. I don’t think it’s safe to set up a system where they’re expected to report it to a representative of law enforcement, or where their report will initiate a permanent surveillance record about either them or their aggressor. They should tell a trusted adult who is not trained to view everything as a potentially criminal matter.
Clergy abuse is probably underreported too, but in both cases the vast majority would never dream of acting this way.
Your analogy is excellent. And it’s not like people in the Catholic Church from the Pope on down didn’t know it was happening. They knew. And they let it happen. The abusers were protected by the non-abusers, who shifted the abusers to new parishes, and participated in covering up the abuse for the sake of the Church’s reputation. So it not only matters what individuals do; what matters is the overall value-system of the organization. And in the case of the police, officer impunity, in values terms, evidently outranks the rights, lives and bodily integrity of the people they are in theory sworn to protect.
enough common ground to pursue a discussion at this point in time.
I have a child in school. Many others here also do, or have in the past. That’s a very common shared experience. Not to mention we have all been through school, most of us public school. I have an opinion about whether there should be a cop in my daughter’s school full-time, and that opinion is informed by my own experiences with cops as a kid and an adult, and by the things I read about cops doing.
This is absolutely something we should talk about, now and any other time it comes up.
Then maybe we can pursue it.
I uprated this comment based on my impatience with participants who simply refuse to admit that their personal experiences as privileged white males growing up in prosperous white suburban neighborhoods is NOT representative of today’s police behavior.
Public school students have constitutional rights just like the rest of us. One of those fundamental rights is a right to privacy. Another is a First Amendment right of free expression.
I wonder if all the participants in the social media network that is being “monitored” know that the police officer is present, and is present in his or her capacity as “SRO”. I wonder if this SRO is “in uniform”, as it were, while monitoring. I wonder what, if any, constraints exist on what the SRO may and may not consider worthy of further attention.
I am currently employed by a company that provides social network monitoring services. I have been building out the tools that we use to power those services for most of this year. I see ZERO evidence that the police — pretty much any police — have the nuance or sophistication to understand and properly react to the things they learn during their “monitoring”.
Some of us may remember “Net Nanny” from a decade ago. I hope people realize that today’s “monitoring” tools are even less sophisticated than that hopelessly blunt axe. What do we expect a police officer to DO when he or she receives an alert from a monitored Twitter account that notifies of “Drug-related language”, triggered by a 15 year old’s use of the term “weed”?
How many of us understand that a more sophisticated analysis of current social media content shows that the term “weed” (or “Weed”) is most often (to the tune 80-90%) used in the context of an unwanted plant (literally or as a metaphor) or a tool used to control the plant?
Real social network users (never mind teenagers) use “weed” in a drug-related context about 10% of the time. So the odds are about 9 to 1 that the alert received by that SRO is a false alarm.
Does the SRO have the nuance or sophistication to know that? Does the process that surely records the false-positive, and thus incorrectly brands the commenter as a probable criminal, include a way to remove the notification entirely?
The pernicious concept that “I have nothing to hide so I don’t care” is the death knell for privacy from government surveillance.
Those of us who value our freedoms should be APPALLED at the suggestions that we expand government surveillance — of our children, no less — even more than is already happening.
…which experiences are more valid than others? Some of us have very good experiences with law enforcement. Others quite the opposite. Both are valid and true, but neither is the entire picture.
Regarding monitoring, I’ve already said it shouldn’t be done, but do you really think a cop looking at someone’s FB feed can’t tell the difference between weed as marijuana and weed as an unwanted plant? We were taught to distinguish between homonyms by context as far back as first grade! There does need to be human and not just electronic agency involved at least before any action is taken.
Do you really think an actual human sits and watches a facebook page?
The monitoring we’re talking about is done by text analysis engines that are exceedingly stupid. The only posts likely to be seen by the police are those that have already been flagged by the monitoring software. In too many cases, the damage to the reputation of the innocent author of the incorrectly-flagged post has already been done — that author is already in the police database.
…a person better darn well check. We should not surrender our ability to think to computers. If a mistake is found for crying out loud take the person OUT of the database! How hard is that?
All they do is to flag the mistaken information as “unreliable” and leave it in there.
Once the alert is flagged, it is nearly impossible to remove.
In any case, most often the agencies very much want to keep it. You do understand, don’t you, that fingerprints and DNA samples taken when ANY person is booked are kept in various databases even if that person is subsequently cleared of all charges, right? And you do understand that merely by being in the database, the likelihood of subsequent false charges raises a thousand-fold or more, right?
