Getting Lost On the Way
To the Principal's Office

Harlem — As another academic year gets underway, New York City public schools once again open their doors under the watch of more than 5,000 school safety agents, employees of the NYPD who enforce security on campus. And like last year and the year before, some officials, parents, school leaders and watchdogs remain vexed about what they consider insufficient accountability for those safety agents – who have been accused of everything from making inappropriate arrests, including placing grade-schoolers in handcuffs, to starting fights themselves.

A city bill aimed at changing that is slated to receive a hearing before City Council this fall, more than a year after Harlem Councilman Robert Jackson, chairman of the Education Committee, introduced it. The Student Safety Act was to require more detailed, regular reporting of school safety incidents, and offer parents, students, and school personnel access to the Civilian Complaint Review Board – the independent group that evaluates complaints levied against other NYPD officers – to audit and evaluate complaints. The bill was referred to the Public Safety committee and hearings were anticipated, then tabled, in fall of 2008.

Now a hearing is slated for Oct. 22, and the Student Safety Act seems poised to become law. The legislation has undergone considerable revision on its way to gathering additional councilmembers' support; it appears close to garnering a co-sponsor count that’s only one member short of the 34 votes needed to override a possible veto from Mayor Bloomberg.

Coming closer to capturing the backing of Council leaders like Peter Vallone Jr. and Melinda Katz, the only Council members who sit on both the Public Safety and Education committees, and perhaps also Speaker Christine Quinn, has meant eliminating one of the Act’s major elements: No longer will complaints go to the cash-strapped, stretched-thin CCRB, which along with other city agencies experienced additional budget cuts this year. Instead, the revised version offers an enhanced reporting process via the city hotline 311 and the NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau, which is the office to which parent complaints currently are directed. More explicit parent education – including posting directions for reporting complaints in all schools served by safety officers, all police precincts, and on the first page of school and DOE websites – is thought sufficient by the bill’s supporters, including a coalition of community advocates that includes the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, Advocates for Children, the Correctional Association of New York, and the community group Make the Road by Walking.

Advocates charge that safety agents can and sometimes do trample the individual rights of students and teachers; numerous press reports have documented children as young as five years old handcuffed, and older children cuffed, detained and held at local precincts. Principals who have resisted safety agents’ actions have found themselves arrested as well – disciplined and threatened with legal action by the safety agents who ostensibly work for them, in their schools. While many safety agents serve as benevolent, caring adults in their school communities, the more detailed reporting elements of the School Safety Act will permit closer tracking of agents against whom repeated complaints are lodged, and can reveal possible patterns of behavior in individual agents, their schools, their community and the school district.