Terrorizing Schoolchildren in the American Police State
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/terrorizing_school_children_in_the_ameri
can_police_state_20151106/
Posted on Nov 6, 2015
By Henry A. Giroux / CounterPunch
South Carolina Deputy Ben Fields ripped a black female student from her
desk in October. (PINAC News)
This piece first appeared at CounterPunch.
Americans live in an age, to rephrase, W.E.B. Dubois, in which violence has
become the problem of the twenty-first century. As brutalism comes to shape
every public encounter, democratic values and the ethical imagination wither
under the weight of neoliberal capitalism and post-racial racism. Giving way
to the poisonous logics of self-interest, privatization, and the unfettered
drive for wealth, American society reneges on the social contract and
assumes the role of a punishing state. Under the regime of a predatory
neoliberalism, compassion and respect for the other are viewed increasingly
with contempt while the spectacle of violence titillates the multitudes and
moves markets. A free-market mentality now drives and corrupts politics,
destroys social protections, celebrates a hyper-competitiveness, and
deregulates economic activity. As politics is emptied of any sense of social
responsibility, the apostles of casino capitalism preach that allegedly
amoral economic activity exacts no social costs, and in doing so they
accelerate the expanding wasteland of disposable goods and people. One
consequence is a vast and growing landscape of human suffering, amplified by
a mass-mediated metaphysics of retribution and violence that more and more
creeps into every commanding institution of American society, now serving a
myriad of functions such as sport, spectacle, entertainment, and punishment.
Alain Badiou rightly calls those who run our current political system a
"regime of gangsters." These so called gangsters produce a unique form of
social violence. According to Badiou, they:
Privatize everything. Abolish help for the weak, the solitary, the sick and
the unemployed. Abolish all aid for everyone except the banks. Don't look
after the poor; let the elderly die. Reduce the wages of the poor, but
reduce the taxes on the rich. Make everyone work until they are ninety. Only
teach mathematics to traders, reading to big property-owners and history to
on-duty ideologues. And the execution of these commands will in fact ruin
the lives of millions of people.
Increasingly, institutions such as schools, prisons, detention centers, and
our major economic, cultural and social institutions are being organized
around the production of violence. Rather than promote democratic values and
a respect for others or embrace civic values, they often function largely to
humiliate, punish, and demonize any vestige of social responsibility.
Violence both permeates and drives foreign policy, dominates popular
culture, and increasingly is used to criminalize a wide range of social
behaviors, especially among African-Americans. In part, the totality of
violence in American society can be understood in terms of its doubling
function. At one level, violence produces its own legitimating aesthetic as
part of a broader spectacle of entertainment, offering consumers the
pleasure of instant gratification, particularly in the visibility and
celebration of extreme violence. This is evident in television series such
as Game of Thrones and Hannibal, endless Hollywood films such as Dread
(2012), Django (2012), and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), and video games such
as Grand Theft Auto 4 (2008), Mortal Combat (2011), and Battlefield Hardline
(2015).
At another level, violence functions as a brutalizing practice used by the
state to squelch dissent, incarcerate poor minorities of class and color,
terrorize immigrants, wage a war on minority youth, and menace individuals
and groups considered disposable or a threat. Not only does such violence
destroy the conditions and institutions necessary to develop a democratic
polity, it also accelerates abusive forms of punitiveness and control that
extend from the prisons to other institutions such as schools. In this
instance, violence becomes the ultimate force propagating what might be
called punishment creep. The punishment creep that has moved from prisons to
other public spheres now has a firm grip on both schools and the daily
rituals of everyday life. Margaret Kimberly captures one instance of the
racist underside of punishment creep. She writes: "Black people are punished
for driving, for walking down the street, for having children, for putting
their children in school, for acting the way children act, and even for
having children who are killed by other people. We are punished, in short,
because we still exist."
Violence in America has always been defined partly by a poisonous mix of
chauvinism, exceptionalism, and terrorism that runs through a history marked
by genocidal assaults against indigenous Native Americans, the brutality of
slavery, and a persistent racism that extends from the horror of lynchings
and chain gangs to a mass incarceration state that criminalizes black
behavior and subjects many black youth to the shameful dynamics of the
school-to-prison-pipeline and unprecedented levels of police abuse. Violence
is the premier signature of what Ta-Nehisi Coates calls "The Dreamers,"
those individuals and groups who have "signed on, either actively or
passively, to complicity in everything from police shootings to real estate
redline, which crowds blacks into substandard housing in dangerous
neighborhoods.The Dream is about the totality of white supremacy in American
history and its cumulative weight on African-Americans, and how one attempts
to live with that." In part, violence whether produced by the state,
corporations, or racist individuals is difficult to abstract from an
expression of white supremacy, which functions as an index for demanding
"the full privileges of the state."
