School Policing and the Extradition of 90 Knowles

by Craig Butler

Anyone with a conscience must be dismayed at the current state of affairs with the children of our nation. No one would be stupid enough to think that there isn’t a problem with the educational system, so this begs the question of why as parents we refuse to accept that there are behavioural problems with our children.

No-one wants to admit that their child is a nuisance or malfeasant, but they sometimes are. I have seen on many occasions parents come before the courts and speak of their good children, and how the charges against them can’t be correct because their good children wouldn’t do such a thing.

There is nothing wrong in having full faith and confidence in your children, in fact that is a good thing. But when that faith and confidence is based solely on the fact that this is your child and you, the parent, refuse to see what is patently obvious to everyone else, that is where the problems start. You, as the parent, are endorsing the actions of the child.

A teacher friend of mine told me the other day of a disruptive parent that always comes on the campus and creates havoc. Accordingly, the teachers and staff are afraid to discipline the child fearing the recriminations of that parent. The child also knows this and acts as though he is a law unto himself. In fact, I am told that this particular child brags that the school won’t do him anything because his mother will come up there and straighten them out.

In an effort to correct the problem they invited the mother to come and observe the behavior of her child. Until she was able to witness it herself she would not believe. She was flabbergasted to hear and see the manner in which her child acted.

This is one time when the matter was corrected, for how long I don’t know. What about all the others? It would be impossible to employ such a strategy for each student, and therefore a system of trust and cooperation between parents and teachers needs to be forged.

Whatever happened, the teacher is always right. I remember vividly being told this by my parents. In fact if I got into trouble in school I went to great lengths to try and hide it so as to avoid getting into further trouble at home. No amount of impassioned pleas by me that I was being singled out was ever enough to convince my father. It was very simple back then and I and every other child at that time knew it. There was no debate.

Nowadays we have parents going into the schools and berating the teachers in front of their children and worst still accosting them. Is it any wonder that the children are fighting amongst themselves on a seemingly daily basis, often with dangerous weapons, and that these same children have now taken it upon themselves to try and exert control over the school. This has even led to students beating up teachers. I have to wonder where it is all going to end.

To top it all off this present administration has seen fit to dismantle two initiatives instituted by the PLP that seemed to have been having a positive effect: the urban renewal programme and the stationing of police in the schools, which was a collaborative effort between the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of National Security.

The FNM has said that they have not abandoned urban renewal, but rather reworked it. However, there can be no doubt that the police in the schools policy has been scrapped. I can understand the need to use our limited police resources to fight crime in the nation. But let’s be serious - part of the problem, and one of the places that criminals are receiving their training, is the public school system.

Former Minister Alfred Sears has referred to a report that showed the school policing imitative was working and that acts of violence and crime in the schools had decreased dramatically as a result.

What is more perplexing is how any government can remove the police when the system of private security is inadequate to handle the situation. They are presently trying to train personnel to take up these positions, and none will be available for some time.

One of the other positive side effects of the school policing programme is that it helped young people become accustomed to the police and helped them to view the police in a different light. Presently there are no figures of authority, and the deterrence factor no longer exists.

Please return the police to the schools until an adequate private security system is in place - and before someone gets killed.

Ninety.
Samuel ‘Ninety’ Knowles was in the news again this week. The matter of his pending application that had been scheduled before the Supreme Court - in relation to his ability to receive a fair trail after being branded a narcotics kingpin by President George Bush - when he whisked away came before the Court of Appeal.

Although the court was not clear on what grounds the attorney representing Mr. Knowles was appealing, they were clear in their view that the executive acted wrongly in extraditing Mr. Knowles. According to Dame Joan Sawyer, the president of the Court of Appeal, former foreign minister Fred Mitchell signed the extradition warrant although she noted that he had denied doing so in the press.

"The minister should be in contempt of court, not the superintendent of prisons." Dame Joan said. "The superintendent can’t be in contempt because he was acting in accordance with the law. There is no application to cite the minister for moving the appellant from the jurisdiction while a habeas corpus was before the court."

She said the real issue was whether the government acted "in the ambit of the law, in which they purported to act...This court, nor the Supreme Court should be seen to be rubber stamping anything the executive branch has done," Dame Joan said.

Justice Milton Ganpatsingh was of the view that Knowles had been denied the protection of the law.

During the proceedings, the appeal court president stressed that she had no sympathy 'personally or otherwise' for Knowles. However, she was concerned about the administration of justice and said the process should not be repeated.

"It is clear in my mind that the executive must never do what it did in this case again, or a minister may find himself in contempt.'

Mr. Knowles could not have been pleased to hear this. Nothing was said to indicate that he would not have been extradited at the end of the day, but the fact that he was denied that which every citizen is accorded was a sad day for the independence of the judiciary of the Bahamas.

What must have made this an even more bitter pill to swallow was the fact that the presiding US judge in the Knowles matter has decided to allow phone conversations as evidence that he had previously ruled inadmissible. The part of the transcripts released to the press is not flattering and tend to paint Mr. Knowles in a bad light. Of course Mr. Knowles is innocent until proven otherwise but it seems that the slippery slope upon which he is perched has just gotten a little more perilous.

Comments

[Anonymous]

yes 10 to 20+% of the students have problems. But at least 25% of the teachers I had in my time had problems of their own. And if it wasn't the teacher with the problem it was the overall Administration that just wasn't making sensible decisions.

I was never a trouble maker.

Here are some examples of the type of bull I had to put up with back in high school.

7th grade Math teacher whenever we had a double session (90 minutes) she's close all the windows, close the door, turn off the fans, turn off the lights and make us site in absolute silence while she took a nap. Of course we complained. 10 years later she still has the same job at the same school probably doing the same $#!+.

8th grade: Math teacher took maternity leave and the substitute had no idea how to teach math.
English teacher substitute was a very nice and intelligent woman but had zero years experience teaching.

9th grade: Math teacher had this weird desire to spend all of our class time telling us stories about her childhood in Jamaica.

English teacher made me and 2 other students face the back of the room for weeks at at time, preventing us from learning anything. She'd write assignments on the board, have the class write them down then erase them so we couldn't see and forbid the other students to tell us what it was. Of course they told us but still that woman's behaviour was insane.

10th & 11th grade just had far too many foreign teachers with too many accents for me to comprehend them all, plus by 11th grade I had just given up and nobody cared that I had given up.

12th grade: Graduated....although according to the school handbook I definitely did not have the grades required to graduate. A lot of people didn't. They just changed the rules in the last minute so they could brag in the newspapers that all their students got diplomas or something.

Meanwhile a few of my best friends who left that school in the 9th grade were graduating at the top of their class with very very good grades.

I wanted to leave my school in the 11th grade and start over in the 10th at that other school but my family would not let me.

[Jerome Sherman]

The comment above made me smile but its so sad.
Former assist. commissioner of police Mr Paul Thompson has a plan drawn up to curb the violence in our schools; I like this plan. The idea of police patrolling the grounds of our schools dont sit too well with me.
That is not the solution. Its a temporary fix at the expense of policing the wider society not to mention the social and psychological impact. There's got to be another way moreso than strong arm tactics.