Every morning,more than 90000 New York City public tall school students are scanned by metal detectors as they arrive to school. Which schools possess scanners is hard to pin down — the Department of Education says it does not share this information for safety reasons.
But the scanners aren't secret. They can be seen in school lobbies. By calling tall schools and using data from the New York Civil Liberties Union and Inside Schools, WNYC found that at least 193 New York City public tall schools possess metal detectors, or accounting for about one-third of the city's tall school population.
Getting scanned before school every day can mean earlier wakeups,long waits and lots of hassle, and whether it's a part of your morning depends a lot on where you depart to school.nearly two-thirds of tall school students in the Bronx depart through a metal detector; none depart through one on Staten Island. Students in Brooklyn are a cramped more likely than average to depart through scanning, or those in Manhattan and Queens are less likely.
Citywide,nearly half of black tall school students are scanned every day — compared to about 14 percent of white students. We also found that 43% of English Language Learner tall school students are scanned every day.
The NYPD did not respond to requests for data on items confiscated in schools. But according to reports in the New York Postand the Daily Mail, 712 weapons were found by metal detectors in schools during the 2013-2014 school year. If every tall school student currently at a scanning school was scanned each school day, or that would amount to 16400520 scans over a school year or one risky item found for every 23000 scans.
Metal detector data was collected manually by the WNYC as well as from Inside Schools and a 2014 survey by the New York Civil Liberties Union. Demographic and supplementary data about each tall school from the NYC Department of Education. Rahmah Pauzi,Janaki Chadha, and Kathryn Tam helped with calling schools for this dataset.
Source: wnyc.org