Police violence against African-Americans has become highly visible and
thrust into the national spotlight as a result of individuals recording acts
of police abuse with their cell phones and other tools of the new
technologies. In the last few years, there has been what seems like a
torrent of video footage showing unarmed black people being assaulted by the
police. For instance, there is the shocking video of Walter Scott being shot
in the back after fleeing from his car; Eric Garner dying as a result of
being put in a chock hold by a white policeman who accused him of illegally
selling cigarettes; the tragic killing of Freddie Gray who after making eye
contact with a police officer was put in a police van and purposely given a
jarring ride that resulted in his death; and the needless shooting of 12
year-old Tamir Rice for playing with a pellet gun in the snow in a park, and
so it goes. All of these deaths are morally indefensible and are symptomatic
of the deep-seated racism and propensity for violence in many police forces
in the United States.
Yet, as Jeah Lee observes, while such crimes have attracted national
attention, the "use of force by cops in schools.. has drawn far less
attention [in spite of the fact that] over the past five years at least 28
students have been seriously injured, and in one case shot to death, by
so-called school resource officers-sworn, uniformed police assigned to
provide security on k-12 campuses." Increasingly as public schools hand over
even routine disciplinary problems to the police, there is a resurgence of
cops in schools. There are over 17,000 school resource officers in more than
half of the schools in the United States. In spite of the fact that violence
in schools have dropped precipitously, school resource officers are the
fastest growing segment of law enforcement.
In part, the militarizing of schools and the accompanying surge of police
officers are driven by the fear of school shootings, particularly in the
aftermath of the Columbine High School tragedy in 1999, and the massacre
that took place at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2013, both of which have
been accentuated by the ever present wave of paranoia that followed the
terrorist attacks of 9/11. What advocates of putting police in the schools
refuse to acknowledge is that the presence of police in schools has done
nothing to stop such mass shootings. While the fear of school shootings are
overestimated, the fact remains that schools are still one of the safest
places for children to be. Caught under the weight of a culture of fear and
a rush to violence, many young people in schools are the most recent victims
of a punishing state in a society that "remains in a state of permanent,
endless war," a war that is waged through militarized policies at home and
abroad.
What has become clear is that cops in schools do not make schools safer.
Erik Eckholm reporting for the New York Times stated that judges, youth
advocates, parents, and other concerned citizens "are raising alarm about
what they have seen in the schools where officers are already stationed: a
surge in criminal charges against children for misbehavior that many believe
is better handled in the principal's office." In Texas, police officers have
written "more than 100,000 misdemeanor tickets each year" and many of these
students "face hundreds of dollars in fines, community service, and in some
cases, a lasting record that could affect applications for jobs or the
military." The transformation of disciplinary problems into criminal
violations has often resulted in absurd if not tragic results. For instance,
in 2009, in Richardson, Texas "a 14-year old boy with Asperger's syndrome
was given a $364 police citation for using an expletive in his classroom."
It gets even more ludicrous. "A 12-year-old student in Stuart, Florida, was
arrested in November 20008 for 'disrupting a school function.' The
'disruption' was that the student had 'passed gas.'"
Similarly, a number of civil rights groups have reported that the presence
of police in schools often "means more suspensions, which disproportionately
affect minority students." Many of the young people who end up in court are
poor black and brown students, along with students with disabilities. What
must be recognized is that schools in general have become combat zones where
it is routine for many students to be subjected to metal detectors,
surveillance cameras, uniformed security guards, weapons searches, and in
some cases SWAT team raids and police dogs sniffing for drugs. Under such
circumstances, the purpose of schooling appears to be to contain and punish
young people, especially those marginalized by race and class, rather than
educate them. What is beyond doubt is that "Arrests and police interactions.
disproportionately affect low-income schools with large African-American and
Latino populations." For the many disadvantaged students being funnelled
into the "school-to-prison pipeline," schools ensure that their futures look
grim indeed, as their educational experiences acclimatize them to forms of
carceral treatment. There is more at work here than a flight from
responsibility on the part of educators, parents, and politicians who
support and maintain policies that fuel this expanding edifice of law
enforcement against the young and disenfranchised. Underlying the repeated
decisions to turn away from helping young people is the growing sentiment
that youth, particularly minorities of color and class, constitute a threat
to adults and the only effective way to deal with them is to subject them to
mind-crushing punishment. Students being miseducated, criminalized, and
arrested through a form of penal pedagogy in prison-type schools provides a
grave reminder of the degree to which the ethos of containment and
punishment now creeps into spheres of everyday life that were largely immune
in the past from this type of state and institutional violence.
