, once a
always a
United States | News & Politics
The 21 Jump Street spin-off that nobody wanted
Secret Jump Street?
Bad joke. I edited my comment to make it better (hopefully).
bastard cop does bastard cop shit, imagine my surprise
High Schoolers Tout Anti-Snitching Program Encouraging Stuffing Kamala Harris Into A Locker
Ok i guess I'm Godwinning but how come nobody else said 'hitler youth' yet?
Man, I hoped he would've picked someone else as his running mate... anyone else. But it seems she's going to be running with him...
They can't drop her though, because she's all the diversity on the ticket. The only possible way to avoid backlash from dropping Harris would be picking someone that checks even more diversity boxes.
I'd prefer Tulsi Gabbard, which should tick similar diversity boxes. But that might just tick off her base.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
But in a land where gun control is politically impossible, the only tangible help the Biden administration offers schools are resources to conduct better behavioral profiling of students, doing so through a Secret Service center founded to study the psychology of presidential assassins.
School shootings are indeed an epidemic in America, and Nikolas Cruz, who killed 17 and injured 17 more in Parkland is a tragic example of yet another juvenile who fell through every social service safety net that American society had to offer.
Today, NTAC is “a multidisciplinary team of social science researchers” who assist “law enforcement, schools, government, and other public and private sector organizations to combat the ever-evolving threat of targeted violence,” according to its website.
Over decades, the NTAC has created desks in over a half-dozen Secret Service field offices, staffed by domestic security strategists who conduct school visits and staff training that mostly focus on recognizing “behavioral” traits that its study associates with mass violence.
“Accurate behavioral threat assessments and early interventions are essential to maintaining a safe environment in our schools and communities and preventing another tragedy from taking place,” Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said, in reintroducing the legislation.
“The U.S. Secret Service is uniquely equipped to help evaluate these threats, and our bill would enable them to share their tools and expertise with school safety partners across the country.”
The original article contains 1,246 words, the summary contains 227 words. Saved 82%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
In gommunist chyna . . .
Question for Democrats-
Based on current polling there is a better than 50% chance that Donald Trump is the next president.
Why the monumental lack of foresight? Why create and expand massive federal apparatus that will likely be used and abused by your opposition, in ways you didn't intend?
Politics is the realm of unintended consequences.
Your average Democrat is unlikely to be supportive of this. And just like your average voter of any political leaning, they're even more likely to be unaware of it.
Someone said Biden is surrounded by overly-optimistic people being yes-peeps. That would make sense when we see articles about how he's mad that he's getting criticized by young people about Gaza. Fuck Israel.
The Intercept. How fitting. They intercepted me reading their article with a shitty pop-up, so that I could not continue to read their article.
I gotcha. Tip: most of the websites that do this will work in whatever Reader Mode if you activate it in the moment between when the article loads and the paywall. Article:
When Vice President Kamala Harris toured the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School this week, site of the infamous 2018 Parkland, Florida, mass shooting, she pushed for more gun control and called for communities to accept more federal help in stopping school shootings. “I will continue to advocate for what we must do in terms of universal background checks and assault weapons ban” Harris said.
But in a land where gun control is politically impossible, the only tangible help the Biden administration offers schools are resources to conduct better behavioral profiling of students, doing so through a Secret Service center founded to study the psychology of presidential assassins. The push, supported by a bipartisan bill that would strengthen the role of the Department of Homeland Security in school violence, would turn America’s schools into another adjunct of the national security apparatus, a veritable school for spies.
School shootings are indeed an epidemic in America, and Nikolas Cruz, who killed 17 and injured 17 more in Parkland is a tragic example of yet another juvenile who fell through every social service safety net that American society had to offer. He is a poster child for the ease with which mentally ill Americans can acquire guns. But can the Secret Service really help to deal with the scourge, and is it the right agency to do so?
The Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center, or NTAC, was created in 1998 to examine threats to the president and security at complex public gatherings. Its focus was expanded a year later to the psychology of school shootings after the Columbine shooting resulted in 15 deaths and horrified the nation. Today, NTAC is “a multidisciplinary team of social science researchers” who assist “law enforcement, schools, government, and other public and private sector organizations to combat the ever-evolving threat of targeted violence,” according to its website.
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Over decades, the NTAC has created desks in over a half-dozen Secret Service field offices, staffed by domestic security strategists who conduct school visits and staff training that mostly focus on recognizing “behavioral” traits that its study associates with mass violence. Last year alone, the NTAC touted some 331 training sessions, and it brags that over the last five years, it has trained hundreds of thousands of school administrators and teachers. The demand for its assistance, the Secret Service says, is thanks in part to NTAC publications regarding threats to schools. In its most recent report, “Improving School Safety Through Bystander Reporting,” the NTAC suggests schools encourage programs for students to report suspicious behavior, removing barriers that might impede any such tattletale reporting.
“For reporting programs to be a useful tool for intervention and prevention in K-12 schools, students and other members of a reporting community need to be aware of the importance of reporting, their role in reporting, what to report, and any resources that are available when it comes to reporting threats and other concerns,” the NTAC report says. “Research finds that the fear of being ostracized, or experiencing other forms of retaliation, is a significant barrier to reporting. When students view reporting as ‘snitching,’ they are discouraged from coming forward with their concerns.”
Another NTAC study, “Averting Targeted School Violence: A U.S. Secret Service Analysis of Plots Against Schools,” studied nearly 70 averted attacks against schools, using demographic information to identify school shooters. Attributes tracked by NTAC include history of school discipline, contact with law enforcement, experience being bullied, mental health issues, alcohol and drug use, and the broadly defined psychological trauma “impacted by adverse childhood experiences.”
NTAC stresses that the goal of school monitoring of students and its suggested “see something, say something” practice is successful intervention. It is the same framework originally created to deal with international terrorism and now expanded to thwart domestic “extremists” and government “insider threats.”
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But are such government programs created to deal with national security threats appropriate when applied to K-12 schools? Not only is NTAC’s list of behavioral threats just as applicable to skateboarders as they are to potential shooters, but lodging the school safety program in the Secret Service, and its Protective Intelligence Division (where NTAC is assigned), also questionably pushes school systems to adopt a national and homeland security curriculum.
“One thing I learned is that threat assessment doesn’t happen in a vacuum,” Bev Baligad, chair of Threat Team Hawaiʻi, said after the Hawaiʻi Threat Assessment Conference last year, where NTAC and the Department of Homeland Security’s National Threat Evaluation and Reporting office made presentations. NTER houses the national “see something, say something” campaign and its own behavioral threat assessment and management program office. “There is a statewide push to build threat assessment capacity on all islands,” Baligad told the conference.
At an NTAC training in Arizona last month, Cochise County School Superintendent Jacqui Clay said, “As the county school superintendent, the reason that we’re doing this is that we have to become a learning community and not be in silos, especially when it comes to school safety.”
“As we come together, the sheriff’s department, the police departments, the (Arizona) Rangers, Border Patrol, superintendents, the community, that’s a deterrent. It’s more of a deterrent because they see we’re working together,” Clay added. “If we all learn the words to the song, then we can sing the song together, better. This is part of the song.” Some of those singing the song are law enforcement agencies without a prior mandate in U.S. schools.
“Messaging should demonstrate to students that there is a big difference between ‘snitching,’ ‘ratting,’ or ‘tattling,’ and seeking help,” a Secret Service guide says.
Last year, a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced the EAGLES Act to prevent acts of mass violence, a bill that would bolster the NTAC by creating a national program on targeted school violence prevention, while expanding the NTAC’s “research and training on school violence and its dissemination of information on school violence prevention initiatives.”
