The charge on the police docket was "disrupting class". But that's
not how 12-year-old Sarah Bustamantes saw her arrest for spraying two
bursts of perfume on her neck in class because other children were
bullying her with taunts of "you smell".
"I'm weird. Other kids
don't like me," said Sarah, who has been diagnosed with
attention-deficit and bipolar disorders and who is conscious of being
overweight. "They were saying a lot of rude things to me. Just picking
on me. So I sprayed myself with perfume. Then they said: 'Put that away,
that's the most terrible smell I've ever smelled.' Then the teacher
called the police."
The policeman didn't have far to come. He patrols the corridors of Sarah's school, Fulmore Middle in Austin, Texas.
Like hundreds of schools in the state, and across large parts of the
rest of the US, Fulmore Middle has its own police force with officers in
uniform who carry guns to keep order in the canteens, playgrounds and
lessons. Sarah was taken from class, charged with a criminal
misdemeanour and ordered to appear in court.
Each day, hundreds of
schoolchildren appear before courts in Texas charged with offences such
as swearing, misbehaving on the school bus or getting in to a punch-up
in the playground. Children have been arrested for possessing
cigarettes, wearing "inappropriate" clothes and being late for school.
In
2010, the police gave close to 300,000 "Class C misdemeanour" tickets
to children as young as six in Texas for offences in and out of school,
which result in fines, community service and even prison time. What was
once handled with a telling-off by the teacher or a call to parents can
now result in arrest and a record that may cost a young person a place
in college or a job years later.
"We've taken childhood behaviour
and made it criminal," said Kady Simpkins, a lawyer who represented
Sarah Bustamantes. "They're kids. Disruption of class? Every time I look
at this law I think: good lord, I never would have made it in school in
the US. I grew up in Australia and it's just rowdy there. I don't know
how these kids do it, how they go to school every day without breaking
these laws."
The British government is studying the American
experience in dealing with gangs, unruly young people and juvenile
justice in the wake of the riots in England. The UK's justice minister,
Crispin Blunt, visited Texas last September to study juvenile courts and
prisons, youth gangs and police outreach in schools, among other
things. But his trip came at a time when Texas is reassessing its own
reaction to fears of feral youth that critics say has created a
"school-to-prison pipeline". The Texas supreme court chief justice,
Wallace Jefferson, has warned that "charging kids with criminal offences
for low-level behavioural issues" is helping to drive many of them to a
life in jail.
The Texas state legislature last year changed the
law to stop the issuing of tickets to 10- and 11-year-olds over
classroom behaviour. (In the state, the age of criminal responsibility
is 10.) But a broader bill to end the practice entirely – championed by a
state senator, John Whitmire, who called the system "ridiculous" –
failed to pass and cannot be considered again for another two years.
Even
the federal government has waded in, with the US attorney general, Eric
Holder, saying of criminal citations being used to maintain discipline
in schools: "That is something that clearly has to stop."
As
almost every parent of a child drawn in to the legal labyrinth by school
policing observes, it wasn't this way when they were young.
The
emphasis on law and order in the classroom parallels more than two
decades of rapid expansion of all areas of policing in Texas in response
to misplaced fears across the US in the 1980s of a looming crime wave
stoked by the crack epidemic, alarmist academic studies and the media.
"It's
very much tied in with some of the hyperbole around the rise in
juvenile crime rate that took place back in the early 90s," said Deborah
Fowler, deputy director of Texas Appleseed, an Austin legal rights group, and principal author of a 200-page study of the consequences of policing in Texas schools. "They ushered in tough, punitive policies. It was all part of the tough-on-crime movement."
Part
of that included the passing of laws that made the US the only
developed country to lock up children as young as 13 for life without
the possibility of parole, often as accomplices to murders committed by
an adult.
As the hand of law and order grew heavier across Texas,
its grip also tightened on schools. The number of school districts in
the state with police departments has risen more than 20-fold over the
past two decades.
"Zero tolerance started out as a term that was
used in combating drug trafficking and it became a term that is now used
widely when you're referring to some very punitive school discipline
measures. Those two policy worlds became conflated with each other,"
said Fowler.
In the midst of that drive came the 1999 Columbine high school massacre,
in which two students in Colorado shot dead 12 other pupils and a
teacher before killing themselves. Parents clamoured for someone to
protect their children and police in schools seemed to many to be the
answer.
But most schools do not face any serious threat of
violence and police officers patrolling the corridors and canteens are
largely confronted with little more than boisterous or disrespectful
childhood behaviour.
"What we see often is a real overreaction to
behaviour that others would generally think of as just childish
misbehaviour rather than law breaking," said Fowler. Tickets are most
frequently issued by school police for "disruption of class", which can
mean causing problems during lessons but is also defined as disruptive
behaviour within 500ft (150 metres) of school property such as shouting,
which is classified as "making an unreasonable noise".
