School Police: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Funny how there’s always money to harden security at school but never enough when it comes to funding actual teaching and growth

When I was in high school I was dealing with stuff like bullying and mental health issues and home drama and I wrote an angry letter to my school counselor about how I was pissed about how stuff was going and about how I didn't want to go to school anymore

Im no way in that letter did I make a threat against anyone at the school or any of my classmates, I didnt even own a gun nor do I like guns. The one time I had the chance to fire a gun at a shooting range with my uncle I chickened out becuase I genuinely don't like guns nor do I like being around them

A day or two passed and my school resource officer pulled me into the principles office along with my dad and he made all these threats like "I could put you away for a long time" and they were actively treating me like I was some potential shooter and this guy was making so many threats and I started to cry and this dude legitimately starts laughing at me. I guess he liked seeing gay nerd kids cry.

For like the next month this officer was ghosting me fallowing me around like I was some sort of active threat that needed to be monitored and I ended up pulling out of high school over it.

These are not "good guys with guns"

People need to stop acting like every police officer is some sainted holy white knight. they aren't.

America: "It's not everyday you hear of the campus police officer taking on a role in the school play".
Rest of the world: It's not everyday you hear the phrase "campus police officer", what is going on over there guys?

“Kids deserve to be annoying without being arrested” might be the most truthful, REAL and IMPORTANT sentence said out loud on any medium outlet EVER!!

I'm an American who has been living in New Zealand the last 5yrs...the thought of being back in the US with my 3 boys is HORRIFYING. No police in the schools here, and no fear of a school shooting. Money for schools actually goes to...teachers and books and stuff! It is almost as if guns being harder to obtain, and mental health being easier to obtain, has some sort of strange relation to each other........

Scariest moment in high school was when the teacher invited the school cop to a debate class. It took all my courage to go through with it, and I “won” the debate. The anger and open hostility was scary. At the time it was a huge confidence boost because I overcame the fear and would not let him bully me into losing. But now I feel stupid and lucky that nothing happened to me.

At my high school our SRO would stand in front of the stairs to confiscate food people were carrying and throw it away in the morning because people weren't supposed to have food outside of the cafeteria. I grew up poor, so I qualified for free breakfast and lunch - without it I couldn't eat on any given school day. But I also lived rurally and my bus was often late, arriving literally right before the bell rang. I would run and grab food and an orange juice from the cafeteria and try to book it to bio, eating on the way, and she started standing at the staircase I had to take to get there. Every. Morning. Because preventing a potential mess for the janitors was more important than children being fed. I learned quickly though. I started only choosing bagels in the morning, which came with a sealed container of cream cheese, so I could stuff them in my backpack before I turned the corner to the stairs. She would try to stop me, I'd hold up my empty hands to show her I had no food then race up the stairs and eat in class. I'm really thankful Mr. Fabian, my bio teacher, didn't care that I ate in class, because that would have been a long semester of going hungry. I graduated 11 years ago and I still think about it all the time.

As a european watching, this is absolutly nuts. I can’t even wrap my head around how it is possible to arrest freaking kids. IF you decide there will be a cop at a school for protection against school shootings, that is the only thing that officer should be allowed to do. They should be prohibited to interfere with anything happing in a school. Leave those damn kids alone and let them be kids.

I graduated in 2016, and my high school had ‘campus police’. They would generally stand at corners not looking at any of us, just muttering into walkie-talkies, and I couldn’t tell you a single one of their names- but I’ll never forget when one of the ‘problem kids’ got upset about getting a detention, and the teacher called the campus police, who arrested her in the middle of class. She clearly had something going on but nobody ever seemed concerned about why a student might constantly be yelling and starting fights.

And for the record, I had classes with three white ‘problem kids’, and never saw the teachers call campus police on any of them.

Can you imagine anything more pathetic than a grown man who, for a career, goes back to school to bully children?

The more I learn about how US really is the more I am convinced that it is amongst the most dangerous countries to live/visit in the world

At my college we have a small army of officers although our campus isn't big. Last year in a public area I witnessed racially motivated harassment from a small group of students to a single student. Me and a few other students had to step in to stop things from escalating, despite there being 2-3 officers nearby clearly within hearing/seeing range. The police only came over to us after me and the others got involved, seemingly upset that we somehow made the situation worse. Luckily no one was arrested, but it was scary and sad.

That woman wasn't stalling for time, she was deciding if telling the truth was worth destroying her career.

That poor dad. He's basically trying to say "protect my kids, they're gonna bring you profits in the future" like a good dad he is. The only thing we need to be appalled about is the idea that the worker and his children are commodities.

"I'm scared that my wife, when teaching at school, can only defend herself with a backpack against a person armed with a gun" is a sentence we'll never hear outside of the USA. I'm in France and this kind of thought is utterly alien to me - because there are no mass shooting in France...
The problem with the USA is indeed gun control, but the problem with gun control is that you guys absolutely WORSHIP guns. Trying to control guns when guns are more important to you than almost anything else is... Well, difficult, to say the least.

as a kid, police presence in my schools made me distrustful of them early in life. I always felt like they were a potential threat and it kept me on edge whenever I walked past one. They were also a constant source of tension with kids who didn't have the best home lives. Idk what that dude was smoking if he thinks school cops improve kids' relationship to the police

I was mercilessly bullied in school—particularly in Middle School in the hallway & my Art Class. This occurred EVERY day; I finally made the bad judgment mistake by bringing a jackknife to Art class, one of the bullies went into my bag, found the knife, ANNOUNCED what I’d done—and my “weapon” was confiscated. Shortly thereafter, the Assistant Principal summoned me to his office. I wasn’t disciplined, someone on faculty knew my intention was to try & protect myself and he just wanted to talk to me. He did—and did so very gently. He let me know that HE knew sth was going on, he was watching—and that I should come to him instead. The bullying lessened (didn’t stop) but I was grateful for his efforts

The story about the kid with autism really hit home for me as someone on the autism spectrum. I was interrogated by police back in 8th grade due to a horrific rumor wherein they thought I was a threat to the school because my interest in firearms. I was also suspended for 5 days and then isolated from the entire school upon my return for an additional 5 days. The schools solution to me possibly being a threat to not do a full investigation but rather to believe the people who screamed louder, not unlike our current political climate.

As a foreigner, having armed officers in campus and students acknowledging them so casually is extremely disturbing

This is even more maddening when you consider the fact that this country has a FOR PROFIT PRISON SYSTEM. We literally have some judges who went to prison because they were deliberately giving kids harder sentences because they were receiving kickbacks and incentives from corporations that profit off of juvenile correctional facilities.