When schools adopt “zero tolerance” policies and treat rule infractions as crimes, they often bring in actual police officers to serve as in-house security, and the entire student body become perps-in-waiting. Tim Cushing’s litany of police overreach in schools includes a third-grader and a fifth-grader who were subjected to intimidating interrogation by a police officer over the alleged theft of one dollar; arrests for students who participated in a water-balloon fight at the end of the school year; felony charges for putting a joke in the school yearbook; arrests for flatulence; a cop who slammed a 10-year-old’s head into a table so hard he got a concussion — because the student was not at music class; and a diabetic student who was beaten by the school cop for falling asleep in class.
But it ends with a wrongful death suit that you have to read for yourself. Kids aren’t perps. Cops don’t belong in schools. When you treat a school like a prison with a curriculum, you view every kid’s actions through the lens of the criminal code.
Zero Tolerance Policies Put Students In The Hands Of Bad Cops [Tim Cushing/Techdirt]
(Image: School, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from dno1967b’s photostream)