Among the
more extreme cases documented by Appleseed is of a teacher who had a
pupil arrested after the child responded to a question as to where a
word could be found in a text by saying: "In your culo (arse)", making the other children laugh. Another pupil was arrested for throwing paper aeroplanes.
Students
are also regularly fined for "disorderly behaviour", which includes
playground scraps not serious enough to warrant an assault charge or for
swearing or an offensive gesture. One teenage student was arrested and
sent to court in Houston after he and his girlfriend poured milk on each
other after they broke up. Nearly one third of tickets involve drugs
or alcohol. Although a relatively high number of tickets – up to 20% in
some school districts – involve charges over the use of weapons, mostly
the weapons used were fists.
The very young are not spared.
According to Appleseed, Texas records show more than 1,000 tickets were
issued to primary schoolchildren over the past six years (although
these have no legal force at that age). Appleseed said that "several
districts ticketed a six-year-old at least once in the last five years".
Fines
run up to $500. For poorer parents, the cost can be crippling. Some
parents and students ignore the financial penalty, but that can have
consequences years down the road. Schoolchildren with outstanding fines
are regularly jailed in an adult prison for non-payment once they turn
17. Stumping up the fine is not an end to the offending student's
problems either. A class-C misdemeanour is a criminal offence.
"Once
you pay it, that's a guilty plea and that's on your record," said
Simpkins. "In the US we have these astronomical college and university
expenses and you go to fill out the application to get your federal aid
for that and it says have you ever been arrested. And there you are, no
aid."
In Austin, about 3% of the school district's 80,000 pupils
were given criminal citations in the 2007/8 school year, the last date
for which figures are available. But the chances of a teenager receiving
a ticket in any given year are much higher than that because citations
are generally issued to high-school pupils, not those in kindergarten or
primary school.
The result, says the Appleseed report, is that
"school-to-prison pipeline" in which a high proportion of children who
receive tickets and end up in front of a court are arrested time and
again because they are then marked out as troublemakers or find their
future blighted by a criminal record.
From her perch on the bench
in an Austin courtroom, Judge Jeanne Meurer has spent close on 30 years
dealing with children hauled up for infractions, some serious, others
minor. Some of the difficulties faced by teachers can be seen as Meurer
decides whether a parade of children should be released to await trial
or held in custody. Meurer switches between motherly and intimidating
depending on what she makes of the child before her.
"Some of them
are rough kids," she said. "I've been on the bench 30 years and you
used to never have a child cuss you out like you do now. I appreciate
the frustrations that adults have in dealing with children who seem to
have no manners or respect. But these are our future. Shouldn't we find a
tool to change that dynamic versus just arresting them in school and
coming down with the hard criminal justice hammer?"
Many of those
who appear in front of Meurer have learning problems. Children with
disabilities are particularly vulnerable to the consequences of police
in schools. Simpkins describes the case of a boy with attention deficit
disorder who as a 12-year-old tipped a desk over in class in a rage. He
was charged with threatening behaviour and sent to a juvenile prison
where he was required to earn his release by meeting certain
educational and behavioural standards.
"But he can't," she said.
"Because of that he is turning 18 within the juvenile justice system for
something that happened when he was 12. It's a real trap. A lot of
these kids do have disabilities and that's how they end up there and
can't get out. Instead of dealing with it within school system like we
used to, we have these school police, they come in and it escalates from
there."
Sometimes that escalation involves force. "We had one
young man with an IQ well below 70 who was pepper-sprayed in the hallway
because he didn't understand what the police were saying," said
Simpkins. "After they pepper-sprayed him he started swinging his arms
around in pain and he hit one of the police officers – it's on video,
his eyes were shut – and they charged him with assault of a public
servant. He was 16. He was charged with two counts of assault of a
public servant and he is still awaiting trial. He could end up in
prison."
Austin's school police department is well armed with
officers carrying guns and pepper spray, and with dog units on call for
sniffing out drugs and explosives.
According to the department's
records, officers used force in schools more than 400 times in the five
years to 2008, including incidents in which pepper spray was fired to
break up a food fight in a canteen and guns were drawn on lippy
students.
In recent months the questionable use of force has
included the tasering of a 16-year-old boy at a high school in Seguin,
Texas, after "he refused to cooperate" when asked why he wasn't wearing
his school identification tag. He then used "abusive language". The
police said that when an officer tried to arrest the boy, he attempted
to bite the policeman. The youth was charged with resisting arrest and
criminal trespass even though the school acknowledges he is a student
and was legitimately on the grounds.
Such cases are not limited to
Texas. In one notorious instance in California, a school security
officer broke the arm of a girl he was arresting for failing to clear up crumbs after dropping cake in the school canteen. In another incident, University of Florida campus police tasered a student for pressing Senator John Kerry with an awkward question at a debate after he had been told to shut up.
