Under pressure from advocates, mayoral candidates Shaun Donovan, Dianne Morales and Maya Wiley have committed to “police-free schools,” which is to say total elimination of school safety agents from Department of Education buildings. Surely they’re not serious.
Not in an age of school shootings, when the presence of a single unhinged armed individual can bring horrendous bloodshed — unless cops, or at least people trained and equipped to stop violence like school safety officers, as school safety agents are, are on call and ready to save lives.
Not when a tiny fraction of young people who try to smuggle weapons into schools and escalate gang beefs present a threat to the overwhelming majority who only seek to learn in peace. As of 2019, more than 1,600 knives had been seized on school grounds.
They can’t be serious that there’s a pressing need to yank police from school grounds at a time when, even pre-pandemic, arrest rates of students have declined substantially, and after Mayor de Blasio has plans in progress to move the school safety unit out from under the NYPD to the Department of Education. Nor can they be serious given that in most schools, the unarmed safety agents, who are a far more diverse group than NYPD cops, are a calming presence who keep intruders out and help parents and kids and teachers resolve disputes healthily.
There’s no question that some school safety agents escalate more conflicts than they contain, and that tensions tend to be highest in some predominantly Black schools, where too many youngsters feel like they’re presumptively treated as wrongdoers. Retraining of safety officers is well and good, as is bulking up the ranks of guidance counselors, who are in much too short supply.
But it’s folly to believe that happy talk and social supports are the only answer when some teenagers bring knives and guns and illegal narcotics and ill intent to schools. To protect children, someone should stand guard.
