Wednesday, November 4, 2015

Police Brutality in Schools

Police have been being placed in schools all over the country, and in many cases, the school administrators have sat back and allowed the officers to take control of the school and its discipline. The supposed purpose of this, was to reduce criminal activity, however, all it's managed to do, is terrorize students unjustly and convince them to drop out. Discrimination has been apparent as well in these cases, as primarily disabled, or non-white students have been the targets.

          In the autumn of 2014, Kenton County, Ky, in two separate incidents, two disabled student, one nine and the other eight, were handcuffed due to not listening to instructions, despite the fact that their disabilities inhibited their ability to do so. And, because they were so small, the handcuffs were placed around their biceps. A video recorded the incident and showed that as the eight year old was screaming in pain the officer said “You can do what we ask you to or you can suffer the consequences.”
          
          In October, 2015, in a school in Columbia, S.C., a teenage girl was grabbed by the arm and her neck, and flipped (along with her desk) backwards, and then dragged across the room, and later arrested, for "disturbing the peace" and refusing to leave the classroom.
          
          This kind of behavior, which leaves children with emotional trauma, is awful and inexcusable. How we've let it escalate to this is beyond me. We need to take the power from the enforcers, and give it back to the people, otherwise the next case could be about you or someone you know.
            
For the article on these stories, click this link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/04/opinion/schoolkids-in-handcuffs.html

For an article and video about the Kenton incident involving the eight year-old, click this link:
http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/04/us/aclu-disabled-students-handcuffed-lawsuit/

For the video and article about the Columbia incident, click this link:


For another video about the Columbia incident, click this link:


For the U.S. Department of Education and Justice school discipline guidance package, click this link:


1 comment:

  1. This is especially frightening to me for a few reasons. The first being that we have come to a place in our society where we feel the need to put armed officers in our schools...you know the place where the children are! To me the issue of gun violence seems to be largely a societal one, that's just one aspect of this though. The other thing that is startling is that the teachers allowed mentally disabled students to be handcuffed. That's completely ludicrous to me, that teacher's who are supposed to be educated and trained to handle students with behavioral issues allowed this to occur.

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