No longer are schools spaces of joy, critical teaching, and support, as too
many are now institutions of containment and control that produce pedagogies
of conformity and oppression and in the name of teaching to the test serve
to kill the imagination. Within such schools, the lesson that young people
are learning about themselves is that they can't engage in critical
thinking, be trusted, rely on the informed judgments of teachers and
administrators, and that their behavior is constantly subject to procedures
that amount to both an assault on their dignity and a violation of their
civil liberties. Schools have become institutions in which creativity is
viewed as a threat, harsh discipline a virtue, and punishment the reward for
not conforming to what amounts to the dictates of a police state. How many
more images of young school children in handcuffs do we have to witness
before it becomes clear that the educational system is broken, reduced
largely to a punishing factory defined by a culture of fear and an utter
distrust of young people?
According to the Advancement Project, schools have become increasingly
intolerant of young people, imposing draconian zero tolerance policies on
them by furthering a culture steeped in criminalizing often minor, if not
trivial, student behaviors. What is truly alarming is not only the ways in
which young people are being ushered into the criminal justice system and
treated less as students than as criminals, but the harsh violence to which
they are often subjected by school resource officers. According to a report
by Mother Jones, Jonathan Hardin, a Louisville Metro Police officer, in 2014
"was fired after his alleged use of force in two incidents at Olmsted
Academy North middle school: He was accused of punching a 13-year-old
student in the face for cutting the cafeteria line, and a week later of
putting another 13-year-old student in a chokehold, allegedly knocking the
student unconscious and causing a brain injury." In a second incident that
year, "Cesar Suquet, then a 16-year-old high school student in Houston, was
being escorted by an officer out of the principal's office after a
discussion about Suquet's confiscated cell phone. Following a verbal
exchange, police officer Michael Y'Barbo struck Suquet at least 18 times
with a police baton, injuring him on his head, neck and elsewhere." Y'Barbo
claimed that beating a student with a police baton was "reasonable and
necessary" and "remains on regular assignment including patrol." There are
have also been incidents where students have been shot, suffered brain
injuries, and have been psychologically traumatized. Jaeah Lee cites a young
black high school student in Detroit who after a troubling interaction with
a school police officer speaks for many young people about the dread and
anxiety that many students experience when police occupy their schools. He
states that ""Many young people today have fear of the police in their
communities and schools."
If one important measure of a democracy is how a society treats its
children, especially young children who are black, brown, or suffer from
disabilities, there can be little doubt that American society is failing. As
the United States increasingly models its schools after prisons, students
are no longer viewed as a social investment in the future. A deadly mixture
of racism and violence in the 21st century has become increasingly evident
in the violence being waged against young people in American schools. If
students in general are now viewed as a potential threat, black students are
regarded increasingly as criminals. One result is that schools increasingly
have come to resemble war zones, spaces marked my distrust, fear, and
demonization. With more police in the schools than ever before, security has
become more important than providing children with a critical education and
supportive learning environment. As authority in many of the schools is
often handed over to the police and security forces who are now asked to
deal with all alleged disciplinary problems, however broadly defined, the
power and autonomy of teachers and school administrators are weakened at the
expense of the safety of the students. This loss of authority is clear in
New York City where school administrators have no control over security
forces who report directly to local police departments.
In most cases, the disciplinary problems that take place in schools involve
trivial the infractions such as violating a dress code, scribbling on a
desk, or holding a 2-inch toy gun. The assault on children in the public
schools suggest that black and brown children cannot view schools as safe
places where they can be given a quality education. Instead, schools have
become sites of control, testing, and punishment all too eager to produce
pedagogies of repression, and more than willing to erect, once again, what
has been called the school-to-prison pipeline, especially for youth of
color. Roxane Gay is right in observing that
Black children are not allowed to be children. They are not allowed to be
safe, not at home, not at pool parties, not driving or sitting in cars
listening to music, not walking down the street, not in school. For black
children, for black people, to exist is to be endangered. Our bodies receive
no sanctity or safe harbor.
It is inconceivable that in an alleged democracy poor minorities at all
grade levels in the public schools are subjected to shameful criminal
practices such as being handcuffed and carted off to jail for minor
incidents-and that such draconian practices could take place in a society
that views itself as a democracy. Stripped of their public mission as
institutions that nurture young people to become informed, critically
engaged citizens, schools have become punishing factories all too willing to
turn disciplinary authority over to the police and to usher students into
the harsh bureaucracy of the criminal justice system.
One recent example of a particularly disturbing incident of police brutality
was captured in a series of videos recorded in West Spring High School in
South Carolina. Prior to the incident being filmed, a young black student
named Shakara took out her cellphone in class. The teacher asked her for it
and when she refused to hand it over, she was asked to leave the class. The
teacher then called the vice principal. Rather than attempt to defuse the
situation, the vice principal called for a School Resource Officer. At this
point, Officer Ben Fields enters the classroom. One of Shakira's classmates,
Niya Kenny, asked her classmates to start filming because as she put it: "I
told them to start filming because we know his reputation-well, I know it."
