The NYPD School Safety Division will be doubling its efforts to conduct weapon scans at campuses across the city after several high-profile violent incidents saw students hospitalized earlier this month, police brass confirmed.
In an interview with amNewYork Metro, Inspector Kevin Taylor, Commanding Officer of the Department’s School Safety Division, looked to reassure parents regarding the safety of their children after there were two stabbings and one slashing within three straight days last week.
The first of these violent incidents occurred on Dec. 5 at Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn, when a 15-year-old boy was stabbed in the stomach. A day later, a 12-year-old girl was stabbed in the leg at JHS 123 James. M. Kieran School in the Bronx. The attacks then continued, when a 15-year-old was slashed in the face at NYC Charter High School for Architecture, Engineering and Construction Industries (AECI), also in the Bronx.
Pledging to take quick action, the inspector declared that the NYPD would be performing more security checks as a direct response.
“They’re gonna see more scanning in schools. For the naysayers, the ones that think that we shouldn’t do scanning, you should look at the violence that hit our schools,” Taylor said. “It tells our young kids, our young students to leave weapons out of our schools.”
Taylor said this comes as part of an effort to be both proactive and reactive to the violence.
In addition to the scanning, the NYPD school safety division will also be initiating more outreach in an attempt to connect with kids in order to prevent them from resorting to violence. Taylor also said that the department will be implementing new active shooter safety measures too.
Taylor told amNewYork Metro that he recently visited a high school in Parkland, Florida, where 17 people were killed in a 2018 mass shooting, to see what could have been done differently to save lives. It is with this in mind, he said, NYC schools will be fitted with panic alarms, which will connect with emergency responders.
“We teamed up with a company called SaferWatch, where we’re actually able to place these devices within our school system and we’re able to roll out one for at least 4,000 school safety agents. Where if someone has a problem, they can press that button and get immediate response from our School Safety headquarters,” Taylor said.
amNewYork Metro pressed the inspector on the lead cause of the surge in school violence. However, the commanding officer says he is not seeing the violence stem from one issue only, such as gang activity. Instead, it is believed to come from a variety of issues, prompting safety agents to take what he calls a multipronged approach.
“We are seeing a variety of different things, and that’s the reason why we have to use more than just a one prong approach to this. This is definitely where multiple hands have to be involved in the scenario,” Taylor said. “The first incident in the confines of the 70 Precinct was gang related, the other one we can’t relate back to gangs. So, it’s not just one size fits all.”