Even if a human decides to take no action on an alert, the damage is already done to the falsely-accused correspondent. The disastrous history of “no fly” lists is a reasonable example of the sorts of failures that can be expected.
…it was plain from context that what he said was part of violent rap lyrics posted under the “rap name” “DJ Cammy Dee” (look, he was 18, OK? We were all 18 once. Have sympathy.)
And the SRO, and the school, and the regular police, and the DA, blithely ignored the context, because they had GOT THEYSELVES A TERRORIST.
Yes, your description of what an SRO should do is appropriate. But SROs are not going to be able to do that consistently. Their training leads them to see things through a law enforcement lens; that’s just the way of it.
…to “get themselves a terrorist”? Seems to me if I thought there might be a problem and I find from context that there was nothing to it after all I would breathe a sigh of relief and move on. Especially if I were law enforcement I’d think good, one less case I have to pursue.
If you bag a terrorist, it helps your career. If your department bags one, it gets more funding. The FBI has worked very hard to gin up as many terrorism cases as it can.
http://warrantless.org/2014/03/fbi-terrorist/
This is not just me saying this. The New York Times and the Guardian have both written about this particular law enforcement dynamic.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/opinion/sunday/terrorist-plots-helped-along-by-the-fbi.html?_r=0
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/16/fbi-entrapment-fake-terror-plots
I’m sorry. I wish things were as you say.
If you or your department bags a false terrorist there should be consequences, especially if there is a pattern of doing so. Why aren’t the appropriators monitoring these things to determine whether additional funding is really warranted or deserved?
You’re a congressman. Law enforcement comes to you and says, “We’ve caught another terrorist!”. Do you say, (a) “Well done boys, go do it again!” or, (b) “Actually, I think I’ll do the unpopular thing, probe whether it was a real terrorist, open myself up to a thousand well-funded negative ads in my next campaign about how I love Islamic terrorism, and…you know, forget I said anything. Well done boys. Go do it again.”
It sounds like we have to address the bigger problem of why it’s so popular to shred the Bill of Rights. For all the anti-government rhetoric we hear, especially on the Right, you would think there would be louder and stronger objections to government abusing its power this way. If the modern “Tea Party” would take up this cause they would be a lot closer to the spirit of their namesake than they are now.
My group Digital Fourth (www.warrantless.org) does work on this stuff. We led the charge against a proposed expansion of electronic wiretapping in Massachusetts this year. Currently we’re working on police militarization, surveillance and fusion centers. If you’re interested in helping out, I’m at alex@warrantless.org, and you’d be welcome to get involved.
We do indeed have to address the bigger problem of why it’s so popular to shred the Bill of Rights.
To quote FDR’s most famous line: “We have nothing to fear but fear itself”.
We hear the war-drums beating again even now. American warplanes are once again bombing the middle east. Our media is once again filled with horrific stories (many of them intentionally seeded by ISIS) of brutal death, torture, and rape.
All are designed to make us fearful. “Terrorism” is the use of fear as a weapon of war. Our own government (and the army of weapons manufacturers and “defense” contractors who profit from war) uses our fear as a tool with which to manipulate us.
It seems to me that a hugely important way to stop our government from shredding our constitutional rights is to make our young people AWARE of those attacks, and to SUPPORT our young people by zealously and passionately PROTECTING their constitutional freedoms.
We do that by, for example, conducting high school classes where teachers help students analyze current local media stories to identify propaganda and learn how to find the real truth. We do NOT do that by encouraging police “monitoring” of social media.
Remember the Aqua Teen Hunger Force debacle? Those were a couple of false terrorists. What were the consequences? The non-terrorists were able to pay fines and do community service, thanks to the largesse of our Attorney General. The officials who wildly overreacted and made our state a national laughing-stock? No consequences for them. Why did the nation laugh at us? Because the same displays had been put up in other cities, and nobody freaked out.
How about the poor MIT student who had no idea that the art project on her sweatshirt would cause heart palpitations and adrenaline rushes among Logan Airport’s defenders. Again, she had to do community service, and apologize for inflicting art on the airport staff. The hyped-up cops who nearly executed her on the spot? Nada.