In what follows, as filmed by one of the students, Officer Ben Fields
approaches the young woman, appears to give her no time to stand up and
proceeds by grabbing her left arm while placing his right arm around her
neck; he then lifts her desk, pulls her out of her seat, slams her to the
ground, and drags her across the floor before handcuffing her. The video is
difficult to watch given the extreme level of violence used against a high
school student. The young woman was arrested as was Kenny, who both filmed
the incident and loudly protested the treatment of Shakara. Fields was fired
soon afterwards, but incredulously both students are being charged with
"disturbing schools, a crime punishable by up to ninety days in jail or a
thousand dollar fine."
What has emerged after the incident went viral was information indicating
that Fields had a previous reputation for being aggressive with students,
and he was viewed as a threat by many students who nicknamed him "Officer
Slam." Moreover, he had a previous record of violently assaulting people.
The question that should be asked as a result of this shocking act of police
violence against a young black girl is not how Fields got a job in a school
working with children, but what kind of society believes that police should
be in the school in the first place. Whatever happened to teacher and
administrator responsibility? Sadly, it was a school administrator who
called in the police at Spring Valley High School because the student would
not turn over her phone. Even worse, when Sheriff Leon Lott announced his
decision to fire Fields, he pointed out that the classroom teacher and
administrator supported actions of the police officer and made it clear that
"they also had no problems with the physical part." Both the teacher and
administrator should be fired. This incident was in all probability a simple
disciplinary problem that should have been handled by responsible educators.
Students should not be treated like criminals. It is one thing to not assume
responsibility for students, but another to subject them to brutal assaults
by the police.
Lawlessness runs deep in American society and has been normalized. Brutal
attacks on defenseless children rarely get the attention they deserve and
when they do the corporate media refuses to acknowledge that America has
become a suicidal society willing even to sacrifice its own children to an
expanding punishing state that protects the interests of the corporate and
financial elite. How else to explain the shameless defense of such a brutal
assault against a young black girl by pundits such as CNN's Harry Houck and
Don Lemon, who implied that such violence was warranted because Shakara did
not respect the officer, as if the beating of a black child by a police
officer, who happens also to be a body-builder, who can lift 300 pounds,
justifies such actions. This is a familiar script in which black people are
often told that whatever violence they are subject to is legitimate because
they acted out of place, did not follow rules that in reality oppress them,
or simply refused to fall in line. The other side of this racist script
finds expression in those who argue that any critique of the police
endangers public safety. In this dangerous discourse, the police are the
victims, a line of argument recently voiced in different ways by both
President Obama and by James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation. This discourse not only refuses to recognize the growing
visibility of police violence, it shores up one of the foundations of the
authoritarian state, suggesting that the violence propagated by the police
should not be subject to public scrutiny. As an editorial in the New York
Times pointed out, this "formulation implies that for the police to do their
jobs, they need to have free rein to be abusive. It also implies that the
public would be safer if Americans with cellphones never started circulating
videos of officers battering suspects in the first place..This trend is
straight out of Orwell."
Educators, young people, parents and others concerned about violence in
schools need to organize and demand that the police be removed from school.
Not only is their presence a waste of taxpayer's money and an interference
with children's education, have they also pose a threat to student safety.
Instead of putting police in schools, money should be spent on more guidance
teachers, social workers, teachers, community intervention workers, and
other professionals who are educated and trained to provide a safe and
supportive environment for young people. It is particularly crucial to
support those social services, classroom practices, and policies that work
to keep students in schools. Everything possible should be done to dismantle
the school-to-prison pipeline and the underlying forces that produce it. At
the same time, more profound change must take place on a national level
since the violence waged by the police is symptomatic of a society now ruled
by a financial elite who trade in cruelty, punishment, and despair. American
society is broken, and the violence to which it appears addicted to will
continue until the current configurations of power, politics, inequality,
and injustice are eliminated.
The increasing visibility of police brutality in schools and in the streets
speaks to a larger issue regarding the withering of democracy in the United
States and the growing lawlessness that prevails in a society in which
violence is both a spectacle and sport-and one of the few resources left to
use to address social problems. America is paying a horrible price for
turning governance at all levels over to people for whom violence serves as
the default register for addressing important social issues. The Spring
Valley High School case is part of a larger trend that has turned schools
across the country into detention centers and educators into hapless
bystanders as classroom management is ceded to the police. What we see in
this incident and many others that have not attracted national attention
because they are not caught on cellphones are the rudiments of a growing
police state. Violence is now a normalized and celebrated ideal for how
America defines itself-an ideal that views democracy as an excess or, even
worse, a pathology. This is something Americans must acknowledge,
interrogate, and resist if they don't want to live under a system of total
terror and escalating violence.
http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/
Terrorizing Schoolchildren in the American Police State
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/terrorizing_school_children_in_the_ameri
can_police_state_20151106/
Posted on Nov 6, 2015
By Henry A. Giroux / CounterPunch
South Carolina Deputy Ben Fields ripped a black female student from her desk
in October. (PINAC News)
This piece first appeared at CounterPunch.
