Problem: Parents are worried about random school shootings.
Bill De Blasio’s Solution: Remove NYPD cops from schools:
The last NYPD cops assigned full-time to New York City public schools are being moved out — despite nationwide calls for heightened security in the wake of last month’s Florida shootings.
As the nation mourned the 17 victims of the school massacre at Parkland, Fla., the NYPD was removing Sgt. Raul Espinet from his post at Francis Lewis HS in Fresh Meadows, Queens — where he had worked for more than a dozen years. Parents, teachers and students are livid over the beloved cop’s departure.
“My colleagues think it’s outrageous — and really stupid,” teacher Arthur Goldstein said. “We’re not enthusiastic about arming teachers, but we liked having a cop around.”
Espinet’s position was eliminated because cops in Mayor de Blasio’s new community policing units will visit schools while patrolling the neighborhood, according to the NYPD. School safety agents are stationed at all schools, but are not armed.
The once-common practice of putting an armed cop in schools waned in the 1990s. All were gradually eliminated, but Francis Lewis, one of the biggest high schools, slipped by. Bayside and Benjamin Cardozo high schools also recently lost their full-time NYPD officers, according to parents.
Espinet is one of the last — if not the last — school cop to go.
“I’m not aware of any other school with a full-time police officer assigned to it,” said Lt. John Grimpel, an NYPD spokesman.
Parents at the overcrowded Queens school, crammed with more than 4,400 students, are protesting the change.
“The community officer is in no way an acceptable replacement,” says a PTA petition launched last week.
The PTA is demanding that the NYPD and city Department of Education bring back an armed cop to Francis Lewis. It has collected more than 1,000 signatures in just two days, according to co-president Linda Lovett.
“It’s ridiculous,” Lovett said. “All over the country they are telling you ‘arm the teachers, get an officer in your school.’ New York City had a designated officer and they are actually cutting the program . . . they are making us less secure.
“You are talking about 5,000 people in a one-block radius, and you’re telling me you can’t designate one officer?”
Cop were originally put into New York City schools not to prevent school shootings, but to curb the overall criminality of students that broke out in epidemic proportions in the 1960s, including one infamous incident where a student set a teacher on fire.
Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and De Blasio seems hellbent on repeating all the mistakes of sixties radicals.
(Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
