I have railed against the stupidity the police academy calls training for quite a while now, but here is an angle I have never covered----the Trickle-Down Effect.
There are people among us who want to be a somebody. Authority, respect, and a fear of their presence is what they crave. Problem is, they’ve got nothing to back it up. Talent, charisma, strength, agility, insight, brain-power, nothing. Even worse, this particular person has a lifestyle that can only go it half-way, a part timer, shall we say. What to do? What DO you do? Police Academy? Naww…they can’t hack Police Academy. How about a school teacher? Well, no, they can’t get a teaching certificate either, so now what?
This mentally-misled person’s dream has come true. Team up with the NYPD and become an SSO! The best of police thoughts combined with the best fantasies of emotionally failed citizens with time on their hands. It’s the School Safety Officers!
School, (we want the kids to go to school), Safety, (who can argue with safety?), and Officer, (one of those titles given to people instead of a raise, like Associate at WalMart.) The SSOs are our friends, right? They fill in for Mom and Dad while the kid is at school, looking after them, keeping them safe, as their title implies. Well, not quite.
These people, hired by the police department and paid by citizens who have no input, are full of smart-mouthed attitude and arrogance to spare. Consider what a SSO looks like to the average school kid: They are dressed in a knockoff NYPD uniform, without the heavy hardware but with a heavy dose of tough-guy face, fueled by a brainless thirst for dominance. SSOs possess the authority to stop, frisk, question, search and arrest students. They strut, glare and threaten their way through the work day. And they don’t hold back on the physical abuse either.
Ask Daija. A 13-year old from the Bronx, she was body slammed to the ground with an SSO sitting on her back. She was handcuffed and dragged inside the school building and then bound to a desk until her mother came to collect her. She never agressed against anybody. She told the SSO that she chose to stay put outside the school and wait for a ride from her mother after being threatened by two strangers there, but that didn’t satisfy the SSO. Here are Daija’s words.
It is clear to anybody with a public school education, the education Dajia was there to get, that the presence and methodology of the SSO misguides kids into a life of either becoming another idiot in a cop uniform, or another criminal who ends up in jail. The attitude the School Safety Officers are eager to apply and the absence of any goodwill or maturity in them leaves impressionable kids with only the two options. And neither the school or the parent have any say in it. Great choice, huh?
How The SSO Gets That Way
The Academy’s message to police recruits boils down to this: “Always win”. That summation, plus some tips and tricks on how to overpower people, is all cops pass onto the SSO recruits. Daija chose to let her mother be the decider of her fate, and the SSO saw no “win” in that for them. So, what to do? Impose violence. That is a “win”, isn’t it? Peace through superior firepower? Ummm…..
She is not alone. Daija is part of a class action suit looking to curtail the authority of these fools, endowed by the police department, and without concern for the school’s authority. In fact, the school has no say whatsoever over the SSOs. Here is an account of the story from Gotham.
Here’s the problem: SSOs only know what cops tell them to do, and cops only know what the Academy tells them to do. Blind leading the blind. All they know is robotic obedience and that just doesn’t make it with school kids. EVERY decent parent knows that it takes a bit more finesse than anything a cop can imagine. The educational world is being polluted by the destructive, single-dimensioned cop mentality.
There is no better example in recent news to show us why a Civilian Review Board is necessary ASAP. We already have this---
· Cops don’t want to come when we call them, (mugging, rape, or home invasion victims, call the police and wait until the perps make a clean getaway and/or the victim bleeds to death while waiting.)
· Cops want to show up in places where they manipulate the law to limit citizens’ rights, like highway checkpoints or pretext stops.
· Cops want to ignore all the mistakes they personally make while exaggerating the importance of everything citizens do, especially “disorderly conduct”.
· Cops lie in court to send innocent people to jail and justify their paychecks.
Evidently, none of that is enough to get a civilian review board established, and the above is just what they do to adults. Now, they are hiring underlings and sending them to our schools to mistreat kids. At what point do we take control of a tax-funded organization called the police department and tell it what we want it to do?
Any citizen’s police oversight worth a nickel would stop the SSO idea in its tracks. An SSO would never pass muster in America if parents who take raising their kids seriously were to vote on it. Cops can’t be trusted to do the right thing without guidance any more than our kids can. Both need daily instruction from those who brought them here. We the people. Where is the citizen control over police?
Bonus!
Want to become a School Safety Officer? Download this application and fill it out.
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