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

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

Meanwhile, Josh Matlow says:

Quote:

While the arrest of the 16-year-old on Friday at the Toronto District School Board high school was said to be "for no reason" by the friend who posted it on the popular video-sharing website, Trustee Josh Matlow says the teen acted inappropriately and had "heckled" the officer beforehand.

"Anyone who tries to blow this up into any other issue, a debate over the (police in schools), I think that would be exploitative and unfair to the student, the school community and the officer involved."

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

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

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 either.

Quote:

Jordan and two Northern students helped organize the demonstration after an officer arrested a teen on school property earlier this month after he failed to show proper identification proving his enrollment at the school.

The teen, who was indeed a student at Northern, resisted arrest and got into an altercation with the police officer. The arrest was videotaped and put on YouTube.

Protest organizer Willie Wilson told ctvtoronto.ca the protest is not about the specific incident but rather the School Resource Officer program in its entirety.

The arrest shouldn't have happened in the first place and wouldn't have happened if the officer was not in the school to begin with, he said.

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 too:

Quote:

As students at Northern Secondary protested the presence of a police officer in their halls following a dramatic on-campus arrest posted online, undercover cops meandered through the crowd Thursday, apparently filming the demonstration and its participants.

...

Another student organizer, Willy Wilson, said protesting pupils managed to spot the undercover officers in the crowd Thursday.

"They're taking pictures of us, apparently, walking around with video cameras and getting our names, I think, as well," he said.

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"?

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?"

my point exactly.

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...

Lard Tunderin Jeezus wrote:

Aristotleded24 wrote:

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.

"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. 

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

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.

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!