NYC Cops Take a Stand Against Doodling

by Te-Ping Chen · 2010-02-05 15:43:00 UTC
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New York is the "safest big city in America," as Mayor Bloomberg would repeatedly have you know. So he must be feeling pretty gratified now that cops have finally been able to start going after those last low-grade perpetrators left in the mix: middle-school students.

Or something like that. This week, they decided to haul a 12-year-old girl in Queens out of her school in handcuffs and detain her. Why? Well, they had to rush the classroom because, you see, a girl named Alexa Gonzalez was...doodling in class.

Just some bizarre extension of the Broken Windows theory? Let one kid doodle, and before you know it, they'll be rioting in the streets?

But hey, let's be fair. It could've gotten ugly there. "I love my friends Abby and Faith," the suspect had written on her desk, with a lime-green Magic Marker. And that was even before she added, "Lex was here, 2/1/10" -- and drew a smiley face.

So glad the cops were there to keep that scene under control. It was kind of like the time that the NYPD saved a classroom from 5-year-old Dennis Rivera, who threw a temper tantrum in front of other kindergarteners. (Remember? The police handcuffed him and sent him to a psych ward.) Or that 11-year-old also caught doodling on her desk in erasable ink (who the police likewise cuffed and perp-walked down to the precinct). Those New York City kids sure can be tough. So tough, in fact, that they require the nation's fifth-largest police force to keep them in check.

That's right. Since 1998, when the New York Police Department took control of NYC's public school safety, over 5,000 officers have been assigned to the city's schools. That's more than the total number of police assigned to patrol the nation's capitol. Or Baltimore. Or Las Vegas. Or Dallas. Or Boston.  Even though school enrollment in New York City is the lowest it's been in a decade. Even though in-school crime had been dropping prior to 1998. But NYC kids are just that scary -- you know, what with their crayons and Magic Markers and all. You never know what surface they'll write on next.

Photo Credit: wokka

Te-Ping Chen Te-Ping Chen is a freelance writer and U.S. Truman Scholar whose writing has appeared in the Nation Magazine, the South China Morning Post magazine, Le Soir, and Slate.com.
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