Good morning. Iran said it had targeted a U.S. military base in retaliation for recent strikes. And President Trump said he wasn’t worried about domestic pressure to end the war: “I don’t care about the midterms,” he said. There’s more below — including a visit with Paul McCartney. But first I want to tell you about an extraordinary investigation into Texas school police by The New York Times and The San Antonio Express-News.
A violent educationAt a school near Houston, a police officer used a cord to hogtie a 10-year-old boy with a behavioral disorder who had kicked the principal. At a school in San Antonio, an officer handcuffed a 6-year-old boy who had kicked a school employee. Near a school in Galveston, an officer chased down a 17-year-old who ran off campus after he was caught with a vape, then pointed her gun and threatened to shoot him. In the four years since a gunman killed 19 children and two adults at an elementary school in Uvalde, school districts in Texas have spent billions of dollars to put police officers on every school campus in the state. This outlay is meant to protect students from similar attacks. And our reporters spoke with dozens of parents, teachers, principals and students who said they believed in it. School police officers stop violent fights. They confiscate weapons. And they’re a balm against a parent’s greatest fear: school shootings. “Just look at the TV,” a third-grade math teacher in Dallas told The Times. “There’s no school in America that should not have some kind of officer.” But the flood of Texas school police officers — about 11,000 have been trained, more than the total number of police officers in many states — has not always made public schools safer. Officers have instead turned to heavy-handed tactics on children, often in response to minor misbehavior, according to an exclusive investigation by The Times and The San Antonio Express-News. Instead of being sent to the principal’s office, a student might get slammed into a wall or a floor, arrested, kneed in the head, pepper-sprayed or shocked with a Taser. And there’s little accountability for it. Here’s a chilling sentence from the investigation: “Police departments in Texas are not required to report incidents of force in schools unless they shoot someone.” Command and controlMost police officers employed by a Texas school district come from municipal police agencies, the reporters found. More than 1,000 had been jailers. And in those jobs, they often need to project a commanding presence. “The notion of policing requires force,” a professor of criminal justice said. “It requires that you compel people to obey your authority.” That doesn’t work so well with young people, the professor and other law-enforcement experts told The Times. The adolescent brain has not fully developed. It has problems with impulse control. Yelling at teens, or getting physical with them, can go sideways. So can yelling at cops. It made me think of one of the most chilling videos that our reporters uncovered. The footage is not easy to watch, but you can find it on our site.
These screenshots, taken from the video, show a 14-year-old at school in Mesquite, east of Dallas. The officer smashes the boy face first into a wall. He falls to the polished linoleum floor, and the officer yanks him back to his feet by his shackled arms. “Who else?” the officer shouts at the group of students gathered behind him. The boy had been caught with a vape. Please read the whole story, which is by Clare Amari, Kristian Hernández and Asher Lehrer-Small, with photographs by Meridith Kohut. No paywall. It’s free. It’s important. Thanks.
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