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Saturday, October 20, 2018

Students tased & beaten in the name of 'safety'

The Other Side Of School Safety: Students Are Getting Tasered And Beaten By Police | HuffPost US - Rebecca Klein:

September 8, 2018 - "Jalijah Jones, then a freshman at Kalamazoo Central High School in Michigan, remembers the punch of thousands of volts hitting his slight frame.... He remembers four school security guards officers pushing him up against a hallway wall before a school police officer arrived and Tasered him. He remembers a feeling of intense cold as if his high school hallway had just turned into a walk-in freezer. He remembers falling to the ground....

"Jones ... had never been in a physical fight at school before. It was just a teenage drama. He owed another kid a small amount of money. Angry words were thrown back and forth, then a push and a shove and some swinging. But no one had been hurt until a school police officer Tasered the teen....

"Jones ... remembers being cuffed a few seconds later, and the school cops dragging him through the hallways and out of school. His body shook furiously as he was loaded into a police car, before being escorted to the hospital in an ambulance. He was charged with resisting arrest....

"The police officer who stunned Jones is one of over 80,000 currently stationed in public schools around the country, according to the most recent data available from the U.S. Department of Education, covering the 2015-16 school year.... The number has risen sharply in the past few years and will continue to grow. Amid the recent spate of deadly school shootings, there has been an increase in federal money funding school police officer positions. This is true at the state level as well...

"Over the past few years, there have been several high profile instances of police brutality in schools. Still, there are no official data sources tracking how often students are subject to intense physical punishments at the hands of law enforcement....

" For the past several months, HuffPost has been tracking how often students in schools are Tasered or shot with a stun gun, pepper sprayed or intensely physically punished. We found:
  • Since September 2011, students have been Tasered or shot with a stun gun by school-based police officers at least 120 times;
  • Since January 2016, students have been pepper sprayed by school-based police officers at least 32 times;
  • Since January 2016, students have been body slammed, tackled or choked by school-based police officers at least 15 times.
"These numbers represent a minimum. Not every incident is reported in the local news. And there is no agency that systemically tracks these numbers."

Read more: https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/school-safety-students-police-abuse_us_5b746a4ce4b0df9b093b8d6a
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