In addition to security cameras, the public school atmosphere today includes more than 4,500 uniformed officers patrolling the halls, enforcement of zero-tolerance behavior policies, and thousands of predominantly minority students attending "Impact" schools – a designation given to the most crime-ridden – who must walk through metal detectors and past armed police officers just to get to class.
Students have expressed their objection in a variety of ways, including at a demonstration in Aug. 2006 on the steps of DOE's central office at Tweed Courthouse. "We’re students, not felons. We need books, not prisons," hundreds of student demonstrators chanted.
In the wake of a City Council hearing this fall, lawmakers increasingly have spoken of a need for change (See Principals, Police And A Question of Authority, City Limits Weekly #609, Oct. 15, 2007). "The current school safety system is at best a Band-Aid, and at worst a criminalization of the students," City Councilman John Liu said this month. A member of Council's Education Committee, Liu went on to condemn the DOE's widely-touted decreases in school crime and overcrowding as "smoke and mirrors."
Councilman Robert Jackson, the chair of Council's Education Committee, believes that the current safety policy has turned schools into "institutions resembling prisons" and "is not conducive to learning."
The "school to prison pipeline" is a phrase coined by civil libertarians to describe the heavy policing and monitoring of students that characterizes many large urban school systems, where ethnic minorities form the student body majority, like those in New York and Los Angeles. Chloe Dugger, a field organizer at the New York Civil Liberties Union, says that policies such as the DOE's rigid discipline code introduce youth to the criminal justice system at an early age by criminalizing normal adolescent behavior.
The atmosphere leaves students with a perspective on school that earlier generations probably wouldn't relate to. "The most devastating thing is how students start thinking about school," Dugger said. "Students say, 'the way I'm treated in school by school safety agents makes me feel like ... the school expects me to be a criminal." The NYCLU presented a model "Student Safety Act" to City Council leadership this fall, which would remedy overreaching in the school safety program – but it has no sponsor to date.
"The Student Safety Act will bring oversight and accountability to police practices in the schools,” said Udi Ofer, the NYLCU’s advocacy director. “It will hold abusive school safety agents accountable for their actions, and require regular reporting by the NYPD and Department of Education on police practices in the schools.”
In addition to the policing of schools, questions are being raised about the effect of video surveillance on the tense climate that pervades city schools, four years after the camera system was first introduced.
Video surveillance in schools not only represents a basic shift in American society, but also exacerbates distrust of young people. "If you put in all these cameras, you're saying you don't expect students to behave like reasonable human beings," said Melissa Ngo, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington, D.C.-based research center focused on civil liberties and privacy issues. Moreover, Ngo maintains that camera use in schools could alter how children perceive the world around them: "Do we want to raise a generation that accepts, without question, complete surveillance of their lives?"
