By Ruchika Tulshyan

In early January of this year, 15-year-old Lisha Harbajan was stopped as she tried to enter Hillcrest High School in Queens just a few minutes after the late bell. But instead of letting her proceed to her first class, where she was to take a quiz, two school safety agents took her in a police car and drove her around Jamaica Avenue. She missed the quiz and failed that class.

Harbajan is among thousands of students who get disciplined each year by school safety agents, a department within the NYPD that is charged with promoting safe learning environments. But the methods used by these agents, say students, parents, civil liberties lawyers and a host of minority rights groups, are needlessly harsh and harass the very students they are supposed to protect.

“My experience made me feel like I should drop out of school,” Harbajan declared. On another occasion, the seventh-grader said a female South Asian friend was pushed by authorities without explanation. Harbajan is angry that school students are treated like criminals. “It’s absolutely unfair that they can get away with treating girls like that,” she said.

Charges that minority students targeted by school safety agents, have been around since the introduction of the system in 1998, particularly given that public schools with the highest concentration of safety agents also have the most minority students. There are more than 5,000 safety agents in city schools; essentially more police officers per student than most cities have per citizen. But an emerging number of minority female students say they face intimidation and have been singled out. “I was targeted by police because I’m Desi (South Asian),” Harbajan lamented.

A spokesman from the NYPD said that the agents have clearly defined roles. “School safety agents cannot discipline students and are only supposed to arrest students in criminal cases,” a police spokesman said.

After the January incident, Harbajan approached Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM), a South Asian organization to find out what her rights were. In November, dressed in a red DRUM t-shirt and looking older than her 15 years, she testified about her experience at City Hall, during a rally to push for accountability for the behavior of school safety agents.

Muslim South Asian girls have also come forward with similar tales. A 2006 DRUM report into youth harassment of South Asian minorities by school authorities found that “Muslim women students are particularly likely to experience harassment when they choose to express their faith through traditional dress.” It described the experience of 17-year-old Maksuda, another Hillcrest High School student who said that she was questioned repeatedly about how religious she was by police officers because she wore a hijab, or headscarf. “When she [a school safety agent] saw my ID, she saw that I was wearing a scarf. Now she picks on me whenever she sees me…I think she was doing this because I was wearing hijab,” the Queens student said in the report.

“Students in our organization have had problems such as being strip-searched if they wear a hijab [a head scarf worn by observant Muslim women],” said Sabita Ramsaran, a youth organizer with DRUM. “Our members complain about being arrested by the police for things such as being two minutes late for class, when it’s not police who should be disciplining them, but their teachers and principals.” An NYPD spokesman commented that students, male or female, are never strip-searched. He refused to comment on Maksuda’s incident, stating: “We can’t comment on this, it’s one person’s story.” But he added that “you cannot be arrested or stripped searched (sic) in New York City for being late to class.” Complaints against student safety agents are handled internally by the NYPD.

In response, the City Council has proposed the Student Safety Act, which if passed calls for school safety agents to provide greater accountability in police procedures and to avoid punitive safety policies in the city’s public schools, like the one used against Harbajan.  The act also calls for a system to report safety agent misconduct, and for the NYPD to provide quarterly reports on all arrests.

In November, there was a rally in support of the act at City Hall by a Student Safety Coalition, which includes 21 organizations and is headed by the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU). DRUM and Make the Road New York, both of Queens, are members of the coalition. Harbajan was one of the many students who described their experience with safety agents, to a group of City Council members.

“There is a rise in police targeting girls”, said Udi Ofer, Director of Advocacy at NYCLU. While the organization acknowledges it has no statistical data for its claim, it contends that minorities, and increasingly female minorities, are facing harassment by the policing in New York schools. “It’s very hard to tell exact numbers, but in general schools with metal detectors are disproportionately attended by students of color, and have a disproportionate number of police personnel,” he said.  The NYPD refused to comment on whether students of ethnic minorities, male or female, are discriminated against by safety agents.

South Asian students were particularly targeted by these agents after 9/11, said Abdul Kashef, a DRUM member who joined the City Hall rally to support his friend Sayeeda Akhthar, whose children were disciplined at school by safety agents. “It’s not right that police can question boys and girls without being held liable for why they are questioning students,” he said. “I feel that South Asian students are targeted because we’re from a third-world country and we’re believed to not have the right to speak up against this,” he added.

More than half of the South Asian students surveyed in Queens say they have experienced or seen harassment by school police and authorities, according to the 2006 survey conducted by DRUM. The Jackson Heights-based South Asian rights organization also found that 85 percent of those surveyed believed that the harassment was based on actual or perceived race, ethnicity, religion, or immigration status. They are conducting a follow-up survey.

Approximately 147 New York City schools are equipped with permanent metal detectors, which means that at least 10,000 schoolchildren must pass through a metal detector to enter school every day, according to the Student Safety Coalition. Minority children make up 82 percent of schools with permanent metal detectors, the Student Safety Coalition found.  For minority girls specifically, school safety agents being allowed to search them is a primary concern. Harbajan said that in South Asian cultures it is seen as an outrage to allow officers to search female students.

Many South Asians do not come forward with their harassment experiences as they are ashamed, DRUM representative, Ramsaran, said. “There has to be a change, and it has to be soon. South Asian students are definitely at a disadvantage when they are stopped by safety agents. Girls especially feel very threatened at school,” she concluded.

Student Safety Coalition rally at City Hall to push for Student Safety Act (Above)