Americans live in an age, to rephrase, W.E.B. Dubois, in which violence has
become the problem of the twenty-first century. As brutalism comes to shape
every public encounter, democratic values and the ethical imagination wither
under the weight of neoliberal capitalism and post-racial racism. Giving way
to the poisonous logics of self-interest, privatization, and the unfettered
drive for wealth, American society reneges on the social contract and
assumes the role of a punishing state. Under the regime of a predatory
neoliberalism, compassion and respect for the other are viewed increasingly
with contempt while the spectacle of violence titillates the multitudes and
moves markets. A free-market mentality now drives and corrupts politics,
destroys social protections, celebrates a hyper-competitiveness, and
deregulates economic activity. As politics is emptied of any sense of social
responsibility, the apostles of casino capitalism preach that allegedly
amoral economic activity exacts no social costs, and in doing so they
accelerate the expanding wasteland of disposable goods and people. One
consequence is a vast and growing landscape of human suffering, amplified by
a mass-mediated metaphysics of retribution and violence that more and more
creeps into every commanding institution of American society, now serving a
myriad of functions such as sport, spectacle, entertainment, and punishment.
Alain Badiou rightly calls those who run our current political system a
"regime of gangsters." These so called gangsters produce a unique form of
social violence. According to Badiou, they:
Privatize everything. Abolish help for the weak, the solitary, the sick and
the unemployed. Abolish all aid for everyone except the banks. Don't look
after the poor; let the elderly die. Reduce the wages of the poor, but
reduce the taxes on the rich. Make everyone work until they are ninety. Only
teach mathematics to traders, reading to big property-owners and history to
on-duty ideologues. And the execution of these commands will in fact ruin
the lives of millions of people.
Increasingly, institutions such as schools, prisons, detention centers, and
our major economic, cultural and social institutions are being organized
around the production of violence. Rather than promote democratic values and
a respect for others or embrace civic values, they often function largely to
humiliate, punish, and demonize any vestige of social responsibility.
Violence both permeates and drives foreign policy, dominates popular
culture, and increasingly is used to criminalize a wide range of social
behaviors, especially among African-Americans. In part, the totality of
violence in American society can be understood in terms of its doubling
function. At one level, violence produces its own legitimating aesthetic as
part of a broader spectacle of entertainment, offering consumers the
pleasure of instant gratification, particularly in the visibility and
celebration of extreme violence. This is evident in television series such
as Game of Thrones and Hannibal, endless Hollywood films such as Dread
(2012), Django (2012), and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), and video games such
as Grand Theft Auto 4 (2008), Mortal Combat (2011), and Battlefield Hardline
(2015).
At another level, violence functions as a brutalizing practice used by the
state to squelch dissent, incarcerate poor minorities of class and color,
terrorize immigrants, wage a war on minority youth, and menace individuals
and groups considered disposable or a threat. Not only does such violence
destroy the conditions and institutions necessary to develop a democratic
polity, it also accelerates abusive forms of punitiveness and control that
extend from the prisons to other institutions such as schools. In this
instance, violence becomes the ultimate force propagating what might be
called punishment creep. The punishment creep that has moved from prisons to
other public spheres now has a firm grip on both schools and the daily
rituals of everyday life. Margaret Kimberly captures one instance of the
racist underside of punishment creep. She writes: "Black people are punished
for driving, for walking down the street, for having children, for putting
their children in school, for acting the way children act, and even for
having children who are killed by other people. We are punished, in short,
because we still exist."
Violence in America has always been defined partly by a poisonous mix of
chauvinism, exceptionalism, and terrorism that runs through a history marked
by genocidal assaults against indigenous Native Americans, the brutality of
slavery, and a persistent racism that extends from the horror of lynchings
and chain gangs to a mass incarceration state that criminalizes black
behavior and subjects many black youth to the shameful dynamics of the
school-to-prison-pipeline and unprecedented levels of police abuse. Violence
is the premier signature of what Ta-Nehisi Coates calls "The Dreamers,"
those individuals and groups who have "signed on, either actively or
passively, to complicity in everything from police shootings to real estate
redline, which crowds blacks into substandard housing in dangerous
neighborhoods.The Dream is about the totality of white supremacy in American
history and its cumulative weight on African-Americans, and how one attempts
to live with that." In part, violence whether produced by the state,
corporations, or racist individuals is difficult to abstract from an
expression of white supremacy, which functions as an index for demanding
"the full privileges of the state."