“Why aren’t the appropriators monitoring these things”? Because then they’d be Soft On Terror. The WoT is a catch-all excuse to keep ramping up surveillance of the public and eliminating tolerance for any hesitation in complying with police instructions. Yes, it’s worse than you think it is.
From the MIT article you linked to:
I would’ve sued if I was her parents. Abominable. And yeah, the ring leader of the Aqua Teen fiasco is about to get demoted upward in November…
Christopher, you’re assuming that the police react the way that you would when presented with words or a situation that can be interpreted either as harmless or as evidence of criminality. All indications are that this assumption is unjustified. Their inclination is to interpret any questionable behavior as crime-related. “Anything you say can and will be used against you.” It’s too bad the cops don’t react as you do. I genuinely wish they did, but they aren’t going to.
comment about a gun. Cops carry guns. That has very little to do with school resource officers. I had reservations about SRO’s in the beginning, but I finally decided that they were more an extension of community policing than part of a police state. Schools don’t need police to violate kids’ rights.
I’m only speaking from my limited experience with SRO’s in the suburban high school I work at and the high school of the small town where I’m selectman. What I see is something akin to the old, neighborhood beat cop. These guys–in these cases–get to know the kids. They have relationships with kids who will be involved with or are involved with the legal system. Those relationships are helpful to both law enforcement and the people at the other end, when problems happen. The SROs also help when events in the community–restraining orders, for example–carry over into schools.
On one occasion, some kids drove onto a golf course in the winter. They were afraid they did damage and also afraid they were seen. They went and talked to the SRO. He called the golf course. There was no damage. And he set it up for the kids to go apologize. On another occasion, one of my daughters was having a problem with a boy across the country. He was sort of stalking her online. She went to the SRO and he advised her on what to do. This is community policing. Getting to know the people for whom the police work. Building relationships of mutual respect.
Where the SRO relationship can break down is in the Memorandum of Understanding it has with the police have with the school. I know of one school where the SRO is treated like a vice principal, and police investigations take priority over school discipline. That’s the fault of the schools. They have complete authority over their buildings. With that said, schools are much more likely to violate a kid’s rights than an SRO. My high school has surveillance cameras all over the place now. These aren’t for intruders, they are for the kids.
My experience is definitely limited. I don’t have any urban school experience, but I know there are serious gang problems in some Springfield high schools.
I also don’t see a reason for a regular police presence in elementary schools, though occasional visits can be part of community policing.
comment about a gun. Cops carry guns. That has very little to do with school resource officers. I had reservations about SRO’s in the beginning, but I finally decided that they were more an extension of community policing than part of a police state. Schools don’t need police to violate kids’ rights.
I’m only speaking from my limited experience with SRO’s in the suburban high school I work at and the high school of the small town where I’m selectman. What I see is something akin to the old, neighborhood beat cop. These guys–in these cases–get to know the kids. They have relationships with kids who will be involved with or are involved with the legal system. Those relationships are helpful to both law enforcement and the people at the other end, when problems happen. The SROs also help when events in the community–restraining orders, for example–carry over into schools.
On one occasion, some kids drove onto a golf course in the winter. They were afraid they did damage and also afraid they were seen. They went and talked to the SRO. He called the golf course. There was no damage. And he set it up for the kids to go apologize. On another occasion, one of my daughters was having a problem with a boy across the country. He was sort of stalking her online. She went to the SRO and he advised her on what to do. This is community policing. Getting to know the people for whom the police work. Building relationships of mutual respect.
Where the SRO relationship can break down is in the Memorandum of Understanding it has with the police have with the school. I know of one school where the SRO is treated like a vice principal, and police investigations take priority over school discipline. That’s the fault of the schools. They have complete authority over their buildings. With that said, schools are much more likely to violate a kid’s rights than an SRO. My high school has surveillance cameras all over the place now. These aren’t for intruders, they are for the kids.
My experience is definitely limited. I don’t have any urban school experience, but I know there are serious gang problems in some Springfield high schools.
I also don’t see a reason for a regular police presence in elementary schools, though occasional visits can be part of community policing.
Belmont Police Department has confirmed to me that their new SRO will do so.
Old-style ‘neighborhood beat cops’ didn’t listen in to kids’ phone calls, or read their journals, but SROs do monitor social media: you said so yourself.
The kids who drove onto the golf course? They were lucky. They had no way to be sure that the SRO wouldn’t treat it as a criminal matter. You can’t present yourself truthfully as a neutral, friendly source of helpful advice, when society affords you in your job complete and unpunished discretion not to be.
