Get the facts before expelling cops

The chair of the Toronto Catholic District School Board sends a letter to the Toronto police services applauding, expressing gratitude for, and urging continued funding of the school resource officer program.

That’s cops going into schools to boost security and build relationships with students.

Or at least such was the intention when the program began in 2008.

From the letter signed by Angela Kennedy: “Due to its tangible successes and demonstrated value, demand for the SRO Program continues to grow. Over the years, the SRO Program has contributed to improved police, student and community relations by establishing a positive climate of mutual understanding and respect. These personalized connections between police and students increase community safety while supporting young people.

“Today, in our school communities, the police are no longer viewed merely as law enforcement officers. Toronto Police Officers consistently go above and beyond the call of duty as important advocates and supporters of student safety and wellbeing. They are key members of our school family serving as positive role models, mentors, coaches, counsellors, and, in many cases, much needed adult authority figures in the daily lives of many students.”

Somehow, at the police board meeting this past week, Item 22 on the agenda morphed into a barely averted motion that would have suspended the program, instead.

So much for a pat on the back; it turned into an aggressive takedown.

Kennedy’s correspondence was all but forgotten once activists learned of the letter, triggering — you should forgive the expression — a march to the table by civilians clearly hostile to any undertaking that has police fingerprints on it.

Jordan Manners was shot dead inside C.W. Jefferys Collegiate in the Jane-Finch area on May 23, 2007. He’d just turned 15. It was the first time a student had been shot and killed inside a Toronto school.

We need to remember those soulsearching days and weeks after Jordan’s death.

The city, most especially parents, was horrified by the slaying and demanded a safer school environment for kids.

In the aftermath, an advisory panel headed by prominent human rights lawyer Julian Falconer was tasked with examining Jefferys and making suggestions to improve school safety. Eventually, the panel would put forward 126 recommendations, addressing safety flaws, while also slamming the lack of support staff to help students struggling with problems including guns and knives and violence against females. Resources were spread terribly thin.

That was the troubling state of affairs when cops went into the schools. Kids were scared. They were encountering violence, threatening weapons, racism, bullying and intimidation on a daily basis, on top of all the usual travails of adolescence.

Cops, the critics who spoke at the police board on Tuesday insisted, aren’t qualified to fix any of that; are, rather — in their estimation — making things worse by their mere presence, provoking confrontations with teenagers, sucking students into a harmful atmosphere of de facto criminalization — “a schoolto-prison pipeline” — with a disproportionate impact on undocumented students and minority youth.

One of the speakers insisted that armed cops on the premises send the wrong message.

Yet, absent those officers, who would do the eyes-on job?

Because teachers, as per their collective bargaining agreement, have abandoned the responsibility of hall-monitoring.

The accounts given were strictly anecdotal, coming exclusively from activists, some of them with wellknown axes to grind on the subject of policing. Desmond Cole, who took the board hostage last month over a demand that police destroy all data collected by carding — a completely separate issue — took his familiar seat at the head of the table and told a story. About a teenage boy unduly confronted by an SRO and subsequently expelled.

What he didn’t explain is why this student was tossed from his school. I highly doubt that expulsion arose because of the described incident. Expulsions are uncommon and always the last resort by school administrators.

“Don’t be scared,” Cole cheekily told board members.

“We’re the ones who are scared. That’s why we keep coming back here.’’

The thrust of Cole’s presentation can be distilled to this: “It’s about intimidation. No one at this table probably wants to admit it, but the reason we put cops in our schools is the reason we put them everywhere else. It’s the reason why you have a few of them outside this door today and you didn’t last month. It’s for intimidation purposes. We get it. We need to know the cost of this program. We need to know what it’s cost all these years. And, of course, this program needs to be eliminated. There’s no debate.”

Well, that’s the crux of the thing, from Cole’s perspective, shared by the others who made decidedly slanted presentations: No debate.

Stunningly, the board almost bought it, with member Ken Jeffers putting forth a motion to junk the program pending a meeting with school and community stakeholders.

Then, upon being informed by the board’s solicitor that it likely didn’t have the authority to tell Police Chief Mark Saunders how to deploy his officers, members spent a tortuous 90 minutes wind-bagging the matter, demonstrating only their utter cluelessness regarding the program’s merits or flaws.

Presently, there are 36 officers played in 75 schools across the city.

Ultimately, the board deferred the motion to next month’s meeting.

It would certainly help to have some dispassionate facts at hand, which is why Mayor John Tory proposed an independent review of the program, already under discussion between Saunders and Ryerson University.

While the program’s last user survey, in 2011, showed 58 per cent of respondents felt safer with SROs, there has never been in independent audit.

That’s what’s clearly needed . . . not a rush to appease chronic cop-bashers. And I say that as a chronic copbasher. Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.