City Hall is keeping parents in the dark about a growing school-safety crisis.
Susan Edelman gave the lowdown in Sunday’s Post. New NYPD data contradict Mayor de Blasio’s repeated assertions that city schools are safe. Over 1,750 weapons have been recovered in the past 10 months — up 26 percent over last year.
Greg Floyd, the head of the school-safety-agents’ union, accuses City Hall and the NYPD School Safety Division of whitewashing school-crime reports. The union has exposed multiple scary cases this year — including an 11-year-old waving a loaded gun at another student.
Floyd blames the “lax tone” set by de Blasio for the spike in weapons at schools. “Kids aren’t stupid. They know that they won’t be punished,” says Floyd.
In particular, he points to the new discipline code, which discourages suspensions and other on-the-record punishments: “In many cases, the children aren’t arrested, so the crime statistics are down — but it’s just not being reported.”
In February, The Post reported how state data show school violence up 23 percent last year, even as de Blasio claims a 29 percent drop in school crime since the 2010-11 academic year.
Yet now the mayor’s School Leadership Climate Committee wants to scale back metal detectors.
Floyd says NYPD School Safety Division bigwigs are grilling agents who have shared photos of confiscated weapons — with the union, not the public. This, when the main NYPD regularly tweets out “look at this illegal gun we recovered.”
Who’s behind the pressure to keep the bad news quiet? Well, Police Commissioner Bill Bratton is a professional dedicated to making accurate data public. Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña is a career bureaucrat who’s proven unable or unwilling to crack down on grade- and test-fixing.
Sounds like one more subject that deserves hard questions at this week’s state Senate hearing on whether to renew the mayor’s control of the schools.