I don’t see any reason for ongoing police presence in schools, and particularly armed police. It poses a risk to students that cannot be removed by individual SROs deciding arbitrarily to be nice. You argue that armed police shouldn’t be in elementary schools, but you don’t present any reason why not: after all, many school shootings happen there. So why not, once you have an SRO in a high school, not extend it to the middle schools and then on down? What, in your belief system, makes that inappropriate?
Last, you don’t address at all the question of misdirected resources. Money spent on an SRO is necessarily money that could be spent on other things. They don’t work for free. What makes you think that having an SRO is more valuable than having an unarmed counselor or school psychologist?
carry guns when they are on duty. Always. It doesn’t matter what their duty is. We arm our police. They aren’t going to be disarmed in school. I don’t see this as an issue. That’s why I wasn’t going to argue with you. I think you’re missing my point of view, which is informed by experience. Limited experience, but actual experience. Not news items and theory. This is why I didn’t want to get into this discussion
SRO’s listen to kids phonecalls? Not in my experience. They read kid’s journals? That’s news to me as well. Social media? That’s public and semi-public. Twitter is not protected speech. It’s the equivalent of patrol in the 21st century, like it or not.
SRO’s have arrest power. Yep, that’s true. That’s where the schools come in. As I said, with memorandum of understanding. The kids who drove on the golf course could have approached any number of adults at our school, including an adjustment counselor or guidance counselor. They chose to speak to the SRO because they knew him and trusted him. That’s the point of community policing. They were lucky, lucky because they knew an adult in law enforcement they could trust.
Why do you think SRO’s are there to provide security from Newtown-type attacks? The police help in developing security plans for the schools, but they aren’t there to fight off attackers. The gun isn’t there to fight off attackers. It’s part of police equipment. You seem to be confusing what is with what the NRA wants to see. The reason we wouldn’t have a regular police presence in elementary schools is that there’s very little crime happening in those schools. The SRO will visit elementary schools to get to know kids. If there is a security issue–such as a non-custodial parents causing problems–he would get involved.
Do schools need SROs? I never said they did. I just provided a description of how they operate in two school systems that I’m involved in. From an educational perspective, their presence could be eliminated without a huge blow to law enforcement or school discipline. One school I know of depends on its SRO as an additional administrator. They are hard-pressed for personnel and the police budget pays for him. Bear in mind, he’s on duty so if a major issue arises, he’s out of the school. Again, I have no idea what happens in urban school systems.
I am arguing that monitoring social media now, is analogous to an old-fashioned beat cop in the 1960s opening up kids’ mail or listening in on their phone calls.
“Twitter is not protected speech” – Not so. Speech, wherever it occurs, is presumptively protected by the First Amendment. Criminal threat statutes, to be constitutional, have to be drawn extremely narrowly, and cover only specific, direct, credible threats against individuals, not generic groups. Everything else is protected. even if it’s said on a forum where it will be recorded.
“Police always carry guns when on duty”: This is false. The British police usually do not. If we’re going to start introducing cops into schools as permanent members of the staff, we sure as hell should question whether they have to be armed around our kids.
A memorandum of understanding? Great. Can you warrant to me that if the SRO breaks that memorandum and uses excessive force, the SRO will be jailed like anyone else who used that force? I don’t think so. So what use is an MOU to constrain them? An MOU provides guidance, not accountability.
“The kids could have approached anybody.” Great. So why is an SRO also needed?
Why am I presuming that it’s about Newtown? Because the people pushing this are citing Newtown as a reason to do it, that’s why; and you know very well that schools wouldn’t have had a wave of new SRO appointments after Newtown without it.
Your last reason is “well, they may not be necessary, but they’re free to the school, because they come out of the police budget.” That’s precisely the reasoning that has funnelled military surplus armored vehicles, grenade launchers and machine guns to our police departments, because it’s free to them so why not. Because it’s a bad idea, that’s why not. You don’t bring a gun into your home just because somebody offers it to you for free. Or maybe you do, jeez, I don’t know, but I’d think that would be a dumb thing to do.
with you. You don’t know what you’re talking about, except from a largely theoretical/ideological point of view. Fine as far as that goes, but you are more interested in proving how right you are than understanding how SROs or policing play out in practice. I don’t mean you’re necessarily wrong in your arguments, but you don’t know anything about MOUs, how schools work, what their authority is, that cops always carry guns on duty, and most of all, community policing, which is an issue I brought up twice and you dropped both times. This is why we don’t have enough common ground to have a fruitful argument for me. I understand your arguments, and don’t necessarily disagree, from the beginning I’ve been trying to give you examples of things in practice, informing you, not arguing in favor of them. Yet everything I’ve said, you’ve taken as an argument. So thanks, but no thanks. Not interested in pursuing this any further with you.
