The union leader representing more than 5,000 school safety officers blasted growing calls to transfer control of school security from the NYPD to the city Education Department, warning it’ll lead to “disastrous results.”
In a letter Tuesday to city lawmakers, Gregory Floyd, the president of Teamsters Local 237, said the strategy failed more than two decades ago.
“I witnessed the disastrous results of the Board of Education being responsible for school safety prior to 1998, and I understand that taking away school safety responsibilities from the NYPD is not an advisable change,” Floyd wrote.
The warning came in response to City Council speaker Corey Johnson’s pledge to cut $1 billion from the NYPD budget, in part by shifting some responsibilities away from the agency. Sources told the Daily News that could include school safety. A spokesman for Johnson’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Council members Mark Treyger (D-Brooklyn) and Donovan Richards (D-Queens) on Monday called for the controversial transfer of control of school safety from the NYPD to the Education Department — which oversaw school security until 1998 — echoing similar demands from Ed Dept. workers who want officers retrained and held directly accountable to school officials.
Floyd criticized city lawmakers for not consulting with union officials before making the proposal, accusing the pols of “pandering and political opportunism.”
The union honcho argued the school safety division “already better achieves the goals of many police reform advocates” than the rest of the NYPD. “Seventy percent of school safety agents are Black and Latina women; the vast majority live in the neighborhoods in which they work; and they do not carry firearms or chemical agents,” he wrote.
He added school safety officers intercept “hundreds of dangerous” weapons at school entrances each year and deter hundreds more with metal detectors. NYPD officials haven’t released that data — or how many schools use scanners, despite City Council legislation requiring the disclosures.
But Treyger pushed back, calling Floyd’s objections “proof that overhaul is needed because it implies distrust in our principals’ ability to run a safe and supportive school environment.”
A coalition of youth groups, meanwhile, criticized lawmakers for not going far enough to reform school policing.
“Black and Latinx youth did not ask for restructuring, reorganization or retraining, we demanded the removal of police from schools,” the groups wrote.