Police violence against African-Americans has become highly visible and
thrust into the national spotlight as a result of individuals recording acts
of police abuse with their cell phones and other tools of the new
technologies. In the last few years, there has been what seems like a
torrent of video footage showing unarmed black people being assaulted by the
police. For instance, there is the shocking video of Walter Scott being shot
in the back after fleeing from his car; Eric Garner dying as a result of
being put in a chock hold by a white policeman who accused him of illegally
selling cigarettes; the tragic killing of Freddie Gray who after making eye
contact with a police officer was put in a police van and purposely given a
jarring ride that resulted in his death; and the needless shooting of 12
year-old Tamir Rice for playing with a pellet gun in the snow in a park, and
so it goes. All of these deaths are morally indefensible and are symptomatic
of the deep-seated racism and propensity for violence in many police forces
in the United States.
Yet, as Jeah Lee observes, while such crimes have attracted national
attention, the "use of force by cops in schools.. has drawn far less
attention [in spite of the fact that] over the past five years at least 28
students have been seriously injured, and in one case shot to death, by
so-called school resource officers-sworn, uniformed police assigned to
provide security on k-12 campuses." Increasingly as public schools hand over
even routine disciplinary problems to the police, there is a resurgence of
cops in schools. There are over 17,000 school resource officers in more than
half of the schools in the United States. In spite of the fact that violence
in schools have dropped precipitously, school resource officers are the
fastest growing segment of law enforcement.
In part, the militarizing of schools and the accompanying surge of police
officers are driven by the fear of school shootings, particularly in the
aftermath of the Columbine High School tragedy in 1999, and the massacre
that took place at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2013, both of which have
been accentuated by the ever present wave of paranoia that followed the
terrorist attacks of 9/11. What advocates of putting police in the schools
refuse to acknowledge is that the presence of police in schools has done
nothing to stop such mass shootings. While the fear of school shootings are
overestimated, the fact remains that schools are still one of the safest
places for children to be. Caught under the weight of a culture of fear and
a rush to violence, many young people in schools are the most recent victims
of a punishing state in a society that "remains in a state of permanent,
endless war," a war that is waged through militarized policies at home and
abroad.
What has become clear is that cops in schools do not make schools safer.
Erik Eckholm reporting for the New York Times stated that judges, youth
advocates, parents, and other concerned citizens "are raising alarm about
what they have seen in the schools where officers are already stationed: a
surge in criminal charges against children for misbehavior that many believe
is better handled in the principal's office." In Texas, police officers have
written "more than 100,000 misdemeanor tickets each year" and many of these
students "face hundreds of dollars in fines, community service, and in some
cases, a lasting record that could affect applications for jobs or the
military." The transformation of disciplinary problems into criminal
violations has often resulted in absurd if not tragic results. For instance,
in 2009, in Richardson, Texas "a 14-year old boy with Asperger's syndrome
was given a $364 police citation for using an expletive in his classroom."
It gets even more ludicrous. "A 12-year-old student in Stuart, Florida, was
arrested in November 20008 for 'disrupting a school function.' The
'disruption' was that the student had 'passed gas.'"
Similarly, a number of civil rights groups have reported that the presence
of police in schools often "means more suspensions, which disproportionately
affect minority students." Many of the young people who end up in court are
poor black and brown students, along with students with disabilities. What
must be recognized is that schools in general have become combat zones where
it is routine for many students to be subjected to metal detectors,
surveillance cameras, uniformed security guards, weapons searches, and in
some cases SWAT team raids and police dogs sniffing for drugs. Under such
circumstances, the purpose of schooling appears to be to contain and punish
young people, especially those marginalized by race and class, rather than
educate them. What is beyond doubt is that "Arrests and police interactions.
disproportionately affect low-income schools with large African-American and
Latino populations." For the many disadvantaged students being funnelled
into the "school-to-prison pipeline," schools ensure that their futures look
grim indeed, as their educational experiences acclimatize them to forms of
carceral treatment. There is more at work here than a flight from
responsibility on the part of educators, parents, and politicians who
support and maintain policies that fuel this expanding edifice of law
enforcement against the young and disenfranchised. Underlying the repeated
decisions to turn away from helping young people is the growing sentiment
that youth, particularly minorities of color and class, constitute a threat
to adults and the only effective way to deal with them is to subject them to
mind-crushing punishment. Students being miseducated, criminalized, and
arrested through a form of penal pedagogy in prison-type schools provides a
grave reminder of the degree to which the ethos of containment and
punishment now creeps into spheres of everyday life that were largely immune
in the past from this type of state and institutional violence.
