Brooklyn, APRIL 1 — Working-class anger raged this week at our school as students, parents and teachers united against an attack on a student by both school “safety” cops and New York City cops.
The incident began last Thursday on March 26, as students were on the line to pass through metal detectors to get to class. One student was wearing a pair of glasses fastened with a straight pin to replace a missing screw, as he’d done for several weeks. The school cops told him the pin was a weapon and made him remove his glasses so they could confiscate it.
When the student reached for his glasses, three agents tackled and handcuffed him. After one agent claimed she’d been elbowed in the face, the student was issued a summons for assault.  When school security released him, he went to the principal’s office to write a statement about what had happened. As he was writing, several cops — not the school cops who are under the command of the New York Police Department (NYPD) — entered the office. They stated they were arresting him for assault, pushed past the principal, slammed the student’s head into the table and handcuffed him again.
‘Students, Not Prisoners’
While this attack is particularly disturbing, it reflects a pattern of racist police terror that we have been struggling against for a long time. Last fall, we held a town hall meeting to demand an end to police harassment of our students as they leave school every afternoon. We also protested after the non-indictments of the police murderers of Mike Brown and Eric Garner.
After this latest incident of police terror, our student government and Parent Teacher Association sprang into action once again. Student government members, who were helping at parent-teacher conferences that night, quickly produced a button that read, “We are students, not prisoners.”
‘We Will Not Be Intimidated!’
By the next afternoon, we organized a protest during Friday’s early dismissal. An integrated group of parents, teachers and students picketed in front of school, demanding justice for the attacked student and the removal of scanners from our building. Over the weekend, parents met to organize observation of scanning for the following week. That Tuesday (3/31) we rallied outside the building’s student entrance, where scanning takes place. Students linked the cop terror at their schools to murder of Black, Latin youth throughout the country. One student boldly stated in response to the increased presence of NYPD that morning, “we will not be intimidated!”
Officials Seek to Pacify
Throughout the week, suited officials from school cops and the NYPD were in and out of our school, trying to “solve” things by pacifying the protesters rather than improving the treatment of students or removing the metal detectors. At lunchtime Tuesday, in the wake of our second protest, four officials met with students to listen to their concerns about security.
Their “listening” consisted of trying to convince students that they need scanning to protect them. But most students see through this racist rhetoric. They know that only a small percentage of New York City schools have scanning, and virtually all of them are predominantly Black and Latin.
Neither the Department of Education nor the NYPD have any interest in removing metal detectors from our school, a mainly Black and Latin school in a mainly white, well-to-do neighborhood. They have a vested interest in keeping our students intimidated and forcing them to leave the area immediately after school.
As we left school for spring break Thursday (4/2) afternoon, we learned of the officials’ intended solution for our school. The school’s head cop and the three agents involved in the attack are being transferred to other schools, but not disciplined or reprimanded in any way.
Some may see this as a victory; we made enough noise for the racist NYPD bosses to want to placate us. But the school cops in question will be free to attack students at their next school, and the ones who replace them here will have the same training and agenda. These cops are used to intimidate and criminalize students. That will change only when we destroy capitalism and the cops with communist revolution.
The real victories are the lessons we have learned and the relationships we have built. Over the years, our school has struggled against police terror, budget cuts, and the co-location of an “elite,” exclusive school in our building. Out of these struggles we have grown, and our fighting forces are stronger and more integrated than ever. This week we stood up to the system with a group of parents, teachers and students. We are men and women, young and old, Black, Latin, Asian and white. Now it is our job to turn this group for school reforms into dedicated fighters for communism!