Kids - School Safety: Metal Detectors In Every School?

"People were saying, 'I can't believe it happened here' …. People in Boston, New York, or Los Angeles would never say it can't happen here. Folks in the big cities have responded" [to the threat of school violence represented by the Littleton, Colorado, shootings] — Northeastern University Prof. Jack Levin to reporter Angie Cannon

Are we failing our children by not installing metal detectors in every school in America?⁵ We saw in the preceding panel that school crime actually declined in the 1990s. In the wake of school shootings and the events of September 11, 2001, however, school officials find themselves trying to allay rising public fears of school violence and terrorist threats, and lawmakers have given us the Gun-Free Schools Act.

Percentage of Public Schools Reporting Serious Violent Crimes (N = 78,000)

Characteristic	Total	City	Urban Fringe	Town	Rural
Total	10.1	16.8	11.2	5.4	7.8
Enrollment 300-999	9.3	12.5	9.0	3.2	13.9
Enrollment 1,000+	32.9	44.2	29.8	15.9	NA
Minority Enrollment
5-19%	10.9	14.5	11.3	10.6	6.8
20-49%	11.1	19.1	10.1	5.0	8.0
50% or more	14.7	17.6	17.8	4.4	11.6

Serious violent crimes do take place in schools. A little over 10% of schools reported such crimes to police in 1996-97, as the table shows. Note too (chart and table) that it is big-city schools with large enrollments of minority students that are more likely to report serious violent crimes. It might be instructive to look at how some of our largest school districts approach school security.

California: In 1998-99 California ranked second in the number of students expelled from school for violations of the Gun-Free Schools Act with 290 expulsions. As of May 30, 2001, two school districts — the 710,000-student Los Angeles Unified (LAU) and Inglewood Unified — used metal detectors on a regular basis. After installing the devices in 1993, LAU used them daily on at least one class of students at each high school. Between 1993 and 2001, no guns were detected, although guns have been found concealed on school grounds. At Inglewood, one knife and one gun were detected over a five-year period. Bill Ybarra, director of the Los Angeles County Board of Education safe schools center, told Joe Mathews of the Los Angeles Times that the most effective crime-deterring strategies have been "maintaining phone hotlines or anonymous tip boxes to report threats, or beefing up security and patrols." He said of metal detectors: "That's a time-consuming type of search that doesn't yield much."

Boston: Massachusetts expelled 43 students in 1998-99 for violations of the Gun-Free Schools Act. In Boston, the 63,000-student school district faces pressure from parents and law enforcement personnel to install metal detectors in every school. Thomas Payzant, Deputy Superintendent of Boston Public Schools, stated his position in a September 2002 memorandum: "The decision to use metal detection devices should be based on incidents of weapons in the school or one serious incident."

States with the most students expelled for violations of the GFSA: 1998-1999

State	Expulsions
1. Texas	294
2. California	290
3. Georgia	208
4. New York	206
5. Alabama	174
6. Missouri	171
7. Tennessee	152
8. Pennsylvania	145
9. North Carolina	141
10. Virginia	115

New York: According to a 1997 New York State Education Department report, one in 10 students in New York has carried a weapon to school at least once. In 1998-99, New York ranked fourth in the number of students expelled from school for violations of the Gun-Free Schools Act with 206 expulsions. That same year, the NYPD took over security in the city's public schools. According to November 2000 news reports, after the NYPD takeover, overall school crimes decreased by 14% while sexual offenses (excluding rape) increased nearly 200%. The increase was attributed to better reporting. Metal detectors have been installed in schools in high-crime areas (about 70 schools out of 1,100). Gregory Thomas, executive director of the student and safety prevention services division, says, "Personally, I've been asked how I feel about them. After Columbine, everyone wanted them in their schools. My counterpoint was, 'No you don't.' Once you get it in your environment you're stuck with it."

Washington, D.C.: This troubled 70,000-student school district, the first to turn to an outside security service, had the third-highest ratio of students per 1,000 expelled in 1998-99 for violations of the Gun-Free Schools Act (0.181). The district uses a combination of patrols, metal detectors, alarms, closed circuit television, and surveillance cameras. It has also found a Youth Gang Intervention Unit to be effective in resolving disputes. It also has adopted a system to track violence data better.

The decision to allow metal detectors and other surveillance devices involves legal, psychological, financial, and practical issues. Superintendent Payzant says: "When you run 12-year-old kids through metal detectors, it has an impact on what their views are about the school and its climate." As a practical matter, in a world of finite school dollars, how many dollars should be devoted to security? Should those dollars be siphoned away from the school orchestra? The football team? School-based after-hours programs, even though experts say that these programs reduce crime?

The National Institute of Justice suggests: "One approach that may help some schools is to establish a policy that allows the school to do a weapon detection scan of any student who arrives at school late in the morning. This may provide the school with a lot of leverage. There could be some excellent deterrence created if students knew they would definitely be scanned when they are running late, if only to convince them to not be late."

Do surveillance devices make schools safer? "Once you put in cameras and metal detectors, you rely on them as a solution and ease up on the harder work — that is, creating a climate that teaches peaceful resolution," says Vincent Schiraldi, director of the Justice Policy Institute. According to Dale Yeager, security consultant and former criminal profiler for the Department of Justice, the education establishment would be wise to indulge in some profiling on school grounds. He contends that bullying, stalking, and harassment are the real security problems in school. Contradicting the thinking that underpins the No Child Left Behind Act, Yeager believes some children should be left behind: "Violent kids must be extracted from the school environment before their behavior escalates," he says (the next panel looks at child offenders).

At school, "zero tolerance" is the buzz-phrase of our times. Students are being suspended or expelled for infractions both great and small. What happens to the students who are therefore denied an education? What will happen if all of our schools become just like prisons?

Sources: National Center for Education Statistics, Indicators of School Crime and Safety, 2000, Table 8.1; Fast Response Survey System, Principal/School, http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2001/crime2000/. Cannon, Angie, "The Lessons of Littleton: Why?" U.S. News & World Report, 3 May 1999, p. 16. Daryl Gale, "Kiddie Profiling," Philadelphia citypaper.net, February 21-28, 2002, http://www.citypaper.net. Dale Yeager, "Unsafe Schools: The Problems with Current School Safety Programs," http://www.fightforchildren.com/dev/unsafe.htm. "School security in the real world," Access Control & Security Systems Integration, Feb 2001. Angela Pascopella, "Safety in the Big Apple," School Administrator, April 2001 v37 i4 p46. U.S. Department of Education, Violence and Discipline Problems in U.S. Public Schools: 1996-97, http://nces.ed.gov/pubs98/violence/index.html. Data retrieved October 8, 2002.