The confusion was highlighted last Tuesday when the principal of a Manhattan high school was arrested by a safety agent when he intervened after the arrest of a student. It was illustrated again the next day, as nine hours' worth of testimony at a City Council hearing revealed no bright lines to guide the interaction of educational and safety officials – and an abundance of unhappy people on all sides because of it.
The hearing – called by City Councilman Robert Jackson, chair of the education committee, to examine school safety in light of ongoing concerns about the school safety climate, including his constituents' complaints – uncovered a host of problems, including the expiration of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that governed NYPD and Department of Education collaboration on school safety. Witnesses also described unfulfilled promises that teachers and students would have input about safety agents' training; possible underreporting instances of school violence; difficulty in obtaining information from both education and police divisions; and confusion as to whether safety agents or teachers and principals are really in charge.
"Our police and teachers need something in writing," said Councilman Peter Vallone, Jr., chair of the public safety committee, which convened the hearing along with Council's education and juvenile justice committees. "We've got confusion in this antiseptic atmosphere of a hearing."
Although Vallone thinks safety agents effectively resolve tense situations and improve school security "most of the time," he agrees the DOE-NYPD relationship is vaguely defined. Vallone says the City Council is examining whether it can created a formal protocol for school safety, using the Office of Emergency Management's Citywide Incident Management System (CIMS) as a model.
A primary finding of the hearing was that the 1998 MOU that assigned responsibility for school safety to the NYPD expired in 2002 and has not been renewed. Furthermore, a joint committee called for by the MOU to "ensure the effectiveness of school safety" and prepare annual evaluations of the school safety program was never convened. The only outside oversight of the school security program, according to DOE and NYPD, is conducted by Mayor Bloomberg.
Elayna Konstan, chief executive of the DOE's Office of School and Youth Development, which is responsible for school safety, told councilmembers that the agencies' partnership was working, citing DOE statistics that show a drop in school crime over several years. However, when situations arise in schools, Konstan says the police have the authority to act: "When the police or school safety agents believe there was a crime, they need to act, and we need to let them do what they need to do."
More than 5,000 school safety agents and uniformed officers are presently assigned to New York’s roughly 1,400 public schools, effecting 1,276 total arrests last school year, and 167 in the current academic year.