If we’re going to talk about experience of these matters, I used to run the main community development corporation in Waltham, interacting for years with city officials, school officials, the community policing department, constables, and administrators and tenants of Waltham’s public housing. You never asked me to present my credentials, and so, I guess, you presumed that I had none.
I was. however, born in England, and moved here as a young man. I think you find it hard to imagine just how insane it would be considered in England to introduce an armed police officer onto the staff of a high school. WHY is he armed? “Because he’s police” is not a sufficient answer for putting high school kids at risk in this way, and you’ve offered nothing as to why it’s good that he’s there that relates to his having a gun.
If it’s not about Newtown-style events, what on earth are the circumstances you envision where it would be appropriate for an SRO to use his gun in a school? I am honestly baffled as to what situations you are thinking of that justify it.
To finish up: Let’s take an analogy. A Middle Eastern emir with a gun, who holds the absolute power of life or death, arrives on staff of our local high school. I express concern that he may exercise that power over our kids, and your only responses are: (a) Emirs always carry guns, don’t they? It’s unimaginable to ask him not to. (b) We have a piece of paper with no actual teeth, where he undertakes to not shoot anyone. (c) He’s a “community emir” and “community emirs” are generally nicer than the average emir, so I trust him. And somehow I remain unpersuaded.
Does that illustrate the matter any better?
and the police. Whether they are needed or not, they have them. That’s the way it’s done in the U.S. Whether they carry a weapon off duty is a matter of choice. Many carry an off-duty weapon. The point is police are required to wear them on duty. If they are on duty at the prom, they wear wear them. If they are on duty at the polls, they wear them. If they are directing traffic, they wear them. Police wear guns. The SRO is policeman. He wears his gun. They don’t wear a gun because they are an SRO. They wear a gun because they are a cop on duty. It doesn’t matter what the duty is.
I’m not surprised you are unpersuaded. You don’t seem to approve of police carrying guns. That’s a separate issue from SROs. It’s a valid to argue police shouldn’t carry guns. It’s also valid to argue that SROs not carrying guns. What I’ve been trying to impress upon you is that guns and police are accepted to the point that no one questions it. You don’t approve. Fine. But very few people are going to share your concern or your reasoning when it comes to police carrying guns on duty.
I’m not concerned about your credentials. You’re arguing far beyond your experience. Your analogy is stupid (Middle Eastern emir? Am I supposed to object to that because I’m racist?) and only illustrates your lack of experience or understanding of the context.
Police don’t hold absolute power over life and death because they have guns, and you obviously don’t know what community policing means. None of this means that your objections to police carrying guns or police being in schools are inherently wrong, but your ignorance of contemporary American law enforcement and societal attitude toward law enforcement undermines your arguments.
Because they will be meaningfully punished if they kill somebody improperly? Do you have evidence for that, that would overcome the actual fact on the ground that Massachusetts DAs don’t prosecute police officers for such things, and the vast amount of anecdotal evidence across the nation that they are prosecuted for abuses at rates extraordinarily lower than the general population?
Unless police officers are brought within the bounds of the law, by there being an actual chance of their being held accountable for a bad shooting, then I am entirely justified in characterizing them as having an extralegal power of life or death. In the same way, a banker who faces no personal consequences for actions that contribute to crashing the economy, will take riskier actions. You don’t need law enforcement experience to be able to follow where the incentives lead.
“That’s the way it’s done” is not a sufficient argument: it is circular. You refuse to cite any situation in which it would be appropriate for an officer to use a gun in the course of their duties as SRO; well, then, there is no reason for them to carry one.
As a US citizen with fifteen years of residency, I have grown…adjusted to the fact that US police carry guns. Where I’m fighting the battle right now is to argue that police officers whose sole duty is to interact with and form friendships with our kids, should not carry guns while they’re doing so. Since, by your own arguments, they’re not necessary in a school, why is it absurd to you that I argue for it? It appears that you simply don’t like me challenging what seems to you to be an untroubled assumption.
