Metal Detectors Don't Make NYC Schools Safer, Students Tell Mayor

MIDTOWN MANHATTAN, NY — Mayor Bill de Blasio invited dozens of New York City high schoolers to talk about how they want to make change after last month's deadly school shooting in Florida. What they wanted to change, it turned out, was the city's imposition of metal detectors on their schools.

Several of the roughly two dozen students who spoke at Thursday's town hall event said the screenings make them feel targeted and criminalized. And many expressed a lack of trust in the NYPD's 5,000 school safety agents despite de Blasio's efforts to strengthen relationships with police around the city.

Only about 90 of the city's more than 1,000 schools have metal detectors in place permanently, de Blasio said. But students argued they're placed far more often in schools where the student body comprises mostly people of color, despite city officials' assertions to the contrary.

"Why are you ... prioritizing police and metal detectors instead of ensuring we have enough social, emotional and mental health support in our schools?" Andrea Colon, a senior at Rockaway Park High School, said before the crowd of more than 100.

The city's high schools lack enough guidance counselors to handle students' concerns, students said, calling on the mayor to hire more of them. Several also said the city should expand its portfolio of other resources to help students socially and emotionally.

De Blasio organized Thursday's event at the Vanderbilt YMCA as a response to the Feb. 14 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where Nikolas Cruz killed shot and killed 17 people. The incident has prompted students in New York and across the country to organize protests and walkouts, including one set for March 14, calling for stronger gun control laws.

He praised the students — several of them involved in organizing those walkouts or in student government — and encouraged them to continue their activism. They either took his advice or didn't need it — several participated in an impromptu protest outside the building after the event, videos from the scene show, chanting, "Let the youth speak!" and "Hey hey, ho ho, metal detectors have got to go!"

At several points, the mayor and first lady Chirlane McCray took straw polls of the students, asking whether knew who to go to if they were having mental health problems and whether they had good relationships with school safety agents. Only a handful raised their hands to answer yes to either question.

Some students felt they could talk to their school safety agents, who are unarmed, but said they didn't have close enough relationships with them. Others said the agents don't help them feel safe.

Sagar Sharma from John Bowne High School in Queens said students there now go through metal detectors daily, but had temporary screenings for a week after a stabbing last year. Safety agents manning them at the time greeted students by saying, "Good morning, John Bowne stabbers," he said; they were later replaced.

"As a person of color I feel like the school safety officers, they’re there more to watch me instead of to help me," said Olukemi, a black student at Scholars Academy in Rockaway Park, Queens.

De Blasio acknowledged the gap in trust between students and school safety agents and committed to fixing the problem. At the event, he told Chief Nilda Hofmann, the head of the NYPD's Community Affairs Bureau, to make sure every school organizes a meeting between its agents and students.

"We’ve got some work to do," he said. "It’s not a shocker. We are trying to change the approach."

But de Blasio and his officials defended the city's policy on metal detectors. The mayor got testy at times with students for continuing to bring up the issue after McCray asked them what mental health services they wanted to see in schools.

The city only deploys the scanners where they're needed, and there are clear criteria for both installing and removing them, the mayor and his officials said.

De Blasio last month said every middle and high school will have random screenings in the coming months after the Parkland shooting. But when the city wants to put them in a school permanently, it does so in consultation with the NYPD and school officials, de Blasio has said.

"I think what we’re hearing hear today is that we’ve got to do better at the trust and communication part, and I would argue the better we do at that, the more chance we have to re-evaluate, in any given school, the use of scanners," de Blasio said. "Until we are sure, we're obviously not going to take away something we think is deterrent."

Watch the full town hall meeting below.

(Lead image: Sagar Sharma, a student at John Bowne High School in Queens, speaks at a town hall on gun violence with Mayor Bill de Blasio on Thursday. Image via NYC Mayor's Office/YouTube)