Boston councilors call for policing, school reforms

Boston city councilors are calling for reforms to bring racial equity in policing and schools as protests continue across the nation against the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, by a white Minneapolis police officer.

Councilor-at-Large Michelle Wu on Wednesday requested information from the Boston Police Department about “what sort of weapons of war (and) military vehicles” it owns.

“As we are talking about the idea of demilitarization and the studies that show that more heavily militarized law enforcement forces are more likely to result in civilian fatalities, are likely to escalate situations rather than deescalate them, we need to think about what it means to create a truly safe community for every single person in that community,” Wu said.

“So this would provide a starting point in terms of just having some specifics on what do Boston police possess right now,” she added.

Council President Kim Janey said reforms also are needed in education, where discipline sometimes feeds the pipeline to prison, particularly for students of color.

“Suspensions in schools should be the last resort,” Janey said. “We need to be doing everything possible to make sure that our young people have access to the classroom and their teachers at all costs, and that the punitive measures that we were putting in place are harming, doing much more harm than good.”

Programs that have real success — and that should be funded, she said — include ones that focus on restorative justice and lead to healing; otherwise the “unaddressed trauma” many youngsters have experienced “will continue to be triggered, and we’re going to continue in a cycle.”

Councilor Andrea Campbell, a former education attorney who worked for a nonprofit, recalled one of her first cases: a boy under the age of 10 who had been arrested and taken out of school in handcuffs and put in the back of a police car for an incident that occurred on a bus.

“That should never happen to any young child in not just Boston but in this country,” Campbell said. “it makes no sense. … If that happened to a child who was not black, for example, we would be mobilized; we would be outraged.”

Today, 1 in 3 black boys and 1 in 6 Latino boys in this country go to prison, she said, compared to 1 in 17 white boys, “and it’s on the uptick for black and brown girls.”

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/3dThIQm