School Safety Officers. The title implies creating a safe environment for young people to learn and engage with each other. Except that in New York City, with School Safety under the NYC Police Department, these School Safety Officers enter the public schools the same way many police officers enter our neighborhoods, with an antagonistic attitude and thinking they are walking into a jungle whose residents they need to crush. Those residents happen to be our children.

Rojan Morgan is suing Hillcrest High School after he says several school safety agents assaulted him after he brought a cell phone to school.

“They took me to a back room, inside of the school and started to beat me,” Morgan said.

“When I came to the school I was ignored and shut out and that’s how this all started,” mother Trudyann Morgan said.

Yes, I know that having a cell phone in a NYC public school is against the rules. I am a parent with a tween in the NYC public school system. Pero, is breaking a rule deserving of getting beat?

“We’re hearing stories about a separate room where children are taken into and then abused or roughed up by school safety agents,” said Monami Maulik of the groups Desis Rising Up And Moving.

Kumar Heeralall said he was assaulted by safety agents last year.

“The whole issue started with a cell phone,” Heeralall said. “They took me in a room they handcuffed me and started beating me up.”

What do people expect when the NYPD who is responsible for the attack on Mineo and the shooting death of an unarmed man in the Bronx (a bat against semi-automatic weapons is unarmed, sorry)?

Having the NYPD run the School Safety division is just starting the criminalization process of our children sooner. It’s mentally, emotionally, and sometimes physically preparing them for the next level of harassment, especially since so many of the young people targeted in these incidents of police brutality are young people of color. And while the Division of School Safety thinks it can hide behind the high number of people of color among their ranks, the fact is that so long as they are trained by and run by the NYPD the blue wall of silence extends over them as well.

Via / Email from Desis Rising Up and Moving