The New York Police Department seized two more guns in New York City public schools Thursday, bringing the total to five in the past 24 hours.
School security officers found one of the guns in the backpack of a 17-year-old student at Martin Van Buren High School in Queens after he showed it to a classmate, according to police.
The other weapon was found in the backpack of a 14-year-old student from Middle School 98 in the Bronx. A classmate told his parents that his classmate had shown them a bright pink pistol on Wednesday. The father alerted school officials, who found the loaded gun in the boy’s backpack on Thursday, according to police.
The latest two cases come just a day after officials found three pistols among the belongings of three students at high schools in the Bronx and Brooklyn. Two of the guns were loaded.
Two of the firearms were discovered thanks to the metal detector in Bronx high schools. Another was discovered on the waist of a teenager during a fight at Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School in Brooklyn, according to sources.
In June 2020, in the wake of racial justice protests over the police murder of George Floyd, Mayor Bill de Blasio pledged to transfer oversight of school security officers from the New York Police Department to the Department of Education. . City officials have said the transition will be complete by 2022.
Some advocates and lawmakers have lobbied the city to go even further by completely removing security officers from schools and diverting funds to social workers and counselors, arguing that the presence of police disproportionately harms students. color.
But critics of those proposals have argued that school security officers are necessary to prevent violence, pointing to firearms confiscated in recent days as evidence.
Critics also criticize the city’s decision not to hire a new class of nearly 500 school security officers. They argue that the number of active school safety officers has dropped from past highs of nearly 5,500 to closer to 4,000, with hundreds of additional officers leaving because they chose not to comply with the city’s vaccination mandate.
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