“Accurate behavioral threat assessments and early interventions are essential to maintaining a safe environment in our schools and communities and preventing another tragedy from taking place,” Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said, in reintroducing the legislation. “The U.S. Secret Service is uniquely equipped to help evaluate these threats, and our bill would enable them to share their tools and expertise with school safety partners across the country.”
Not everyone horrified at the rise of gun violence inside schools has signed on to the mission of reauthorizing and expanding the NTAC as proposed in the EAGLES Act.
The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights wrote of the bill that “Threat assessment, including as proposed in this legislation, poses major risks for and to students, including increased and early contact with law enforcement, overidentification of students … for ‘threatening’ behavior, distraction from the role of easy access to guns in enabling mass shootings in schools and elsewhere, and undermining of students’ rights under civil rights laws, including the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and Section 504. School safety belongs in the hands of educators, and those trained in child/adolescent development — not law enforcement, and we should never start from a place of viewing some children as threats.”
The Consortium for Constituents With Disabilities followed suit, adding, “The U.S. Secret Service is part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security — a border security and counterterrorism agency. This agency has no expertise in student behavior or child development. Nonetheless, they would develop best practices and train school staff on threat assessment, treating children as potential terrorists.”
I fully expected to read this and then be mad at Kamala; I'm not. This really doesn't sound bad to me. They're just making work the secret service has done to non-invasively figure out who to keep an eye / who might be an assassin available to schools.
These are the criticisms:
The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights: Threat assessment, including as proposed in this legislation, poses major risks for and to students, including increased and early contact with law enforcement, overidentification of students … for ‘threatening’ behavior, distraction from the role of easy access to guns in enabling mass shootings in schools and elsewhere, and undermining of students’ rights under civil rights laws, including the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and Section 504. School safety belongs in the hands of educators, and those trained in child/adolescent development — not law enforcement, and we should never start from a place of viewing some children as threats.
The Consortium for Constituents With Disabilities: The U.S. Secret Service is part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security — a border security and counterterrorism agency. This agency has no expertise in student behavior or child development. Nonetheless, they would develop best practices and train school staff on threat assessment, treating children as potential terrorists.
I get that law enforcement isn't popular with a lot of folks right now. However, there's no way to solve this problem legally without someone to actually enforce the law. Nobody's saying that they're going to place Randy from the town police office with a weapon in your school.
School safety belongs in the hands of educators
If you look at what the opponents are actually saying here, they're proposing "teachers are law enforcement." That burden absolutely should not fall on educators. Educators are there to teach; they are not a safety force, they never have been, and attempts to make them some kind of police for student safety have IMO been unsuccessful at best. They should not be the ones dealing with bullying issues or gun violence. They do not need further overloaded with even more responsibilities when there are counselor and safety personnel positions that should be created and filled with people who are actually qualified.
not law enforcement, and we should never start from a place of viewing some children as threats
There's a lot of presumption in their comment in general about how this is going to be applied. I can almost guarantee it's not going to be "there's a secret service agent in every school throwing kids in jail and interrogating them."
This is the start of the intervention program they're claiming they want; this is community policing with education on what to look out for (and that's just as much what not to look out for). This is IMO clearly not some attempt to railroad students into prisons.
The Consortium for Constituents With Disabilities: The U.S. Secret Service is part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security — a border security and counterterrorism agency. This agency has no expertise in student behavior or child development.
Considering the threat of domestic terrorism and the rise in youth violence, I'd say they absolutely should become experts on student behavior and child development if they're not already looking at that now.
I am concerned about the ACLU sign on and the studies that police intervention negatively impacts graduation rates. However, I think we need to research why that's happening and how to fix it. These studies (from a quick look) attack the angle that these things are a consequence of increased intervention/disciplinary action. The answer to that problem isn't to remove enforcement, under report it, and let more people that are beating the crap out of their peers get away with it.
I hope the criticism here from these civil rights organizations can be used to improve law enforcement, further that conversation, and examine what can constructively be done to address the issues facing students, the issues facing educators, and the issues facing minorities around the country.
Please.
That is the magic word, yes.