No longer are schools spaces of joy, critical teaching, and support, as too
many are now institutions of containment and control that produce pedagogies
of conformity and oppression and in the name of teaching to the test serve
to kill the imagination. Within such schools, the lesson that young people
are learning about themselves is that they can't engage in critical
thinking, be trusted, rely on the informed judgments of teachers and
administrators, and that their behavior is constantly subject to procedures
that amount to both an assault on their dignity and a violation of their
civil liberties. Schools have become institutions in which creativity is
viewed as a threat, harsh discipline a virtue, and punishment the reward for
not conforming to what amounts to the dictates of a police state. How many
more images of young school children in handcuffs do we have to witness
before it becomes clear that the educational system is broken, reduced
largely to a punishing factory defined by a culture of fear and an utter
distrust of young people?
According to the Advancement Project, schools have become increasingly
intolerant of young people, imposing draconian zero tolerance policies on
them by furthering a culture steeped in criminalizing often minor, if not
trivial, student behaviors. What is truly alarming is not only the ways in
which young people are being ushered into the criminal justice system and
treated less as students than as criminals, but the harsh violence to which
they are often subjected by school resource officers. According to a report
by Mother Jones, Jonathan Hardin, a Louisville Metro Police officer, in 2014
"was fired after his alleged use of force in two incidents at Olmsted
Academy North middle school: He was accused of punching a 13-year-old
student in the face for cutting the cafeteria line, and a week later of
putting another 13-year-old student in a chokehold, allegedly knocking the
student unconscious and causing a brain injury." In a second incident that
year, "Cesar Suquet, then a 16-year-old high school student in Houston, was
being escorted by an officer out of the principal's office after a
discussion about Suquet's confiscated cell phone. Following a verbal
exchange, police officer Michael Y'Barbo struck Suquet at least 18 times
with a police baton, injuring him on his head, neck and elsewhere." Y'Barbo
claimed that beating a student with a police baton was "reasonable and
necessary" and "remains on regular assignment including patrol." There are
have also been incidents where students have been shot, suffered brain
injuries, and have been psychologically traumatized. Jaeah Lee cites a young
black high school student in Detroit who after a troubling interaction with
a school police officer speaks for many young people about the dread and
anxiety that many students experience when police occupy their schools. He
states that ""Many young people today have fear of the police in their
communities and schools."
If one important measure of a democracy is how a society treats its
children, especially young children who are black, brown, or suffer from
disabilities, there can be little doubt that American society is failing. As
the United States increasingly models its schools after prisons, students
are no longer viewed as a social investment in the future. A deadly mixture
of racism and violence in the 21st century has become increasingly evident
in the violence being waged against young people in American schools. If
students in general are now viewed as a potential threat, black students are
regarded increasingly as criminals. One result is that schools increasingly
have come to resemble war zones, spaces marked my distrust, fear, and
demonization. With more police in the schools than ever before, security has
become more important than providing children with a critical education and
supportive learning environment. As authority in many of the schools is
often handed over to the police and security forces who are now asked to
deal with all alleged disciplinary problems, however broadly defined, the
power and autonomy of teachers and school administrators are weakened at the
expense of the safety of the students. This loss of authority is clear in
New York City where school administrators have no control over security
forces who report directly to local police departments.
In most cases, the disciplinary problems that take place in schools involve
trivial the infractions such as violating a dress code, scribbling on a
desk, or holding a 2-inch toy gun. The assault on children in the public
schools suggest that black and brown children cannot view schools as safe
places where they can be given a quality education. Instead, schools have
become sites of control, testing, and punishment all too eager to produce
pedagogies of repression, and more than willing to erect, once again, what
has been called the school-to-prison pipeline, especially for youth of
color. Roxane Gay is right in observing that
Black children are not allowed to be children. They are not allowed to be
safe, not at home, not at pool parties, not driving or sitting in cars
listening to music, not walking down the street, not in school. For black
children, for black people, to exist is to be endangered. Our bodies receive
no sanctity or safe harbor.
It is inconceivable that in an alleged democracy poor minorities at all
grade levels in the public schools are subjected to shameful criminal
practices such as being handcuffed and carted off to jail for minor
incidents-and that such draconian practices could take place in a society
that views itself as a democracy. Stripped of their public mission as
institutions that nurture young people to become informed, critically
engaged citizens, schools have become punishing factories all too willing to
turn disciplinary authority over to the police and to usher students into
the harsh bureaucracy of the criminal justice system.
One recent example of a particularly disturbing incident of police brutality
was captured in a series of videos recorded in West Spring High School in
South Carolina. Prior to the incident being filmed, a young black student
named Shakara took out her cellphone in class. The teacher asked her for it
and when she refused to hand it over, she was asked to leave the class. The
teacher then called the vice principal. Rather than attempt to defuse the
situation, the vice principal called for a School Resource Officer. At this
point, Officer Ben Fields enters the classroom. One of Shakira's classmates,
Niya Kenny, asked her classmates to start filming because as she put it: "I
told them to start filming because we know his reputation-well, I know it."
