(For
California if the student has 3 offenses they get 25 years to Life,
and no Removal for just vandalism of Graffiti!!!)
School District Called Police on Students 1,745 Times in Single School Year
Watch
Video:
A Bay Area school district recently referred more students to police
than nearly every other district in the country. Bigad Shaban reports in
a story that first aired September 29. (Published Wednesday, Sept. 30,
2015)
Updated 43 minutes ago
Read the first part of this two-part story here.
An NBC Bay Area
investigation into the use of police on school campuses found one Bay
Area school district called police on its own students so many times
they outranked nearly every district in the country.
East Side Union High School District in San Jose referred students to police 1,745 times
during the 2011-2012 school year, ranking them 14th in the country,
according to data collected by the U.S. Department of Education.
Critics say that
when police handle school discipline, the line between childish
misbehavior and criminal activity is often blurred leaving some students
with a criminal record before they hit puberty. Certain groups of
students find themselves face-to-face with police more often than
others, with African Americans and students with disabilities referred
to police at disproportionately high rates.
At East Side
Union High School District, Superintendent Chris Funk said a combination
of factors led to the extreme numbers of police encounters on campus.
Zero-tolerance discipline policies and insufficient staffing numbers
meant that police were being called when it wasn’t always appropriate.
“I think that we
had a practice here where we were relying too much on having the officer
do the facilitation and the legwork versus the administration doing the
legwork,” Funk said.
To put those numbers in perspective, Oakland Unified School District only referred 12 students to law enforcement
during the same year, despite enrolling nearly 15,000 more students
than East Side Union High School District. No other Bay Area school
district came close to East Side Union’s numbers.
“I think what
happened was because of zero-tolerance policies, there was a period of
time where people just went to the police and had students cited for
everything,” Funk said. “Now, we’ve really narrowed that gap.”
The U.S.
Department of Education has not released police referral data since the
2011-2012 school year, so NBC Bay Area filed public records requests
with each of the Bay Area’s 25 largest school districts to obtain the
most recent data. 20 school districts provided the information by our
deadline.
The Investigative Unit found that East Side Union’s referrals dropped dramatically to just 214 during the 2013-2014 school year.
Bay Area School Referrals to Law Enforcement (2013-2014)
California schools referred 31,961 students to law enforcement, according to the latest available statewide data for 2011.
To get the most recent numbers, the Investigative Unit
individually requested the latest student disciplinary data from 20 of
the Bay Area's largest schools. In many districts, schools refer
students of color and students with disabilities to law enforcement at a
much higher rate than their peers.
See Chart:
Funk attributed the decline to doubling the number of counselors in the district and placing social workers on every campus.
“Those positions
are just starting to come back in the last two years,” Funk said. “We
hired 207 new staff members in the last two years as budgets continue to
grow. There were a lot of loop-holes where kids were falling through
the cracks, and hopefully we’re closing them now.”
However, the
district’s lower referral rates are still among the highest in the Bay
Area. The Investigative Unit also found that minorities and students
with disabilities were still sent to police at disproportionately high
rates.
During the
2013-2014 school year, children with disabilities made up 10 percent of
the population, but totaled 25 percent of all students referred to law
enforcement. Hispanic children represented 47 percent of the population,
but 73 percent of all the students referred to police.
The practice of
staffing police on school campuses is not unique to East Side Union
High. School-based “resource officer” programs began in the 1950s, but
grew in the 1980s and 1990s to weed out drugs, weapons and violence from
schools.
According to the
U.S. Department of Justice, 76% of all high schools have police or
security officers on campus. While the goal of these policies is to make
schools safer, some believe they can actually harm students.
“There are tragic long-term consequences,” said Laura Garnette, Chief Probation Officer for Santa Clara County.
When a child
enters the criminal justice system at an early age, Garnette said, they
begin to identify as a criminal and are more likely to offend again in
the future. It is part of a phenomenon known as the “School to Prison
Pipeline”, where zero-tolerance policies criminalize certain behaviors
and funnel students from the school system into the justice system.
Schools that
aren’t well resourced with counselors and staff tend to lean more
heavily on police, according to Garnette, which can lead to students
getting in serious trouble for some not-so-serious misbehavior. If a
student is cited by police for that conduct, it is the equivalent of an
arrest and goes on a child’s criminal record.
Garnette says
her probation officers drop nearly 70% of juvenile cases because they do
not find them serious enough to get referred to the District Attorney
for criminal charges.
“I think we
certainly see a lot of cases where we think, ‘seriously?’” Garnette
said. “The consequences of having the criminal justice system and police
intervene in what by most people’s account is normal adolescent
behavior is tragic.”
However, even if no charges are filed, the arrest still shows up on a student’s criminal record.
That was the
case for 15-year-old Adrian Crosby. Crosby, who is autistic, was in
seventh grade at Bret Harte Middle School in San Jose when he used a
small rock to write his initials on the sidewalk outside the school.
School staff called the campus resource officer, and Adrian received a
juvenile citation for vandalism.
“It is just
unbelievable,” said Aida Crosby, Adrian’s mother. “It brings me chills
down my back and it is injustice. It is injustice.”
Adrian’s
probation officer closed his case two years ago, but Aida said her
family was never told Adrian would still have a criminal record. Aida
said she had no idea until the Investigative Unit explained the process
to her. By law, the Crosby family will have to wait until Adrian turns
18 before they can petition the court to seal his juvenile record.
“The feeling is a
feeling of desperation,” Aida said. “It’s a feeling…like they have cut
the oxygen out of you – like you can’t breathe and it’s painful and it
makes you kind of want to give up.”
Published at 11:00 PM PDT on Sep 29, 2015
