Police Brutalize Brooklyn High School Student Over Broken Glasses

April 1, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

On Friday, March 27, dozens of students and parents rallied outside the Park Slope Collegiate secondary school in Brooklyn, NY, against the police brutalization of one of the students. Some students wore buttons saying: "We're students not prisoners." One teacher said, “A student was expecting to learn but instead he got handcuffed."

The day before, NYPD cops handcuffed Noah, a 19-year-old senior student, when he was going through the school’s metal detectors. Witnesses said Noah wasn’t doing anything wrong. The cops attacked Noah over a pair of broken glasses.

A letter from the PTA explaining what happened said: “The student was wearing a pair of glasses that needed repair and he was using a pin to hold them together… security felt that the little pin posed a threat to school safety. They stopped him, took his glasses, and confiscated the pin. When the student reached to recover his glasses and the pin, officers restrained him. They brought him to the ground, pinned him down, and handcuffed him.”

Parents say the student was then released to the school principal’s office and asked to write down what happened. But then while he was there, “NYPD officers arrived on our floor, forcefully entered Principal [Jill] Bloomberg’s office, and handcuffed our student again. He was dragged out, placed under arrest, and held in a room by NYPD officers without his parents or any of our staff present. After multiple discussions with NYPD and School Safety, he was released and there were no charges filed.”

The NYPD claimed Noah became “confrontational,” and they issued him a summons for "disorderly conduct"—which means he will have to appear in youth court. This is exactly the way the “school-to-prison pipeline” works: Kids get written up or arrested on all kinds of bullshit things in school, even very small things like writing on the bathroom walls, which means they build up a record, are deemed a “troublemaker” and can end up being sent to a juvenile detention center.

Parents and students at Park Slope Collegiate are calling for the school to get rid of the metal detectors they say make the students feel like criminals. A 16-year-old student told reporters, "I feel like they're just trying to be mean and bully us. It's training us to be ready for prison." Think about that: Students recognize that they are being trained to be ready for prison!

Yet another outrage of this system—one more reason to SHUT IT DOWN ON APRIL 14!

Volunteers Needed... for revcom.us and Revolution

Send us your comments.

If you like this article, subscribe, donate to and sustain Revolution newspaper.