A high school’s police presence
NEW YORK — On a chilly morning in November, Lt. Donzel Cleare of the New York Police Department stood in front of a classroom at Liberation Diploma Plus High School in Coney Island and asked a simple question: “How many of you guys feel that I work for you?”
Before him, in desks arranged around three sides of the room, sat roughly 15 students, mostly male, with a group of girls gathered together on one side. Most of them were black or Hispanic, and because Liberation is a so-called transfer school, virtually all of them had dropped out or fallen behind at other schools.
Not a single student raised a hand. A few actually laughed.
They were there at the beginning of a monthslong course, conceived by Liberation’s founding principal, April Leong, as an experiment in bridging the gap between New York City’s police and young people from a poor, minority community in Brooklyn. An elective class called the Junior Citizens Police Academy, it met weekly and was made up of students selected by Leong, in some cases because they had expressed negative feelings about police.
It is a common sentiment in the neighborhood around Liberation. The 60th Precinct, which includes Coney Island, has nine public housing projects, some with long-running feuds between their residents. Last year there were 23 shootings in the precinct. This year, as of Aug. 28, there were nine — half as many as there were by this time last year, though it is unclear why the total is down.
A number of Liberation’s students have had friends or family members killed. Some have watched fathers, brothers or friends go to prison. Others have themselves been incarcerated.
Two years ago, Manuel Ocampo, an 18-year-old student, was shot in the head and killed by a retired police officer. Police said Ocampo had a gun and was trying to rob the former officer and steal his car. The shooting was determined to be self-defense, and the former officer was not charged. The week before he died, Ocampo had given a short speech at school, thanking his mother and Leong for helping him turn his life around. Leong keeps a photograph of him on the wall next to her desk.
It is no surprise that many of Leong’s students are suspicious of and hostile to police. They are mostly resigned to the idea that officers will never be held accountable for what the students see as mistreatment of black people.
Cleare, the commanding officer of the housing bureau’s community affairs unit, said later that he knew what the students’ response would be before he even asked the question, but he saw it as a way to get them talking.
“It was very important when I came in there to let them voice their true feelings and opinions and concerns,” he said. “I didn’t want them to feel that this was going to be a brainwashing session.”
But the skepticism he faced from the students was deep-seated, especially about the idea that community residents should help police stop crime. “That’s not going to happen,” a young man named Jahkhil said at the end of the first class. (He, like most of the other students, is being identified by only his given name at the school’s request, so that the details of their lives don’t affect their future opportunities.)
“It’s just a rule — you just don’t snitch,” he said. “You can’t snitch.” The consequences for those who do are clear. “You going to be looked at a certain type of way,” he added, “and certain people are going to want to kill you.”
As politicians, police officials, civil rights activists and others talk about how to change relationships between the police and poor minority communities, there has been little discussion of what role schools might play. The city’s Education Department has made some modest efforts. In May, more than 300 elementary schools received visits from officers from their local precincts, who read to students or led physical education classes or other activities. But there was little preparation, and the program was not aimed at neighborhoods where mistrust of the police is most pervasive.
On July 14, after the shootings of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota, and then of five police officers in Dallas, New York City’s schools chancellor, Carmen Farina, sent a letter to principals, teachers and other department staff members asking for lesson plans to address topics of civil rights, guns and violence. She also asked for suggestions about how schools could develop relationships with local police precincts.
But few if any schools have attempted a program as intense as the one at Liberation. Leong and Cleare plan to repeat the class this year, with more field trips and hands-on activities. Over the five-month course, they intend to have the students tour the 60th Precinct’s station house and the new headquarters of the local housing police unit, Police Service Area 1.