(And the second battle I am fighting is that if they are armed, they should not have the type or scale of arms appropriate for fighting a rebel insurgency, because they are not interacting with our enemies in a war; they are civilians, tasked with keeping the peace among fellow Americans.)
Last, I am not ignorant about the current assumptions underlying US law enforcement; I am hostile to some of them. It’s not the case that if I only knew more, or talked to more police officers, I would understand that they really don’t hold my life in their hands. The reverse has been the case during the last few years’ work on civil liberties that I have done; the more I interact with police officers, and the more I understand about how few practical constraints they have, the more nervous I get, and the less likely I am to want an armed officer trying to make friends with my kids, ‘kay?
your battles. It may be with the arguments you attribute to me, but it’s not with me.
I’m not sure what button marthews is pushing for the usually unflappable mark-bail, but it saddens me to read this exchange.
Both of you are making VERY solid arguments, and it seems to me that this exchange is crucially important.
Mark, you ARE making a circular argument that cops carry guns because cops carry guns. You are have not presented any evidence, argument, or even scenario where an armed cop in a school is preferable to an unarmed one.
Marthew, Mark is making a valid and credible point about the role that police play in many or most US communities. Waltham is NOT representative of those communities.
I’m confident that Mark NEVER wants the gun carried by an SRO to be discharged in a school. NEVER. I’m similarly confident that marthews NEVER wants a loyal and loved member of the community killed or grievously wounded because misguided liberalism left him or her unprotected in the face of a crazed terrorist.
I want to hear each of your voices. I see no need for either of you to “win”. Instead, I hope that each of you can articulate the things you care about and the outcomes you hope to achieve.
feelings. Just a lack of common ground.
I began by offering my experience, not arguments for or against. I think Marthews is more interested in an argument than I am. I’m more interested in practice. It was his first comment about guns that led me to believe we didn’t have common ground. I’m by no means a gun nut, and would be quite happy to live in a society where most police don’t carry weapons. We don’t have one. We’re not going to have one in my lifetime.
As a selectman, I’ve negotiated two police contracts and been involved on one occasion between the school and our police department. I also know the SRO at the school I work at very well and have worked with him over the years. I can’t count the number police I know personally, though not intimately. Former schoolmates, former students, and people who just live in town. My experiences and acquaintances don’t grant me automatic authority over arguments, but as I said in another comment, theory and ideology are insufficient. Knowledge is required for a deep understanding.
I agree with you that we arm our police. In my view, that fact alone is strong evidence that an “SRO” does NOT belong in our schools.
There are two pernicious myths that I think need to be demolished:
1. Employers are family
2. Police are friends
Neither is true. Each serves to expose workers and citizens to greatly increased risk.
I am not anti-employer (I *am* an employer!), and I am not anti-police. I believe that these two myths blur two very important boundaries, boundaries that once blurred are then inevitably crossed — to the great detriment of the victim. Families do not fire children. Friends do not arrest us, and friends do not shoot us. Friends also do not stop and frisk us if they don’t like the color of our skin, the way we wear our hair, the people we choose to love, or the music we choose to listen to.
Mayberry, North Carolina was a fictional town when Andy Griffith popularized it. NO Mayberrys exist today. None. The gun that each and every police officer carries is loaded and deadly. I do NOT want ANYBODY with loaded weapons in a school my children are required to attend.
An aspect that makes the police-as-friend myth dangerous is the way it plays out with real cops in real towns. The drunken son or daughter of a selectman is just as lethally dangerous behind the wheel of a car as any other drunken driver. I have listened to police and fire scanners since the 1970s (it’s a hobby of mine). When the cop calls in the stop, and the dispatcher says “That individual is known to us”, most cops in Massachusetts do NOT call in the wrecker and the transport vehicle.
In 1985, I lived in Billerica. I was a member of the Fincom. I knew many of the cops, I knew the chief, my committee voted to approve their annual budgets and had a significant voice in their annual raise budget. One winter evening, a Ford Econoline van was driving up Boston Road towards the center fast enough that when it crossed the centerline and hit the snowbank on the opposite side, it went airborne long enough to cross half the lot next to us. It snapped 6×6 uprights of a board fence like toothpicks. It hit the hard-frozen ground 30 feet from our front porch, plowed deep ruts through that ground, and struck the corner of our 100 yr old Victorian. At that corner, it broke 6×10″ (or so) hemlock sills, crashed through the front door and wall, and landed in my living room. Fortunately, it did not catch fire … my then-infant daughter was asleep in her room at the top of the stairs. The driver was falling down drunk, and both he and the van reeked of booze.
