School Violence
Deadly consequences
"Zero tolerance" policies to stop youth violence may actually make schools less safe, an expert says.
When 15-year-old Charles Andrew Williams walked into court Wednesday in his oversized orange jumpsuit to be arraigned for wounding 13 people and killing two classmates at Santana High School on Monday, it was hard not to notice how young the teenage killer seemed, no matter how heinous his crime.
But whatever the investigation of Williams uncovers, one thing is already clear: The high school freshman will be tried as an adult, thanks to California’s latest crackdown on juvenile crime, Proposition 21, a ballot measure that passed last year and requires that teenagers as young as 14 who are accused of murder be tried as adults. Now Williams’ attorneys are trying to use his case to challenge Prop. 21 by arguing that its provisions, which automatically move their client’s case to adult court, are unconstitutional.
But Prop. 21 may not be the last tough-on-crime approach to juvenile violence. Already the Santee, Calif., shootings have led to now-familiar calls for action to reduce the problem: tougher gun control, stricter security on high school campuses, as well as, in the words of President Bush, teaching children “the difference between right and wrong.” But before the latest school shooting leads to more Draconian anti-juvenile crime measures, it’s worth noting that violence by youths has sharply declined in the last few years, even as killings at Columbine and Santana grabbed headlines. And some experts now think our hysteria about school violence may actually be limiting our attempts to curb it.
“You’re five times as likely to get killed on your way to school or from it than in school,” says Frank Zimring, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley who has studied crime statistics for 30 years. “So if you want to create a metal-detector society, you better put the metal detectors on the other side of the schoolyard.” The juvenile murder rate, Zimring notes, is at its lowest level in nearly 20 years. According to the Justice Department, juvenile murder arrests dropped 68 percent between their peak year of 1993 and 1999. And schools are still the safest place that kids can be.
But the public doesn’t seem to think so. A Gallup poll taken last April asked whether people felt a random school shooting like the one at Columbine was likely to happen in their area; 30 percent said they felt it was “very likely,” 36 percent said “somewhat likely” and only 13 percent said it would be “very unlikely.
The circumstances of the Santana shootings raise the possibility, however, that our paranoia about school shootings — and the “zero tolerance” policies schools adopt to crack down on potentially violent kids — may even be counterproductive. Williams’ friends told reporters that the boy had been boasting about shooting up the school for several days before claiming he was kidding, but they didn’t tell anyone, because they didn’t want to get him in trouble.
“By creating zero tolerance,” Zimring says, “you raise the price of telling an adult about what a kid you like told you. Under those circumstances, you get exactly what you had here: a reluctance to tell on your friends.”
Jaana Juvonen, a behavioral scientist at the Rand Institute, says the typical solutions that have arisen to combat juvenile violence “may not only be ineffective but may actually backfire.” Zero-tolerance policies, she says, are the worst example.
“We think of zero tolerance as the school’s way of showing kids how they will not tolerate that kind of behavior,” Juvonen says. “But this is a mere tactic to punish; it’s retribution. We focus on the act and we forget the motives, and by doing that we may actually increase a kid’s risk for future behavior problems, and at least the kid’s alienation from school.”
Another popular approach is to put police officers on campus — last month, the Department of Justice announced $70 million in new grants for COPS [Community Oriented Policing Services] in Schools programs in 47 states. But there was a cop on duty at Santana High, and he wasn’t able to stop the freshman from sneaking a pistol into school and opening fire in the boys’ bathroom.
Juvonen says she has never seen a study indicating that cops-in-schools programs have any benefit. She says such programs please school officials because they send a visible message “that our community is doing everything we can, that parents have peace of mind when they drop off their kids at the middle school because there’s police standing at the front door.”
But students might feel differently. “There is some preliminary evidence to show that in these schools where they have metal detectors and use security checks — where the physical safety issues are very salient — that that’s where kids’ anxieties are heightened. It’s a constant reminder of how unsafe the school is.”
The most important aspect of preventing school violence, Juvonen says, is in fact psychological safety. A report from the surgeon general in January backs up that notion. It calls on the public to address school violence as a health issue — to look at stresses like violence at home and on the streets, as well as the impact of drugs that lead to violent behavior. It also states emphatically that incarcerating teenagers or trying them in adult court for their offenses only makes it more likely that they will become criminals for life.
