With each cherub in chains whose photo and story lands in the tabloids – and even those who don't – the question of who is responsible for arrests made in schools becomes more pressing. The Department of Education says the NYPD is responsible, because school safety agents are hired and trained by the city’s police force. But according to the NYPD, responsibility rests with the DOE, because school safety agents (SSAs) are under the immediate supervision of individual school principals.
Thus SSAs reside in a kind of accountability limbo, a 4,600-strong group that seems to operate in a contrary fashion to the transparency so vocally prized by DOE and Mayor Bloomberg. The New York Civil Liberties Union charges that SSAs are not being held to account for their actions, because neither the NYPD nor the DOE are required to report criminal incidents in the schools. “We know they have the data,” says NYCLU advocacy director Udi Ofer. “But they refuse to release the raw data to the public.”
To address the situation, NYCLU has drawn up proposed legislation called The Student Safety Act, which proposes direct lines of accountability for SSAs, with regular reporting and the provision that issues can be brought to the Civilian Complaint Review Board, as is true for questions about NYPD behavior. Agencies with portfolios as varied as the Correctional Association, Advocates for Children, and the Children’s Defense Fund all support the Act. But unless and until the act is embraced by City Council – and there's no sign of that at present, as no Council member has yet adopted the measure – the efforts of parents and advocates to learn more about specific arrests may continue to be impeded by DOE, individual schools and the NYPD.
Take the case of Genesis Seaton, an eighth-grader at Nathan Straus Prep on the Lower East Side. On January 8, Genesis was handcuffed, arrested, and transported by van to the Seventh Precinct by school safety officers, where she remained restrained until a kind-hearted sergeant asked that she be made more comfortable, by cuffing only one hand to the metal chair where she sat. Unlike 5-year-old Dennis Rivera, who was handcuffed last month at a Queens school, Genesis’ story didn’t land in the dailies. But her arrest symbolizes a critical issue for the city’s students and families, with difficult questions for the Department of Education and the NYPD.
There’s little argument over what happened: Genesis and some friends were together at school when a fire extinguisher that had been standing on a table (an unexplained violation of OSHA rules) fell or was knocked to the floor. The impact caused the extinguisher to flood the room with smoke-like, fire-retardant foam and fumes; the area was evacuated and some students received medical attention for potential inhalation injuries, including one student with asthma who was treated on-site and three who were taken to area hospitals, evaluated, and released. Genesis was handcuffed by school safety agents – at the explicit direction of school principal Esteban Barrientos, she maintains – bundled into a police van and transported to the local police precinct, where she was cuffed to a chair until her parents came. Calls to Esteban Barrientos were not returned to City Limits.
