Indeed. I live in Northern Ireland; not a place known for its entirely peaceful neighbourhoods. But even here I would be shocked about a police officer arresting a student for starting a waterfight for example, even if it did result in damage to property that was not excessive. I have colleagues who wonder why I wouldn't want to move, along with my family, to the US for work.
For reference, the murder rate in Belfast recently is around 3-4 per 100k. In comparably-sized cities like Newark, NJ or New Orleans, LA, it's 10-20 times higher.
The peak of violence in Northern Ireland was apparently 1972, when ~500 people were killed. At the time, the area had a population of 1.5 million people, so the rate was 333 per million. At least 18 U.S. states have rates above 50 per million, and crime is the lowest in the U.S. that it has been in decades.
I'd like to say that most people have common sense, wherever in the world they happen to be, and that these stories are only news-worthy because they're rare.
But these extremes have recalibrated people's expectations of what's acceptable. Is it okay to have police in schools if they're not zip-tieing children?
I think it's baffling to have police officers stationed in schools.
Here's the thing: I don't think Europeans can appreciate how totally and prevasively dysfunctional our inner cities are.[1] Inner city schools are rife with gang activity. Teenagers shoot each other up all the time (usually not directly in the school though, but the fights that lead to shooting often start there). Just last month in Chicago, a woman was shot in the chest while holding a child because a gun fight broke out on an alley by an elementary school.[2] Posting police might not be the best response, but its not baffling. Who the hell would want to teach at some south side Chicago schools without an armed police officer nearby?
And when the suburbanites hear about kids accidentally getting shot in gang hits in parks,[3] they want police in their schools too, never mind that the dangers are far less there.
[1] Chicago is the deadliest major (1m+) city in the U.S., with ~18-20 murders per 100k people per year. But it pales in comparison to small/mid-sized U.S. cities like Wilmington, DE (38 per 100k), New Orleans (53 per 100k), or Flint (65 per 100k). In comparison, London is 1.4 per 100k, Berlin 1.0 per 100k, Toronto 1.7 per 100k, and Paris is a hell-hole at 4.4 per 100k. In the neighborhoods where getting shot is a real threat, the murder rate is far higher than the above numbers per capita.
The list of top 50 world cities by murder rate has U.S. cities like St. Louis hanging among company that is almost entirely cities in Brazil, Mexico, Columbia, Iraq, and South Africa, or Honduras: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate. Compounding the average rates is the highly segregated nature of violence in American cities. As an aside, this is apparently mostly just a list of battlefields for the drug war. Except Detroit and Mosul, which I think are not so much on major drug trade routes like say Baltimore, but rather are simply parts of failed states...
I'm not convinced police officers stationed in school is generally a good idea, but the bigger issue here seems to be more the actions of the police officers in question. Whilst some incidents might be open to framing by the media, there are simply no circumstances under which charging a 5 year old with battery of a police officer would be appropriate. (I think we can safely apply "zero tolerance" here; someone should be fired for sanctioning the charge)
It's genuinely quite scary to think how an officer that considers that an appropriate response might react when dealing with adults suspected of committing something which might actually be a crime.
Zero tolerance policies specifically disallow common sense though, as surely tolerance is a major part of common sense in these kinds of situations.
Also rare is an imprecise term.
The US jails more people per head than any other country, and also jails a larger percentage of its children than any other country in the world, so if you compare the situation in the US to the global norm, rather than rare, it would seem to be frighteningly common.
The problem with the incarceration rate is that it's not just 'US does more', but 'the US is an extreme outlier'. Pretty much all the developed nations are in the band 50-150/100k population, from memory New Zealand is an outlier at 200, and the US is... 750. It's such a mind-bogglingly extreme outlier. South Africa at the height of Apartheid 'only' had 550.
