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An Australian friend draws our attention to two stories that appeared in the Australian press last week:
The government of Western Australia is considering placing police officers in that state’s high schools, in response to a recent increase in assaults on teachers there…
…And an officer assigned to an “elite unit designed to be the public face of [the] police in high schools” in the state of New South Wales has been arrested on charges that he sexually assaulted a child.
This is just one incident, of course. But it does serve as a reminder that whatever the benefits to teachers and students of bringing police onto school grounds may be, the practice carries real costs as well.
(Thanks to lauredhel of Hoyden About Town for the tip.)
A professor at the University of East London has been suspended from his position for predicting that there may “be real bankers hanging from lampposts” at Wednesday’s protests against the G20 economic summit.
Chris Knight, a professor of anthropology, is an organizer of G20 protests in London this week. He told the BBC that if bankers and government ministers don’t “surrender their power, obviously it’s going to get us even more wound up and things could get nasty.”
Knight’s G20 Meltdown is just one of many groups planning actions in London this week, but Knight’s eagerness to make incendiary statements to the media has made him the most quoted figure in the movement right now.
The UEL’s decision to suspend him has confirmed that position.
The British police have in recent months opened files on more than two hundred students who have been identified as potential “criminals and would-be terrorists” by teachers and other authority figures.
Under a program called the “Channel project,” launched in selected British localities 18 months ago, Muslim students who have expressed “bad attitudes towards ‘the West'” have been reported to the police and subsequently subjected to formal intervention by community members or government officals. Such intervention is said to range from meetings with religious leaders to investigation by social services workers and “intervention directly by the police.”
Students targeted by the Channel project have been as young as thirteen.
Connecticut eighth grader Patrick Abbazia attended classes wrapped in duct tape Friday morning to protest his East Shore Midddle School’s “no touching” policy.
Earlier in the week, East Shore principal Catherine Williams sent home a letter telling parents that “physical contact is prohibited to keep all students safe in the learning environment.” The announcement was prompted by an incident in which a student required medical attention after being kicked in the groin, but the letter specifically banned “hugging” and “horseplay” as well.
Contacted by the Connecticut Post, Williams said she was “only concerned about unsafe behaviors,” but Abbazia claimed teachers had told him that high-fives and pats on the back were out of bounds as well. Superintendent of Schools Harvey Polansky told the paper that principals would use their discretion in interpreting the policy.
Abbazia had a friend tape his torso at the shoulders and elbows while he was waiting for the school bus, and kept the tape on until fourth period, just after noon. School officials called his father in for a conference, telling him that Patrick had misunderstood the policy.
The elder Abbazia told a reporter that he supported his son’s actions. “He is using his freedom as an American citizen to protest,” he said. “Those are the kind of people who get ahead in the world.”
An appeals court in Mexico has found that there is insufficient evidence to prosecute former Mexican president Luis Echeverria in the 1968 mass killings of student protesters in Mexico City’s Tlatelolco Square. Echeverria was the head of the federal police at the time of the massacre.
Federal agents fired on a peaceful pro-democracy protest in Tlatelolco Square on the evening of October 2, 1968, days before the start of the Mexico City Olympics. Five thousand students and others were participating in the rally, and estimates of the number of dead range into the hundreds. (The official government tally was just thirty.)
The killings provoked an appalled response from Mexico’s citizens, and helped to spur a new resistance to the country’s repressive government. Mexico’s current president, Ernesto Zedillo, has called 1968 “the watershed of the country’s political life, when a real public outcry began for a more democratic country.”
Echeverria served as president of Mexico from 1970 to 1976. Since 2006 he had been held under house arrest in connection with the Tlatelolco Square killings.
A statement from Amnesty International yesterday called the court’s ruling “a symptom of the failure of successive Mexican governments and legislatures, as well as the courts and prosecutors, to live up to Mexico’s international human rights commitments.”
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