The “neighborhood cops” that came to investigate that crash (at least a half-dozen of them) wrote NO citations. NONE. No speeding tickets, no drunk driving, nothing. The driver was, apparently, “known” to the police. There is a dark side to the police-as-friend myth — virtually ANY minority knows all about that.
Many of us bring knowledge as well as theory and ideology to these discussions. I think we desperately need to find a way to protect ourselves, protect our children, and preserve our freedoms while we do that.
Armed police in our schools are not the answer, and police “monitoring” of our children’s social interactions are not the answer. At least, that’s my bias.
Many other first world nations don’t, but then they don’t have an armed populace either. I would like to get to the point where myth #2 were closer to true. Things work so much better when police and community are all us rather us vs. them. For that matter the same could be said of myth #1 as the Market Basket saga this summer showed.
I didn’t suggest that we not arm our police. I said, instead, that our armed police have no place in a school. They similarly have no place in a social network “monitoring” young people.
Any family that put its members through the trauma suffered by every MB employee this summer could ONLY be described as dysfunctional. The MB experience demonstrates that employers are NOT family.
…I had forgotten you were one of only two BMGers who didn’t join the ATD cheering squad. HE treated them like family even if his own actual family didn’t share his views. I suppose I could have used Steve Grossman or Aaron Feuerstein too.
Yes. Here are some details of the teen-shootin’ cop story I told earlier. The first kid borrowed his dad’s car without asking. Dad knew his son had it, but he thought, “I will use our friends the local police to teach Junior a lesson.” He called them and reported the car stolen. Sgt. Sharpshooter is driving along and spots the “stolen” car, and pulls it over. When he walks to the car, the kid is reaching into the glove box. Sgt. S. pulls his revolver and terminates the perp. Justifiable. All the kids in my generation in that town learned that the cops held our lives cheap, and that they were not our friends. The dad learned a lesson too, and I think it’s one that applies here: there are some jobs the police are just not the appropriate tool to use. They have the power to use deadly force with near-impunity. So long as we allow them that, we need to sharply limit the areas of our lives they bring it to.
but they dragged me back in! What do I have to do to make myself clear?!
If you don’t want police officers in schools, get them out! I don’t really care. It’s not an issue for me. I have a certain amount of experience and knowledge on the subject, which I thought might improve people’s knowledge base, but I don’t think I made an argument for SROs. They can be eliminated pretty easily at the community level. All you have to do is persuade your school system to change its memorandum-of-understanding with the police. It is that simple. Aside from a serious crime investigation, police don’t have jurisdiction in schools.
It’s not the police that are in charge of the situation. It’s the school systems that have control.
Police are not going to stop carrying guns in schools. I talked to my school’s SRO today. He answers other calls while he’s on duty at school. He’s not going to leave his gun elsewhere. An officer would leave his gun anywhere while he’s on duty. The police union would never agree to that.
Police can be friends. I have many I am friendly with. I don’t expect to change your mind. I see police befriend kids and people all the time. I’ve seen them treat obnoxious people with respect. Are they all like that? Of course not. Do I live in Mayberry? Well,Granby is a lot closer to it than Somerville. On the other hand, it’s not 1985 either. A lot has changed, though sadly, not enough in most place.
And guns? Maybe it’s because I grew up with guns (rifles and shotguns, not pistols), but they don’t faze me when they are carried by a cop. I don’t need a gun, but I’m nonplussed by them.
Maybe I slipped up somewhere and said I thought we needed SROs. I thought I was providing information.
I wholeheartedly agree with your observation that it is up to the school committee/school board to decide whether or not an SRO should be on-campus.
I also understand and agree that a police officer can also be a friend, at least to some. Perhaps it might be helpful to distinguish the role from the person. In my view, the proper role of the police officer is to be an impartial “officer of the peace”. Certainly a well-trained officer treats even obnoxious people with respect. It is the attempt make “friend” be part of the role of a police officer that I dislike.
