© Richie Pope
A company that provides training to police officers and private-security personnel is now offering its services to schools.
This tendency toward suspicion, hyper-enforcement and punishment is so pervasive it even trickles down to our kids.
CNN cites a National Center for Education Statistics report that finds 43 percent of U.S. public schools have some form of security personnel patrolling their halls and grounds, a figure that rises to 63 and 64 percent, respectively, in public middle and high schools.
In addition to the school resource officer, the over-policing of American society has now given rise to a new figure: the educator-interrogator.
As
the Guardian noted last year and
the New Yorker discussed recently,
school administrators are increasingly being trained as interrogators to extract confessions from students for so-called "crimes"—most often, minor offenses from schoolyard scuffles to insubordination. Instruction in the interrogation arts is provided by John E. Reid and Associates, a global
interrogation training firm that contracts with police departments, armed services divisions and security companies around the country. According to the New Yorker, the company has taught its patented "Reid Technique" to hundreds of school administrators in eight states.
That training may be leading to an increasing number of students 'fessing up, even when they have nothing to confess to.
As the New Yorker notes, "like the adult version of the Reid Technique, the school version involves three basic parts: an investigative component, in which you gather evidence; a behavioral analysis, in which you interview a suspect to determine whether he or she is lying; and
a nine-step interrogation, a nonviolent but psychologically rigorous process that is designed, according to Reid's workbook, 'to obtain an admission of guilt.'"
Comment: Training exercises and live incidents seem to go hand in hand quite a bit. At any rate, it will surely be more of a security headache to take a Greyhound bus from now on.