Yet trying kids as adults is exactly what California voters decided to do when they passed Proposition 21 last year. Now Williams will be tried as an adult for the Santana shootings, and if convicted, he would also serve time in an adult prison thanks to Prop. 21. If he’s convicted, he’ll face more than 500 years in prison.
An unprecedented alliance came together to oppose Prop 21 — including the California Youth Authority and California Juvenile Court Judges, the Parent Teacher Association and the League of Women Voters (organizations that rarely take positions on such issues). But they didn’t defeat it. Early cases show that prosecutors have exercised restraint in moving juvenile cases into the adult court system. And a state court recently struck down a provision that gave prosecutors, rather than judges, the discretion about whether to do so.
But what the future holds for juvenile offenders is uncertain, and school shootings only intensify the hysteria. “There’s been a crisis and now everybody and their grandma seems to come up with a solution, and people are going wildly after these programs,” Juvonen says. “What’s scary about it is not only the money that gets poured into some programs where there’s no proof of their effectiveness, but that when you start probing and questioning some of the underlying assumptions of these programs, you say, why would this ever work?”
Fiona Morgan is an associate editor for Salon News. More Fiona Morgan.
Inside the bully economy
A provocative new book argues that deregulation is leading to more school shootings. We speak to the author
As the details of this week’s Chardon, Ohio, school shooting emerged, they seemed eerily familiar. On Monday, three students were killed when a gunman emptied 10 bullets into a group of teens sitting at a cafeteria table. Once again, the alleged shooter, T.J. Lane, a 17-year-old fellow student, was described as a “loner” with a “troubled” family history. And, once again, other students described him as the victim of “bullying.” And so Chardon joins the long list of violent school incidents with a connection to America’s rampant bullying problem.
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Thomas Rogers is Salon's Arts Editor. More Thomas Rogers.
Police: 3 shot at Los Angeles-area high school
The shooter, believed to be a student at Gardena High School, is still at large
Police on scene at Gardena High School following the shooting. Police say three people have been shot at Gardena High School in Los Angeles and the shooter is at large.
Gardena police Lt. Steve Prendergast says the shooter is believed to be a student.
Prendergast says the three victims have been treated by paramedics and transported to a hospital.
The lieutenant says a teacher called 911 at 10:41 a.m. Tuesday and police from the city of Gardena initially responded. The school is actually located in the city of Los Angeles and the incident is being turned over to Los Angeles police.
L.A. school district confirms 2 wounded in accidental shooting
Principal Rudy Mendoza says the 10th-grader who brought the gun to school has been apprehended by police
A wounded student is taken to an ambulance in Los Angeles. A gun in a 10th-grader’s backpack accidentally discharged when he dropped the bag, wounding two students at a Los Angeles high school, the campus principal said.
Gardena High School Principal Rudy Mendoza said the student dropped the bag as he walked between classes at midmorning. The boy who brought the gun was apprehended, Mendoza told The Associated Press.
Los Angeles Fire Department Capt. Jamie Moore said two victims were transported to a hospital, one in serious and one in critical condition.
Continue Reading CloseAnti-government gunman had Dec. 14 marked
Clay Duke had circled his calendar for Tuesday school board attack, in which he was the only casualty
Police say the ex-convict who held a Florida school board at gunpoint had been planning to do it for some time.
Panama City Police Chief John Van Etten says Tuesday’s date was circled on a calendar found in the trailer where 56-year-old Clay Duke lived north of Panama City.
Duke shot himself after firing at school board members during a meeting Tuesday. No one else was hurt. Before opening fire, he painted a red V on a wall and talked about his wife being fired.
Officials say she worked for the schools, but it wasn’t clear whether she resigned or had been fired or what her job was. She was apparently living with her mother in a nearby town.
Continue Reading CloseWisconsin teen dies after school hostage drama
Police say Samuel Hengel, 15, shot himself after holding fellow students, teacher in classroom
Authorities say a 15-year-old boy who held 23 students and a teacher hostage in a Wisconsin classroom has died at a Green Bay hospital from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Marinette Police Chief Jeff Skorik says sophomore Samuel Hengel died at 10:44 a.m. Tuesday. Skorik says Hengel, of Porterfield, shot himself as police stormed a classroom at Marinette High School Monday night.
The 24 hostages who were held for several hours Monday afternoon were not injured.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.
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