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Comment by Pxtl | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I'm not sure that police involvement for this stuff is a bad thing.

Schools are no longer equipped to handle violence between students, and it's questionable whether they ever were. They've lost many disciplinary tools they could use to deal with violent students, and even then it's hard to say that schools properly handled bullying or other student-on-student violence issues back in the "good old days".

Bringing in the police to handle those kinds of issues might actually be the appropriate response. Pulling out an arrest for it though seems excessive.

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>Honestly, I'm not sure that police involvement for this stuff is a bad thing. Schools are no longer equipped to handle violence between students, and it's questionable whether they ever were.

I don't know, they are perfecty fine to "handle violence between students" in Western Europe, and without metal detectors and police on site.

Perhaps it's time for the society to recheck it's course, instead of throwing jail time at the problem?

I don't agree. School in Western Europe can be a horrifying experience where the only solution is that the person being beaten up transfers to another school. Nothing is done about the people beating.

Emphasis on can. Of course it can, there is always outliers and there is nothing that can be done about that. However I would guess that in the majority of cases people beating do get handled. I am just guessing. Are you just guessing too or do you have some hard evidence or statistics to back your claim?

My personal experience and that of other members of my family is in line with Kiro's claim. Not very strong evidence, but it's what I've got.

Where I'm from people doing the beatings would get warnings, detention, special class and consultation, or as a last resort youth detention center ("prison" for kids with focus on rehabilitation) in that order. Sure, you could also move schools but this seems more to have been a decision taken by parents and not the school system itself.

I don't know. I went to school there, and there was absolutely zero (or 0.01% cases) of beating I'm aware of. In a whole region of 130.000 people.

Perhaps that's the case in some down and out regions in England or France, with rampant poverty and ex-industrial towns/suburbs (think Detroit).

But not in the majority of Western Europe. Some guys getting into a fight, sure. But beatings are not an occurance in schools, the same way guns aren't.

Except that actual violence comitted by teens is going down.

That could be taken as an argument that police intervention in schoolyard violence works.

My point isn't that schools are more violent, but that we're correctly identifying that managing school violence is not part of the teacher role, and simply ignoring it as "boys will be boys" isn't good either.

While violence may not be a part of the teacher role, education certainly is. And that sounds like the kind of social education that is an extension of what family should be providing. I'm wary of sending policemen to school, just the same as I'd be wary of sending policemen to families ("violence is not part of the parent role").

It could, but the time period violent crime has been going down and the period that saw far more cops in schools don't completely overlap.

The "more cops deployed in schools" thing lagged the preference for police intervention and legal charges for school-site crimes that previously might have been handled informally (deploying cops to schools was a response to the fact that the cops were being called to schools more often.)

So if it was the change in disciplinary approach that drove the decrease in violent crime, its quite possible that effect would somewhat precede the increase in police deployments in schools.

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