New York City schools call 911 on children in emotional distress more than 2,000 times a year, and hundreds of those children end up in handcuffs, Chalkbeat reported Thursday. Some are 6 or 7 years old. Since 2016, when the city began counting, schools have called 911 more than 5,000 times on children under 10.
Black children carry the weight of it. In an analysis of NYPD data covering 2017 to 2022 (leaving out the pandemic school years), THE CITY and ProPublica found that Black students were 25% of the student body but 46% of the “child in crisis” incidents and 59% of the cases in which a student was handcuffed. That analysis is the most recent racial breakdown we found. Chalkbeat says only that these calls fall far more often on students with disabilities and on Black students.
The police category is called “child in crisis.” It describes a child having a meltdown, not a child committing a crime. Crystal Roach, a parent quoted by Chalkbeat, said: “I just kept thinking: ‘Cops? For a 6-year-old?'” Nelson Mar of Legal Services NYC told the outlet: “Calling 911 doesn’t make anything better at school the next day.”
The city says it does not want this. The Education Department told Chalkbeat: “Under no circumstance is 911 ever called simply for a student’s behavior.” It also said: “Our students are children who need support, not children who should be criminalized.”
The rules on paper are not new. A 2013 lawsuit led to city regulations requiring staff to try de-escalation before dialing 911. After the 2023 ProPublica investigation, the City Council passed a law requiring police to record whether a school tried de-escalation first. Chalkbeat reports that progress has stalled anyway.
Advocates point to a fix that does not involve police: behavior specialists across districts, teacher training on how neurodivergent children melt down, and programs such as PATH that teach evidence-based strategies in ordinary classrooms. Nearly 30% of students classified with emotional disabilities are sent to separate District 75 schools, among the city’s weakest on attendance and graduation.
A school that calls the police on a first grader has handed a mental-health problem to an armed agency, and the handcuffs land on Black children at more than twice their share of enrollment. The city can answer with numbers: if calls on children under 10 do not fall, its own promise means nothing.
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