OFFICER Curtis Brown reckons 2015 was a fairly peaceful year at Furr High School, in the hardscrabble east side of Houston. True, five of its pupils died violently, including the school’s first-pick quarterback, Michael Davis, who was murdered in a gang fight, and two female students, who were killed in a school-bus crash. In the state that executes more people than any other, a recent old boy was also charged with three murders. Yet Mr Brown, one of the school’s two police officers, with a revolver, canister of pepper foam and a truncheon hanging from his belt, says he has known worse over his eight years at Furr: “It’s a tough place.”
It was with violent schools like Furr in mind that Texas began stationing police officers in its schools in the early 1990s, which helped start a national trend. It proceeded to accelerate on the back of persistent concerns over law and order during the decade; in 1999, after 13 people were massacred at Columbine High School, in Colorado, the federal government launched a supportive funding programme, Cops in Schools. By 2007 there were an estimated 19,000 school policemen, known as School Resource Officers,...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/1OIZQJn
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