In what follows, as filmed by one of the students, Officer Ben Fields
approaches the young woman, appears to give her no time to stand up and
proceeds by grabbing her left arm while placing his right arm around her
neck; he then lifts her desk, pulls her out of her seat, slams her to the
ground, and drags her across the floor before handcuffing her. The video is
difficult to watch given the extreme level of violence used against a high
school student. The young woman was arrested as was Kenny, who both filmed
the incident and loudly protested the treatment of Shakara. Fields was fired
soon afterwards, but incredulously both students are being charged with
"disturbing schools, a crime punishable by up to ninety days in jail or a
thousand dollar fine."
What has emerged after the incident went viral was information indicating
that Fields had a previous reputation for being aggressive with students,
and he was viewed as a threat by many students who nicknamed him "Officer
Slam." Moreover, he had a previous record of violently assaulting people.
The question that should be asked as a result of this shocking act of police
violence against a young black girl is not how Fields got a job in a school
working with children, but what kind of society believes that police should
be in the school in the first place. Whatever happened to teacher and
administrator responsibility? Sadly, it was a school administrator who
called in the police at Spring Valley High School because the student would
not turn over her phone. Even worse, when Sheriff Leon Lott announced his
decision to fire Fields, he pointed out that the classroom teacher and
administrator supported actions of the police officer and made it clear that
"they also had no problems with the physical part." Both the teacher and
administrator should be fired. This incident was in all probability a simple
disciplinary problem that should have been handled by responsible educators.
Students should not be treated like criminals. It is one thing to not assume
responsibility for students, but another to subject them to brutal assaults
by the police.
Lawlessness runs deep in American society and has been normalized. Brutal
attacks on defenseless children rarely get the attention they deserve and
when they do the corporate media refuses to acknowledge that America has
become a suicidal society willing even to sacrifice its own children to an
expanding punishing state that protects the interests of the corporate and
financial elite. How else to explain the shameless defense of such a brutal
assault against a young black girl by pundits such as CNN's Harry Houck and
Don Lemon, who implied that such violence was warranted because Shakara did
not respect the officer, as if the beating of a black child by a police
officer, who happens also to be a body-builder, who can lift 300 pounds,
justifies such actions. This is a familiar script in which black people are
often told that whatever violence they are subject to is legitimate because
they acted out of place, did not follow rules that in reality oppress them,
or simply refused to fall in line. The other side of this racist script
finds expression in those who argue that any critique of the police
endangers public safety. In this dangerous discourse, the police are the
victims, a line of argument recently voiced in different ways by both
President Obama and by James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation. This discourse not only refuses to recognize the growing
visibility of police violence, it shores up one of the foundations of the
authoritarian state, suggesting that the violence propagated by the police
should not be subject to public scrutiny. As an editorial in the New York
Times pointed out, this "formulation implies that for the police to do their
jobs, they need to have free rein to be abusive. It also implies that the
public would be safer if Americans with cellphones never started circulating
videos of officers battering suspects in the first place..This trend is
straight out of Orwell."
Educators, young people, parents and others concerned about violence in
schools need to organize and demand that the police be removed from school.
Not only is their presence a waste of taxpayer's money and an interference
with children's education, have they also pose a threat to student safety.
Instead of putting police in schools, money should be spent on more guidance
teachers, social workers, teachers, community intervention workers, and
other professionals who are educated and trained to provide a safe and
supportive environment for young people. It is particularly crucial to
support those social services, classroom practices, and policies that work
to keep students in schools. Everything possible should be done to dismantle
the school-to-prison pipeline and the underlying forces that produce it. At
the same time, more profound change must take place on a national level
since the violence waged by the police is symptomatic of a society now ruled
by a financial elite who trade in cruelty, punishment, and despair. American
society is broken, and the violence to which it appears addicted to will
continue until the current configurations of power, politics, inequality,
and injustice are eliminated.
The increasing visibility of police brutality in schools and in the streets
speaks to a larger issue regarding the withering of democracy in the United
States and the growing lawlessness that prevails in a society in which
violence is both a spectacle and sport-and one of the few resources left to
use to address social problems. America is paying a horrible price for
turning governance at all levels over to people for whom violence serves as
the default register for addressing important social issues. The Spring
Valley High School case is part of a larger trend that has turned schools
across the country into detention centers and educators into hapless
bystanders as classroom management is ceded to the police. What we see in
this incident and many others that have not attracted national attention
because they are not caught on cellphones are the rudiments of a growing
police state. Violence is now a normalized and celebrated ideal for how
America defines itself-an ideal that views democracy as an excess or, even
worse, a pathology. This is something Americans must acknowledge,
interrogate, and resist if they don't want to live under a system of total
terror and escalating violence.
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