Sometimes the force is deadly. Last week, Texas police were accused of overreacting in shooting dead a 15-year-old student, Jaime Gonzalez,
at a school in Brownsville after he pointed an air gun, which resembled
a real pistol, at them outside the principal's office. The boy's
father, also called Jaime, said the police were too quick to shoot to
kill when they could have wounded him or used another means to arrest
him. "If they would have tased him all this wouldn't have happened," he
told the Brownsville Herald. "Like people say there's been stand-offs
with people that have hostages for hours … But here, they didn't even
give I don't think five minutes. No negotiating." The police say
Gonzalez defied orders to put the gun down.
Meurer says she is not
against police in schools but questions whether officers should regard
patrolling the playground the same way they go about addressing crime on
the streets.
"When you start going overboard and using laws to
control non-illegal behaviour – I mean if any adult did it it's not
going to be a violation – that's where we start seeing a problem," she
says. "You've gradually seen this morphing from schools taking care of
their own environments to the police and security personnel, and all of a
sudden it just became more and more that we were relying on law
enforcement to control everyday behaviour."
Chief Brian Allen,
head of the school police department for the Aldine district and
president of the Texas school police chiefs' association, is having none
of it.
"There's quite a substantial number of students that break
the law. In Texas and in the US, if you're issued a ticket, it's not
automatically that you're found guilty. You have an opportunity to go
before the judge and plead your case. If you're a teacher and a kid
that's twice as big as you comes up and hits you right in the face, what
are you going to do? Are you going to use your skills that they taught
you or are you going to call a police officer?"
But Allen concedes
that the vast majority of incidents in which the police become
involved are for offences that regarded as little more than
misbehaviour elsewhere.
"Just like anything else, sometimes
mistakes are made." he said. "Each circumstance is different and
there's no set guideline. There's also something called officer
discretion. If you take five auto mechanics and ask them to diagnose
the problem of a vehicle, you'll come up with five different solutions.
If you ask five different doctors to diagnose a patient, a lot of times
you'll have five different diagnoses. Conversely, if you ask five
different police officers if they would write a ticket or not for the
same offence, you possibly have five different answers."
Parents who have been sucked into the system, such as Jennifer Rambo,
the mother of Sarah Bustamantes, wonder what happened to teachers
taking responsibility for school discipline.
"I was very upset at
the teacher because the teacher could have just stopped it. She could
have said: OK class, that's enough. She could have asked Sarah for her
perfume and told her that's inappropriate, don't do that in class. But
she did none of that. She called the police," she says.
Politicians
and civil liberties groups have raised the same question, asking if
schools are not using the police to shift responsibility, and
accountability, for discipline.
"Teachers rely on the police to
enforce discipline," says Simpkins. "Part of it is that they're not
accountable. They're not going to get into trouble for it. The parent
can't come in and yell at them. They say: it's not us, it's the police."
That
view is not shared by an Austin teacher who declined to be named
because he said he did not want to stigmatise the children in his class.
"There's
this illusion that it's just a few kids acting up; kids being kids.
This is not the 50s. Too many parents today don't control their
children. Their fathers aren't around. They're in gangs. They come in to
the classroom and they have no respect, no self-discipline. They're
doing badly, they don't want to learn, they just want to disrupt. They
can be very threatening," he says. "The police get called because that
way the teacher can go on with teaching instead of wasting half the
class dealing with one child, and it sends a message to the other kids."
The
Texas State Teachers Association, the state's main teachers union, did
not take a position on ticketing at the recent debate in the legislature
over Whitmire's proposal to scrap it. But the association's Clay
Robison says that most teachers welcome the presence of police in
schools.
"Obviously it looks as if some police officers are
overreacting at some schools. I'm a parent and I wouldn't want my
17-year-old son hauled in to court if he and another student got in to
an argument in a cafeteria. Police officers need to exercise a little
bit of common sense but the police are what they are. They enforce the
law," he says. "At the same time, years ago, at a school in one of the
better neighbourhoods of Austin, a teacher was shot to death in his
classroom. It's still a very rare occurrence but it does happen.
Anything that increases the security of the teacher is good so they
don't have to worry about personal safety and they can concentrate on
teaching the kids. We get complaints from some teachers that the police
aren't aggressive enough at moving against some of the older juveniles,
those that they feel actually do pose a danger to the teachers or the
other students."
Because of Sarah Bustamentes's mental disorders, a
disability rights group took up her case and after months of legal
battles prosecutors dropped the charges. Ask her how she feels about
police in schools after her experience and she's equivocal.
"We
need police in school. In my school it can get physical and it can turn
out very bad," she says. "But they should stop issuing tickets. Only for
physical stuff or bullying. Not what you do in class."