The city of Boston is currently suffering it was through a notable increase in the number of violent incidents at public schools in the wake of the city making the choice to rid the schools of their standard police officer at the end of the last fall semester.
The police officers who had been tasked with the protection of the students and staff of Boston’s public schools for the previous decades were quickly replaced with school safety specialists, who lack all law enforcement powers, and when students finally came back for in-person learning this past September after just a year of remote learning due to the pandemic.
Over the course of this academic year, the schools around the city have been forced to deal with a series of violent attacks which have prompted talks about overall public safety and the previous choice to get rid of police officers that were stationed on campus to protect the schools during class hours.
Back at the start of last November, one female student aged 16 was taken into custody for attacking and knocking out her principal, who was a woman well past the age of 60, at the Dr. William W. Henderson K-12 Inclusion School. The attack resulted in quite serious injuries to the principal, and the student was slammed with multiple assault counts, which included one charge of assault causing serious bodily injury.
Additionally, just this month, a student and a teacher were shot while in the parking lot of TechBoston Academy. The victims of the attack were a 17-year-old boy and a 31-year-old man, both of whom suffered very serious but non-life-threatening wounds and were taken to hospitals in the area.
A little over two weeks later, a pair of teen mails, a 16-year-old and a 17-year-old were taken into custody in connection with that shooting.
“Obviously, this is a very concerning and disturbing set of circumstances,” stated Gregory Long, the Boston Police Superintendent-in-Chief, of this latest incident. “Schools are supposed to be a safe haven for our students and our teachers, not a place where they’re subjected to brazen and random acts of violence.”
“We will make sure that this is an incident that we quickly address, and make sure that our school communities have what they need to process and heal,” stated Michelle Wu, the Mayor of Boston.
The 2020 police reform bill from Massachusetts was the major turning point that pushed the public schools of Boston to stop the hiring of police officers to be on-site while school is in session.
That police reform law, which passed in response to the racial justice protests over the summer, would have forced school police officers to get multiple hundreds of hours of additional training in order to maintain their presence on campus. The vast majority of schools chose to forgo the police presence and instead bring on school safety specialists without handcuffs or the power to arrest anyone.