Injuries to NYC school safety officers see drastic decline
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. December 17 2018 — Data from the NYPD shows that injuries to school safety officers have seen a decline in consecutive years citywide, down from 121 reported cases in 2016 to only 28 through three quarters of 2018.
While the 2018 statistics only feature 75 percent of the expected data for 2018, a drastic dip in overall injuries is evident.
However, the fourth quarter of the year has been known to see an uptick in overall injuries, according to NYPD data.
According to Phyllis Safran, a spokeswoman for Teamsters Local 237, a union for school safety officers, “A school safety agent was assaulted at John Adams High School” in Queens on Dec. 6. “A student from the school was not happy about the use of scanners. …She, her mom and a friend came back (on Thursday) and attacked the agent. The three were arrested,” Safran said.
This incident, and any incident from October until Jan. 1, 2019, will not be reflected in the overall data until the end of the year.
In 2017, 130 injuries to school safety officers were reported, with 40 of them resulting in a hospital visit, according to NYPD data. In contrast, only 17 of the 28 incidents reported for this year have resulted in a hospital visit.
There is also a decline in overall FADO complaints from 2016, which measure complaints against school safety officers. The acronym represents complaints regarding force, abuse of authority, discourtesy and offensive language.
According to NYPD data, there were 208 overall complaints across New York City schools in 2016, with four of them being filed from Staten Island precincts. Last year, only one of 130 FADO complaints in New York City took place on Staten Island.
This year is a different story. With 107 complaints through three quarters, it is possible that FADO complaints see a slight increase from last year overall. On Staten Island alone, 10 complaints have been filed, a large increase from the last two years
Frank Squicciarini, president of Community Education Council 31, said that the numbers do not necessarily reflect a trend of inadequacy on the part of school safety officers. Rather, Squicciarini said that the situation is “just like being a police officer…the more active the safety officer is, the more complaints.”
Squicciarini, who is also a retired NYPD sergeant for the Counterterrorism Bureau, said that a “proactive” school safety officer will likely have more complaints, similar to an officer “who makes a lot of arrests…and pulls a lot of weapons off the street.”
The majority of the FADO complaints concern the use of force, according to NYPD data.
Squicciarini added that “a lot of times when an enforcement action is taken, they try to say the officers instigated it. They’re looking to let their punishment be less by blaming the school safety officer.”
Safran said that there was no comment from Teamsters Local 237 regarding the data, and that the union’s data acquisition is primarily anecdotal.
NYPD did not respond to a request for comment regarding the data.
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