Candles outside of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Fla., after Nikolas Cruz shot to death 17 students there on Feb. 14, 2018.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Legislation has been proposed in the General Assembly to diminish the use of police in Connecticut's schools, and some of its supporters suggested the other day at the state Capitol that the presence of police in schools actually causes crime -- that if the police weren't there, students wouldn't be arrested. Of course that's not quite to say that bad stuff wouldn't happen anyway.
"The story is simple," said Robert Goodrich, executive director of Waterbury-based Radical Advocates for Cross-Cultural Education. "The moment police started being implemented in our schools, arrests rose dramatically, and they continue to rise. The more police we have in schools, the more likely it is that any student is going to be arrested," especially Black and Hispanic students.
The far-left child-welfare organization Connecticut Voices for Children made a similar claim a year ago.
So did boards of education request the permanent stationing of "school resource officers" to get more minority kids in trouble with the law?
Or were police requested -- especially for schools in impoverished and crime-ridden cities -- because schools increasingly were having trouble maintaining order with teachers and administrators alone?
Of course, it was the latter. Indeed, in the days just preceding the recent clamor at the Connecticut Capitol for expelling cops from schools, students were arrested for bringing guns or knives to school or brawling at school in Waterbury, Hamden, Meriden and Manchester.
The racial disproportions in arrests in school are no more remarkable than the racial disproportions in crime and arrests everywhere, nor more remarkable than the racial disproportions in poverty, child neglect and mental illness, which all correlate with crime.
The people complaining about police in schools don't seem to have noticed the long rise in misbehavior by students, nor the special schools that have been established in recent years to try to educate the kids who can't behave, nor the recent calls to put mental-health clinics in schools because so many more students these days are disturbed.
The kids aren't disturbed because of "school resource officers." No, they come to school disturbed -- that is, when they come to school at all, the chronic absenteeism rate in Connecticut's schools now being up to 25 percent. Most of these kids get little parenting and especially little from fathers.
Nor is it remarkable that students who behave, and their parents, favor having police in schools for protection against the kids who don't behave.
Connecticut and the country are awash in social disintegration -- from the schools to the streets and highways, where reckless driving now abounds; to crude behavior in markets and at public meetings; to shootings, including shootings at schools. Government claims misleadingly that crime is declining even as murders and shootings increase and much of the worst crime involves repeat offenders who should have been jailed for life a dozen convictions ago.
The people who blame this disintegration on cops in schools think that social workers and therapists can handle it. But it already is straining the capacity of the police, as indicated by the high unsolved murder rates in the cities.
The people who blame cops in school scorn what they call the "school-to-prison pipeline." But that pipeline is a lot longer than they acknowledge. Crucially, it starts at home.
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PRETEND PROTECTION: Another of Connecticut's "protective orders" proved its worthlessness Jan. 31 as Traci-Marie Jones was shot to death at home in Bethel by her estranged husband, Lester Jones, who then killed himself. Traci-Marie had gotten the order from a court a week earlier.
It prohibited her killer from any contact with her and required him to stay at least 100 yards away and to give up any guns and ammunition. He didn't, and of course nothing was done to enforce the order. Nothing is ever done to enforce such orders.
The only solutions in such circumstances are to provide the endangered person with round-the-clock police protection, move her permanently to a secret location, or arm her.
Every time a woman with a protective order is murdered, state legislators say they'll do something about the problem. But they will do nothing. For two of the solutions are expensive and the third is too politically incorrect.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester. =(CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)
