Tolman High School – RI Future

December 23, 2015December 27, 2015

Groups request release of state police report on Tolman High School incident

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The American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island, the NAACP Providence Branch, the George Wiley Center, the American Friends Service Committee – South East New England, and Providence Student Union today filed an open records request with the Rhode Island State Police requesting the full report of its investigation, conducted in conjunction with the Pawtucket Police Department, into the actions of a school resource officer who was recorded body-slamming a 14-year-old student at Pawtucket’s Tolman High School on October 14. The groups are also seeking the evidence gathered in the investigation, as well as documents related to any review of the pepper-spraying by Pawtucket Police of students protesting on the day following the incident.

The request, filed pursuant to the state’s Access to Public Records Act (APRA), was made after the State Police announced it had completed its review of the incident and found that the officer in question behaved appropriately. In their APRA request, the groups noted that they are not calling the report’s conclusion into question, but consider it important that the public be able to understand the report’s finding and see all the evidence used to reach this conclusion.

The public interest in both the incident and subsequent investigation is clear, the groups stated, pointing to the extensive media coverage of the incident, the subsequent student protests, and the important policy issues the incident raised. In requesting the release of the documents, the groups noted that in August the State Police voluntarily released a detailed report into the Cranston Police Department and its “Ticketgate” scandal.

“Like that report, release of this information would shed light on important government issues, and particularly the role, responsibilities and powers of school resource officers in the schools,” the groups stated. By releasing this information, the groups noted, the State Police would be acting in line with an October 20 memo released by Governor Gina Raimondo’s office that emphasized the importance of state agencies disclosing information under APRA whenever possible.

“In balancing the public’s right to know versus any general privacy interests, we clearly believe the public interest is paramount in this instance,” the groups stated. Recognizing the need to protect the privacy of some individuals whose statements contributed to the report, the groups reminded the State Police that APRA provides for the redaction of those names and other personally identifying information rather than withholding the records.

ACLU of RI executive director Steven Brown said: “Release of the State Police report and materials is critical to promoting transparency and the public’s right to know in understanding this controversial incident that brought to light the many serious concerns raised by the routine presence of police officers in schools”

Martha Yager, program coordinator for the AFSC – SENE, said today: “I find it disturbing that it is deemed acceptable for a police officer to slam a child to the floor in school and arrest him. When a young person is loud and angry, should not the response be to patiently defuse the situation? Are not schools among the places we should teach children how to deal with their anger and distress? Why are children arrested when no law is broken? We need these documents to get a better handle on how to change a system that criminalizes children at school.”

NAACP Providence Branch President Jim Vincent added: “Although the police officer in question was cleared, the NAACP Providence Branch finds the use of force on a 14-year-old child very disturbing and calls into question whether police officers should be in schools in the first place.”

After the October incident at Tolman High School, the ACLU called on all school districts that currently have school resource officers to re-evaluate their use in the schools and to revise the agreements they have with police departments that set out their job responsibilities.

A copy of the APRA letter is available here: http://riaclu.org/images/uploads/Tolman_High_School_State_Police_APRA.pdf

From an ACLU press release

How nonviolence street workers kept the peace in Pawtucket

Tolman students report disturbing police behavior

Violence, protest at Tolman leads to dialogue, opportunity for students

After the violence at Tolman: ‘What Now?’

ACLU calls on schools to revise policies on SROs

October 22, 2015

ACLU calls on schools to revise policies on SROs

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The American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island has called on all school districts that currently have school resource officers (SROs) to re-evaluate their use in the schools and to revise the agreements they have with police departments that set out their job responsibilities. The call was prompted by incidents at Pawtucket’s Tolman High School last week, which reinforced many of the serious concerns the ACLU has long held regarding the routine presence of police officers in schools.

In a letter sent to Pawtucket school district superintendent Patti DiCenso on Tuesday and shared with school superintendents across the state, ACLU of RI Executive Director Steven Brown noted that school districts cede an “enormous amount of control” when they sign Memorandums of Understanding (MOU) with police departments, and that this “unnecessarily set the stage for last week’s series of ill-fated events” in which an SRO’s attempt to handle a single student’s behavioral issue led to the injury and arrest of the student and his brother, the arrest of eight other individuals, and the pepper spraying of numerous youth.

Reviewing the MOU in effect in 2011 between the Pawtucket school district and the police department, the ACLU noted that it designates the SRO as the school’s “law enforcement unit” who reports to the police department, not the school principal. In fact, the MOU authorizes the SRO to remove a student from school without notifying school officials, and, if the SRO charges a student with a crime, requires the principal to support the officer’s decision in any legal proceedings.

