|
Comment on this article |
View comments |
Email this Article
|
|
News :: Miscellaneous |
|
Urbana Council Skeptical about Proposal for Greater Police Presence in Schools |
Current rating: 0 |
by O. Ricks
Email: omarricks (nospam) hotmail.com (unverified!)
Phone: 355-2813 |
16 May 2001
|
|
Monday night's Urbana City Council meeting was dominated by questions about the effects of funding an additional police resource officer for Urbana schools. |
Urbana City Council members debated at length with Urbana school board and police officials at Monday night’s meeting. At stake is the placement of a second police resource officer in Urbana schools for a total of 6 years. Council members fired a barrage of questions at the school board chair, the police chief, and the present Urbana schools resource officer until about 10:30pm.
The Urbana Police Department will receive a federal grant for 3 years to fund an additional school resource officer. After that 3-year period, the Urbana City Council would be expected to pick up the tab for the additional officer for another 3 years.
Early in the meeting, three individuals spoke in detail about why they felt resource officers were not a good idea. Sascha Meinrath, a student in community psychology, said that, especially in light of the findings of the recent Champaign County Schools racial climate survey, adding resource officers to schools would serve primarily to make schools less comfortable places for students, especially for students of color, who are disproportionately targeted and arrested by police. He said that there is no evidence to suggest that resource officers actually do make schools any safer than they are.
Local high school students Sehvilla Mann and Sara Carsey explained that the resource officer in Urbana schools did not help security. Mann said that officers spent a lot of time writing students up for tardiness while turning a blind eye to more serious incidents like sexual harassment and bullying.
Many advocates of school resource officers say that having a police officer in schools creates a safer environment in many ways. Officers can identify problems before they begin and work to resolve them before legal action is involved. If enforcement is necessary—say, if a student pulls a gun or a knife—officers are often the only ones in a school who are trained to respond. Officers can also serve as teacher’s assistants on matters of juvenile justice and safety (like penalties for drug use), and as mentors who can put a human face on local police departments. Most importantly, many advocates claim, the presence of an officer may serve to prevent youth from getting involved in illegal activities. The notion that having a police officer in schools would make schools safer is, as the school board chair put it, “plain old common sense,” even though she admitted to being unaware of any evidence that directly supported such a conclusion.
But opponents tell a different side of the story, and it was this side that seemed to be on the minds of the council members Monday night. Council members Chynoweth, Otto, Patt, and Wyman all expressed concern that the school district had no statistics to document the effectiveness of having a school resource officer in Urbana. The absence of any such evidence seemed to make council members hesitant to fund an additional officer with money that could be devoted to other needs. Council members also expressed concern that the officer may tend to ignore certain activities (like harassment), would tend to target minorities disproportionately, and would increase the exposure of youth to the juvenile justice system.
School violence has shown a general decrease since the late 1980s, when unprecedented levels of urban youth violence alarmed parents and gave impetus to the “get tough on crime” mantra of politicians. Though school violence has declined significantly since those years, school violence has been on many parents’ minds chiefly because the media has made much of a wave of ultra-violent tragedies in suburban and rural schools. Graphic media coverage devoted to these school shootings has been out of proportion to the extreme rarity of such shootings. Nonetheless, concerns about school safety have resulted in a trend towards heightened security measures in schools. Many parents have expressed concern about the effect of security restrictions on the educational environment of public schools.
|
|
For More Information-- and a Note on Sources |
by O. Ricks
omarricks (nospam) hotmail.com (unverified) |
Current rating: 0
17 May 2001
|
Please forgive me for not putting this information with the article.
For a copy of Sascha Meinrath's statement made to the Urbana City Council, including a list of the resources on the topic of police in schools, please go on this (Urbana) IMC site to:
Police Officers In Urbana Schools a Bad Idea -- here's the facts by Sascha Meinrath 9:21am Wed May 16 '01
General information about trends in the rates of juvenile crime and potential solutions to juvenile crime is widely available. I suggest the following recent reports that I used in writing the article above, particularly regarding the declining rates of juvenile crime and the role of media and political hype over school shootings and the demonization of adolescents as "superpredators."
The first report was published in June 2000 by a youth policy advocacy group. The other report awaits publication and was written by a panel of the National Academies of Sciences. Both reports contain a wealth of information from numerous studies and advocate a wide range of solutions.
Richard A. Mendel. (2000). Less Hype, More Help: Reducing Juvenile Crime, What Works -- and What Doesn't. Available: http://www.aypf.org/mendel/index.html.
National Research Council Panel on Juvenile Crime. (in press). Juvenile Crime, Juvenile Justice. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. (Please preview a copy online at http://www.nap.edu/catalog/9747.html)
|
