Get police off the temper tantrum beat
Teachers should handle unruly children
If you’re hard- hearted enough not to find it distressing, surely you’ll find it absurd: a six- yearold girl allegedly so out of control at school that Peel Regional Police Officers put her wrists and ankles in handcuffs. All parties agree this happened in September, at a school in Mississauga, Ont. The girl’s mother, understandably, is furious: “My daughter didn’t have a knife, my daughter didn’t have a gun,” she told CBC. “There’s no way my daughter could’ve harmed anybody in that situation.”
And Margaret Parsons, executive- director of the African Canadian Legal Clinic, is certain the girl’s race — she is black — played a central role. “When you look at how the police treat our community and the ( use of ) force, that always seems to be the fall-back position,” she says. “We’re seen as dangerous, we are seen as violent, we are seen as deserving of this harsh treatment.”
The Peel District School Board (PDSB) and police dispute this, naturally. Speaking generally, school board spokeswoman Carla Pereira says employees try to de- escalate situations before calling 911 — though the latter is apparently fairly routine, even for elementary schools. Police spokesman Sgt. Josh Colley says handcuffs, likewise, are a last resort very rarely deployed with chil- dren. Indeed, officers had responded to calls about this little girl before without similar incident.
Colley calls the accusations of racism a “complete insult,” and argues handcuffs were a safer option than others critics have suggested. The girl’s behaviour had “escalated to the point where there (was) concern for her well- being,” he says. If officers had “locked her in a room” and she had hurt herself, “now we’re being done for neglect of duty.” And if one had tried to restrain her physically, the girl might have been injured.
“This is a small child who is flailing, kicking, punching, biting, spitting. Spinal fractures happen very easily (with children),” says Colley. “Now I’m standing here talking to you about an officer breaking (a) bone.”
No one gets into policing to slap handcuffs on a sixyear- old, Colley plausibly argues. The case for racism is circumstantial — and yet understandable. It certainly won’t do anything to help strained relations between police and many in the Toronto region’s black community. “How is our community supposed to perceive the police when they would do this to a six- year- old?” asks Parsons.
It’s a perplexing question, but here’s a more basic one: why should police be expected to respond to a six- year- old pitching a fit? They’re not specifically trained for that. Educators are supposed to be specifically trained for that. PDSB policy mentions calling 911 only in the context of a student who has already harmed himself. If a student is a known safety risk to himself or others, the policy demands he be supervised by staff trained in “non- violent crisis intervention” — including physical restraint procedures.
Various companies provide this kind of training; PDSB uses the Milwaukeebased Crisis Prevention Institute. And recipients of that training are certainly better suited to handle these situations than police, says Reece Peterson, a professor of special education at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and an expert in crisis de- escalation techniques used in schools. For example, they would have been taught methods of physical restraint “specific to youngsters, who are smaller and ( require) a different level of intervention than adults.”
A flailing, biting, spitting, punching six- year- old is no joke; but a team of educators should very obviously be able to handle it. And this is precisely what Peel seems to have contemplated in its policies. ( Other area boards have similar ones.) Perhaps teachers lack the necessary legal protections, or feel they do, to intervene physically when they deem it necessary. (PDSB policy doesn’t exactly scream “we trust your judgment”: it explicitly sanctions a “high five” as an appropriate “reinforcement” on the occasion of “celebrating success.”) If so, they should be empowered and encouraged to perform this unpleasant but vital part of their job descriptions.
Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario president Sam Hammond recently argued violence is on the rise in schools thanks to insufficient funding for early intervention programs and teaching assistants. If so, it could hardly be a higher spending priority. Quite apart from being absurd and potentially traumatizing, sending the cops out on tantrum patrol is a very poor use of taxpayer resources.
The girl is said to be faring well in a new school, thankfully. Parsons is considering launching a human rights complaint on her mother’s behalf against the school board and the police. I’d say the former has more to answer for than the latter, who shouldn’t even have been there in the first place.