Students against the use of police in Northern Secondary School: Toronto: Thurs Oct 22

What specifically is wrong with this initiatives? What examples of created problems exist?

know that this sounds like a pipe dream, and I never did, and most students do not, but students should have the right to feel safe in school.  There are ways to do this without a police presence.  A lot of people do not feel safe around police.  I cannot feel safe in the presence of cops.

http://www.nowpublic.com/world/student-arrested-northern-secondary-schoo...

Meanwhile, Josh Matlow says:

Why is it unreasonable to debate the presence of police in our schools at this point? 

This is the kind of shit that happens when you have uniformed police patrolling school halls.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhfh8P0FomI

The kid was arrested for "heckling"?  What the fuck is that?  Is that a new, made up, Walking While Black charge or something?

LTJ, can you give us a link to that article where you pulled that quote? 

If heckling has now become a crime, perhaps we should place uniformed cops in all of our parliaments and legislatures.  We'd see dozens of parliamentarians arrested every day of the week.

I can't believe this B.S.

Looks like I was right - started out as a Walking While Black incident - why else would the police officer stop a kid at the school and demand to see his ID?  There were no alcohol or drugs involved [10] either.

No kidding.  What probable cause did the cop have, to demand that the kid (who actually WAS a student) show his ID?  The pig clearly caused the problem from the start.  If there had been no cop there to begin with, this kid would not have been criminalized.  Now, lucky him, this pig will ensure he has a nice police record with which to start his life.

Just lovely.  And if you watch the video, the whole "resisting arrest" and "assault" on the police officer was just the kid pulling away and demanding that the cop tell him why he was being arrested - while the cop refuses to tell him the whole time.

Furthermore, it looks like the cops were gathering information on the kids protesting [11] too:

Wow.  Nothing better to do with their time than to intimidate students by taking their names and pictures.  How much do you want to bet those kids will now have their entire backgrounds investigated - or if they ever run into a problem with the SRP, they'll now be described as "known to police"?

Arresting someone for "heckling" is not defensible, however I also don't believe that heckling or insulting a police officer is necessarily a good idea. For the same reason I wouldn't argue against an armed robber either.

About the SRO program, was there any consultation and discussion beforehand, or did the police all of a sudden say, "we're going into the schools and doing it our way?"

"Familiarity breeds contempt" is a long-standing truism. If a police officer were in my face for weeks at a time, I doubt I'd be able to resist cracking off - and I know that my teenage self wouldn't have resisted the impulse. 

my point exactly.

Ahmen.

It's funny how there's not shortage of laws when it comes to charging people who stand up for themselves, but no one can see any laws being broke in the E-Health Scandle.

What bullshit.

On the other hand, maybe cops in schools is a good thing. In this case a police officer saved another highschool student from being robbed by 6 men. Good job.

A police officer who was beaten while defending a student and preventing an alleged robbery by up to six men is being hailed as a hero by the students and faculty of a high school in northwest Toronto.

"Staff and students of Dante Alighieri Academy wish to recognize the heroic efforts of their student response officer Tony Santeramo, whose swift response from a phone tip averted a possible assault on one of our students," said Laila Velocci, vice principal at Dante Alighieri Academy, in a letter to Toronto police.

Santeramo was in his office at the school at about 11:30 a.m. Thursday when he was told that a student was being robbed outside.

He went out to investigate and saw six men apparently about to rob a student. When he approached the group, they began to walk away. When Santeramo tried to arrest them, one of them attacked him, hitting and kicking him.

He was taken to a hospital with neck injuries, said Det. Ira Hill. Another officer responding to the scene sustained minor injuries while arresting one of the suspects.

http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/crime/article/715638--officer-attacked-a...

Another officer arriving at the scene? 

In other words, they called the cops and cops who weren't in the school got there in time to arrest them, right?  So, why do you need a cop inside the school if regular cops are just a quick phone call away when something like this is going down?

True enough. Perhaps there is a great deal of background information that we don't know, although nothing was said on that particular point.

You Torontonians are lucky to have that effective a police service. If they have the resources to keep tabs on that many students, then they must have solved all the murders, robberies, sexual assaults, and gang-related crimes that go on in your city.

Well I didn't know much about this until watching the news channel. The cop says they've had five altercations at the highschool already, and once incident involved the cop being pushed and shoved by a student. And the cop is a large black male. And he is of some intimidating physical stature as cops sometimes are. So we might imagine that the kids are intimidated by the cop's large stature and the whole Orwellian or even US-style nature of their predicament. I don't know the whole situation and so will say nothing more about it.

I think cops in schools might be useful for some small percentage of the time. I know when I was attending highschool in Northern Ontario there were fist fights in the halls and even classrooms. I had a running war with a classmate beginning in grade nine. He was shorter than I and about the same weight then. But by grades eleven and twelve, he'd become a fully grown man at 200 pounds, six feet tall and with the strength of a man. I was still 140 some pounds soaking wet and not quite six feet. The fist fights were awful, and I remember one fight with he and I taking it off the school grounds and into the woods across the street on lunch hour, and I was hurt badly enough in one fight to require stitches.

Another incident in the uneventful northern town where I grew up involved vicious rape and murder of a highschool student in the west end of town. A young man in his 20's hid himself in one of the girls bathrooms and laid in wait for one of the female students.

I think if we're going to be paying cops to do a job, we might as  well have them looking out for everyone's kids and not just the private property concerns of industrialists and the well-heeled around town. We can deal with the fascist setup some day down the road when we collectively conjure up the courage to overthrow the system, and-or vote in a new and democratic government that tries to change things for the good of us all.

When London was about a third to a quarter of the size it is now, cops pretty much knew all the jackaninnies and ne'redowells.  One of them is a friend of mine.  And, you could get into trouble and tag a cop, and they'd arrest you and take you out by Fanshaw Park, and let you know that you might get a punch or two in with a cop, but you would never get the last punch.   And years later, your former ne'erdowell friend would tell you the story and laugh about it, and laugh about how he deserved it.

But that was then.

In the case above, I don't doubt that the incident boiled over because neither the kid nor the cop wanted to lose face, and it just escalated.

It's a situation where after, both should be brought to some understanding.  I guess Obama would call it a teaching opportunity or something.

But to charge this kid?  Fucking Crown's Attourney.  Assholes.

I mean, we go on and on about the cops, but that is not where the problem is.

Here's a bunch of guys, the Crown's Attourney in Toronto, where they purposefully or incompetently mishandled the vice cop prosecution to such an extent that charges had to be thrown out.  They are the ones who turn a blind eye to white collar crime, and crime by significant citizens.

Read the news.  What does it say about the Crown's Attourney in Toronto when the Attourney General of Ontario doesn't even trust them to prosecute Micheal Bryant, or trust them to prosecute one of thier own against coruption charges?

And, they take the word of a embarrassed cop and dig up some trumped up obscure charge like intent to resist arrest, instead of giving the cop a lolly pop and telling him to pick smarter battles and go away?

I agree, Tommy. The crown is the problem. I love ordinary people but loathe the crown. Down with the crown! Down with the imperialist crown and their liberal-fascist bureaucracy!

The ACLU reports on a simliar experience in New York City:

http://www.aclu.org/racialjustice/edu/29061prs20070318.html

This is a very important struggle and should be widely supported. How oppressive and malevolent to place these pigs in our schools.