The Pawtucket MOU further specifies that all SRO assignment and retention decisions are made at the complete discretion of the Chief of Police, not school officials. In addition, while the MOU recognizes the importance of selecting officers with demonstrated abilities and skills in working with students, officers are not required to receive any training on addressing behavioral issues or understanding the needs of students. The ACLU questioned how seriously those interests and skills are considered in light of the fact that the SRO at the center of last week’s incident had been investigated for a videotaped incident in which he pepper-sprayed and repeatedly hit a man with his baton just months before he was assigned to the high school.

In the letter to Supt. DiCenso, the ACLU’s Brown stated: “Despite the tremendous power that SROs wield in an educational environment, your school district’s MOU allows police officers to walk the halls of schools with little responsibility to school officials themselves. That is because, at bottom, they serve the police, not the school.”

The letter acknowledged that Pawtucket should not be singled out for such problems. A 2011 review by the ACLU of SRO use across the state found that many school departments had similar “one-sided” MOUs and that there were many incidents in which the presence of a police officer escalated a student’s minor infraction, such as wearing a hat in school, into an arrest for disorderly conduct.

“When a student’s immature behavior is addressed by a law enforcement official trained in criminality and arrest, not in getting to the root of a behavioral issue, neither the child nor the school is well served. In short, the presence of SROs redefines as criminal justice problems behavior issues that may be rooted in social, psychological or academic problems, for which involvement in the juvenile justice system is hardly the solution,” Brown stated in the letter.

The letter called on school districts to take responsibility for the police officers in their schools in order to prevent incidents similar to last week’s from happening again. In a series of recommendations, the ACLU urged Pawtucket and any other school departments that continue to use SROs to revise their MOUs to ensure school officials have a meaningful role in the selection of SROs and that, absent a real and immediate threat, school officials, not police, handle all disciplinary matters. The MOUs, the ACLU said, should also require SROs to receive annual training on issues such as restorative justice and adolescent development and psychology; establish clear limits on the use of force; and put in place simple procedures for students to raise concerns about the SRO.

Following delivery of the ACLU’s letter, a news article in the Valley Breeze indicated that Pawtucket school officials plan to review their agreement with the police department. The ACLU welcomes Pawtucket officials and officials from any other district re-evaluating their policies to contact its office for guidance.

[From an RI ACLU press release]

October 21, 2015October 22, 2015

After the violence at Tolman: ‘What Now?’

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The twenty people, parents, activists, concerned citizens and students, gathered in the meeting room at the Pawtucket Public Library Tuesday night agreed that the police officer violently arresting two brothers at Tolman High School last week used, “too much force.”

“I’ve never seen any 14, 15, or 17 year old handled in that way,” said Alexandra, the organizer of the meeting. She opened the meeting by writing the words, “WHAT NOW?!” on the wipe board. It was the question of the evening.

Alexandra arranged the meeting and lead the discussion along with Marco McWilliams, who runs the Black Studies program at DARE (Direct Action for Rights and Equality).

The ensuing discussion was challenging and illuminating. Some of those in attendance were students at Shea, another public high school in Pawtucket. “Having a police officer is necessary,” one student believed, “because what if a student brings a gun to school and intends to use it?”

An activist countered that, “safety is different from policing” and then worked to disentangle the two ideas. “Developing forms of keeping each other safe is important,” he said. “We need to ask ourselves ‘Why are our schools unsafe?’

“Having kids packed into an underfunded school leads to tensions that leads to beefs that lead to escalation,” continued the activist.

This struck me as true. When I first went to Tolman after the incidents took place, I encountered students who were plainly nervous about the violence that that had occurred. They felt that the violence would continue, and continue to escalate. According to these students, the tensions surrounding the arrests, subsequent protests and further arrests had lead to tensions growing between various gangs in Pawtucket and nearby cities. The police, always to be avoided, were seen as extra nervous and vigilant.

The expectation of further violence was, “in the air” as one 15 year old put it to me.

Back in the meeting room at the Pawtucket Library, someone suggested educating high school kids about their rights and teaching the youth to prevent the kinds of situations where they might be targeted for arrest by police officers. An objection to the second part of this idea was immediately voiced: Framing this as “how kids should behave puts the blame [for police violence] on the kids.”

“Where I’m from we’re harassed by police, all the time, for no reason,” said another participant, “At some point your rights just don’t matter.”

When the topic of the violence at Tolman is brought up by students at Shea, “the teachers say, ‘we don’t know what happened before the video started,’” said a student, “and that means they think the kids deserve it.”

The teachers would have a different point of view if they lived in Pawtucket and sent their kids to public schools, said the student. Like the police in Pawtucket, most teachers are white, and commute to work from nearby or even distant cities. “They don’t come from Pawtucket, most of them, and they don’t care about their impact on the city,” said a student about the teachers and police. There is an attitude among public sector workers that the problems of Pawtucket can be left in Pawtucket.

