When a district banned thin blue line flags

Symbol has made students, others feel uncomfortable

In late October, administrators in a suburban

New York school district told employees that some of their apparel was making students feel uncomfortable, and even threatened.

At issue were masks showing the so-called thin blue line flag that signals support for the police but has increasingly been used to display opposition to the Black Lives Matter movement, which rose in opposition to racism in policing.

Wearing the symbol violated a district policy prohibiting employees from expressing political speech, officials said. The logo, a black-and-white version of the American flag with a single blue stripe at its center, could no longer be worn by staff members.

Days later, a group of employees of the district, in Pelham, New York, appeared at work wearing shirts bearing the word “Vote” and the names of Black people who had been killed by the police, prompting accusations of hypocrisy and political bias.

The resulting controversy has divided Pelham, an affluent and mostly white Westchester County town of about 12,000 people just north of New York City.

“It made a lot of people upset here, obviously,” said Ralph Demasi, a school safety coordinator who was told not to wear the flag. “Clearly a directive was given. One side followed it, while another side was allowed to express their views.”

Facebook discussions have grown heated. Neighbors staked out clear positions and lined up in the cold to speak at a public meeting. School employees and parents said they had gotten threatening messages as the district attracted national media attention.

“People are taking this hard line,” said Solange Hansen, a Black and Latina woman who moved to Pelham last year and whose teenage son is a student there. “All of a sudden, overnight, you see these blue line flags on people’s lawns. You see them in people’s businesses. And that makes it really hard for the people of color.”

On Friday evening, The Pelham Examiner, a local news outlet, published a letter written by a Pelham high school senior, Nadine Leesang, that expressed support for the district’s policy and said that the flag reminded students of color of “racist experiences they have had” with law enforcement.

“Nobody was really talking about how students felt uncomfortable, and it was kind of being dismissed,” Leesang, 17, who is Black and Asian, said in an interview. Her letter was signed by 15 other people, most of them also students.

The debate over the flag’s meaning has played out across the country, particularly after widespread protests this summer over police brutality and systemic racism.

“It signifies a memorial, a connection between officers killed in the line of duty and those who continue with their duties in the present,” said Carla Caccavale, a Pelham resident who has four children enrolled in district schools and whose father, a New York City Transit detective, was killed while trying to stop a robbery when Caccavale was an infant.

Caccavale has made sweatshirts honoring her father’s memory that include a thin blue line patch. Although she initially made them only for her family and another family, she has begun to sell them to support police-related charities.

When school staff members were told they could no longer wear the flag, her sweatshirts were included in the ban. She said the decision baffled her.

“You have to look at the intention of the sweatshirts,” she said.

But supporters of the district’s ban on the flag said the logo could not be divorced from its current context as a symbol for the pro-police Blue Lives Matter movement that sprang up in response to the Black Lives Matter movement.

In recent months, the flag has become a more common sight at propolice demonstrations around New York and elsewhere. It hung prominently behind President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Wisconsin, and the campaign has sold merchandise bearing the symbol.

Demasi, the Pelham school employee who was told not to wear the flag, said that he did not connect it to white supremacists. But he acknowledged that it had become a political symbol.

“Obviously, you’ve seen caravans with the Trump flag in the back of pickup trucks and then the thin blue line,” Demasi, a former police officer, said. “I think maybe people had a good intention, but it ended up giving the meaning of the thin blue line a black eye.”

But the ban on Caccavale’s sweatshirts provoked a ferocious letter from the president of the Detectives’ Endowment Association, a New York City police union, who accused Cheryl Champ, the district’s superintendent, of “perverting views” of students and turning them into “cophaters.”

The letter touched off an onslaught of coverage by local and national media outlets, including Fox News, where Caccavale has appeared twice.

Much of the coverage has focused on Caccavale and the school board’s policy, to the frustration of some who said they feared that the concerns of nonwhite students were being ignored.

The school district would not provide details about the students who were involved, including the number of complaints or the ages of those who had filed them.

Garcia, who volunteers for the district, said she had heard multiple students explain their views about the flag to staff members but she declined to provide details, citing privacy concerns.

“You have adolescents who actually stood up and expressed their concern,” Garcia, who identifies as white and Hispanic, said. “And these are not adolescents who look like the majority of the kids in Pelham.”