Police stations could be set up inside Sandwell schools in a bid to battle the rising tide of weapon and drug crime.
One Tividale school already has a police base on site and its officers have been called on to break up fights and tackle vandalism issues.
Sandwell is about to start a £370million rebuild of every secondary school in the area and Councillor Ian Jones, cabinet member for children and young people said that police bases could be an integral part of schools in the future.
He said: “Tividale Community Arts College already has a police base on site, in the former caretaker’s house.
“There are often tensions in a school environment. These can come out thorough vandalism or fighting and the police there are able to calm these situations down.”
He said schools could also consider using metal detectors to prevent weapons being taken into school.
He said: “There has been a lot in the news about this recently and we aren’t ruling anything out.
“As an authority we have a zero tolerance attitude to weapons and drugs and our priority is protecting the youngsters and staff in our schools.”
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2 Comments
Oh please.
Lets see some evidence based statistics about how successful school-based officers are at preventing crime and/or dealing with actual crime.
Having ‘experienced’ this situation first hand as a teacher, I can honestly say it was a waste of time.
The ineffectiveness of the school-based police officers actually undermined the whole Police Officer’s role as the pupils found them a complete laughing stock.
Get more effective police out into the community where they belong, not hiding in schools.
Give more rights to teaching staff to get law-breaking pupils quickly into the hands of the police.
And crime figures are falling you know ! They must be we are told so…. thats why this programme is going forward.