Regarding guns, my issue is with guns on campus. I think the presence of an armed officer raises, rather than lowers, the risk of deadly violence on campus. It is because I agree that every officer should be armed at all times that I also feel that the only time a police officer should be on campus is when an emergency is in-progress.
You are providing information (as always), and I appreciate your commentary.
that data would support the idea that cops having guns on campus raises the risk of violence. At least not in my experience. We don’t have violence in the systems I’m involved with. There are barely even fights. I think the last time we had a weapons issue it involved a mentally-unstable middle school kid who brought a knife to school over a decade ago.
FWIW, the idea that police officers are friends is probably not precise language. Many kids have nothing to do with them. The kids certainly don’t learn to buckle under to authority without question. The basic idea with community policing is that both people and police treat each other better when they are acquainted. The idea is one of things that would help in Ferguson, MO.
Police agencies do not produce statistics on the prevalence of accidental shootings by officers. I won’t bother to link to them again, but a Web search will bring up hundreds of accounts of police inadvertently shooting innocent people. Bystanders shot while the police fire at someone they want to kill. Other policemen shot accidentally. Policemen shooting themselves. Gun Range Masters accidentally shooting each other. Firearms safety instructors shooting themselves and their students during safety demonstrations. One instructor actually shot two students, years apart.
It should be obvious that the presence of a gun introduces the possibility that someone will be shot. Introducing that potential to schools is a bad idea.
for Massachusetts. If someone got shot, or something was shot by accident, people would know. You just can’t get away with that in a school. Too many people would hear it and hear of it.
Most police officers never even draw a gun in the line of duty.
There are some pretty bad stories out there. The former police chief of Pelham, MA was indicted when a Connecticut boy shot himself with a machine gun at a gun show in Westfield. In his past, he had shot a hole in a wall when he was giving a gun safety course. Prior to that, he may have been let go from a town on Cape Cod for accidentally shooting a hole in his boss the police chief’s door. He was recently arrested for drunkenly menacing someone with a gun in Belchertown.
A kid is more likely to be shot by an intruder than a police officer, and the chance of that happening is infinitesimal. I can see you guys opposing guns in schools or on cops, but calling them a danger or a bad idea, I don’t think that’s valid.
Well, here are some incidents:
Officer suspended after gun discharged in school
Tempe resource officer accidentally shoots student with Taser
Brimfield police officers disciplined after gun discharges at high school
3 Students Injured when Calif. Officer’s Rifle Discharges at School
Calif. Boy Fires Officer’s Holstered Pistol
Needless to say, none of these incidents would have occurred in schools if the police had not brought their weapons to the school.
sir!
They’re not from Massachusetts, but the point still stands, and the chance is not “infinitesimal”: it’s low, and by definition is higher than it would be if the armed SRO were not there.
Student punches another student at bus stop, SRO pursues, shoots and kills him.
Eighth-grader brandishes pellet gun, SRO shoots and kills him.
Two students necking in a car, SRO shoots at the car
out some more information about SROs, see what my cop friends say about what they do and how they function. I seem to remember them starting ten to fifteen years ago. I was doing my own blog at that point and remember questioning the need for police in schools.
Better information is always useful.
social media, while protected speech– but is protected from censorship, not from reading or listening.
Social media is by definition public and therefore not private. Therefore anyone, including law enforcement, can read along or listen in. Decidedly not like opening someone’s mail.
(I don’t know if Tom was responding to me or Christopher).
Personal experience is extremely valuable as long as it isn’t generalized to every situation. Parochialism is indeed bad, but that need not be the outcome of reasoning from personal experience. The most trustworthy interpretations of things are supported by both theory and experience.
One of the biggest problems with policy-making is that it is made in a bubble. I remember encountering this when I was in grad school and listening to fellow students and professors that had much less than my 15 years of teaching. They had the theory and the numbers, but they didn’t know what policy looked like when it was implemented. The same may be true for this report.
My comments about personal experience were directed towards Christopher. I think further discussion about all this is vital.
Everyone evaluates new research and data through a lens shaped by our personal experience, that is an important part of calibrating the new material. In my view, such calibration must only be a first step.
I grow impatient with the attitude expressed by Christopher because he seems to consistently remain attached to his own biases even while remaining largely blind to the very existence of those biases.
I think that we all need to be very cautious about the extent to which we are handing power and authority to law enforcement agencies that are ill-equipped and ill-tempered to handle that power and authority.
I think this is especially true with young people.