Blogs > Liberty and Power > Criminalizing the Classroom—Courtesy of Mayor Giuliani

Jun 20, 2007 2:01 am

Criminalizing the Classroom—Courtesy of Mayor Giuliani

"Since the September 1998 takeover of school safety in New York City public schools by the NYPD [New York Police Department, an initiative promoted by Rudolph Giuliani when he was mayor of New York,] the number of police personnel in schools has spiked dramatically. Before the takeover, the school safety division employed 3,200 school safety personnel. By the start of the 2005-2006 school year, the number of officers had increased by over 50 percent to 4,625 SSAs. In addition to the unarmed SSAs, at least 200 NYPD officers patrol school hallways with guns at their hips. New York City has more SSAs, by far, than any other school district in the country. If SSAs were considered their own police force, the number of SSAs alone would make the NYPD's School Safety Division the tenth largest police force in the country, with more school safety agents than there are officers in the police forces of Washington, D.C., Detroit, Baltimore, Dallas, Phoenix, San Francisco, Boston, San Diego, Memphis, or Las Vegas.

"In fact, New York City has more SSAs per student than other cities have police officers per citizen. San Antonio, which has a population approximately equal to the 1.1 million student enrollment in the New York City public schools, employs half as many police officers per citizen as New York City employs SSAs per student."

You can read the full story here (pdf file). The quotations above come from Section III, Policing in New York City's Schools Today.

No doubt the situation in some New York City public schools was pretty dire before the change in policy. Now we have the criminalization of the classroom, which, I suggest, would be indicative of Mr. Giuliani's approach to a lot of other issues were he to be elected president.

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