“I don’t know how to defend myself and my children as a Hispanic woman,” said a mother. She has come to this meeting because she can imagine her children being arrested by police officers as shown in the video, and she worries. Like everyone in the room, she knows the statistics about students of color being disproportionately suspended from school. She is aware of the school to prison pipeline, and she wants to keep her children out of it.

It is suggested that the presence of police officers in schools causes students to be pushed into the court system, sometimes directly, like the two brothers arrested on video. Policing schools makes schools unwelcoming to students of color. Schools can take on a prison-like atmosphere.

“The reality of being black in America is to fear the police.”

“I’m a black guy with two degrees and I don’t feel safe with the police,” said a college professor attending the meeting, “and that’s because of my lifelong interactions with police.”

The meeting closed with some ideas about goals. Goals include bringing elders into schools, retired grandmothers for instance, to “change the energy of a school.” Another is for schools to be community run.

But the most important goal is to grow the group and begin to effect real change. The tragic events at Tolman have presented opportunities that people are eager to seize.

October 16, 2015October 16, 2015

Tolman students report disturbing police behavior

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There are disturbing reports from Tolman High School students in Pawtucket concerning the behavior of police officers during yesterday’s mass arrest of eight student and two adult protesters.

One protester, said a student, was “arrested for flipping off the cops,” a constitutionally protected form of speech.

Another student who has “really bad asthma” was suffering an asthma attack after being hit with pepper spray. The student was told by police officers that she could “go to the hospital and get arrested, or you can stay here,” according to witnesses.

The protest outside the school Thursday morning was happening without a lot of the students inside the school being aware of what was happening. After a fire alarm was pulled, (for which a student was arrested) students flooded outside.

“Pulling the alarm was a good idea,” said a student, “No one knew what was going on until we all came out.”

Students involved in the protest were told that they were not allowed to have cellphones on their person while in school that day. “They didn’t want us communicating with people outside,” said the student.

Some students who refused to turn in their cellphones were refused readmission to the school, yet students feel the cellphones are necessary to protect themselves. After all, it was a cellphone video of a violent police arrest that sparked these incidents.

There was also some pushback against the mediation offered by the Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence. Some students feel that the Institute street workers are more interested in “telling us to go back to class” than in addressing the root causes of the problem, which they see as the presence of police in the schools.

Some students want school resource officer Jared Boudreault removed from the school and fired from the Pawtucket Police Department for his actions. But more than that, they want police entirely out of schools. Instead of policing and suppression, some students say they want respect and the help of adults who are able to deescalate situations.

Meanwhile, representatives from several community and social justice groups are decrying the events of the last two days as evidence of the school to prison pipeline. The RI ACLU has repeatedly shown that across Rhode Island, “black [and Latino] children face unwarranted racial disparities in their earliest years, with long lasting consequences. The disparities begin in the classroom, and at a very early age.”

“I really think it has to do with race,” said a Tolman student. She was speaking from her own experiences in high school and not quoting from a report.

October 15, 2015October 16, 2015

How nonviolence street workers kept the peace in Pawtucket

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Since the incident yesterday at Tolman High School in Pawtucket, in which a resource officer aggressively arrested a student by grabbing him from behind and slamming him to the ground, the situation has been escalating. The incident was caught on video and has gone viral. This morning a student protest against police brutality spiraled out of control after a car window was broken. Once again the police reacted aggressively, arresting eight students and two adults. Then a police officer pepper sprayed the crowd to disperse them.

I talked to both students and a reporter who were caught in the pepper spray.

This afternoon the media was out in force outside Tolman, as were the police. Up the street could be seen the major crimes unit in their signature windbreakers. A paddy wagon was parked near the Gamm Theater. There was even a forensic crime van parked nearby, as well as over a dozen uniformed officers.

But when school got out at 2:30, there were no incidents of violence.

Instead, there was the calming presence of street workers from the Institute for the Study and Practice of Non-Violence. I watched as they reached out to students and listened to their concerns.

Make no mistake: many students at Tolman are justifiably angry and confused. The video is seen by many as confirmation that the police see students of color as nothing more than criminals to be controlled.

But I watched as Melissa DaRosa, an Institute street worker and others not only calm student’s concerns but also assured them that their voice would be heard at meetings with school officials, Mayor Don Grebien and the Pawtucket police. The Institute streetworkers were there to guide the students and help channel the anger into constructive organizing and community power.

I watched as the confident members of this wonderful organization spread peace instead of violence.

I wonder what Rhode Island would be like if the Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence were adequately funded? How much is it worth to prevent violence and arrests before they happen? How much is it worth to actualize and empower future citizens of our state, rather than to criminalize and brutalize them?

My answer is not only would such outcomes be worth nearly any amount of money, but street workers and intervention are far cheaper than police officers and incarceration.

#choosepeace