An obscure unit of the New York City Department of Education tasked with addressing “gang and youth violence” in the city’s public schools has been promoting a set of guidelines that reveal serious ignorance of adolescent behavior and perpetuate false and racist stereotypes. The guidelines, which youth advocates warn put students’ rights and potentially lives at risk, were compiled in a handbook by the Gang Prevention & Intervention Unit, a division of the DOE’s Office of Safety and Youth Development, which relies heavily on schools’ formal relationship with the New York City Police Department. The 14-page handbook is an alarmist compilation of dubious and often absurd claims, listing “personality changes” and “alcohol/drug use” as warning signs of gang involvement and cautions that “females” joining gangs are at higher risk of pregnancy and sexual diseases. The handbook also repeats sensationalistic folklore about gangs, like the idea that initiations require the murder of “an innocent victim, rival gang member, or even a police officer.”

The “GPIU Gang Awareness Information” handbook is part of a set of documents that were obtained through a public records request by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and shared exclusively with The Intercept. It’s not clear how long the guidelines have been in place or how widely they have been used within the city’s schools. Little is known about the GPIU, a unit that dates back to the 1990s but remains largely unknown to the public. While the GPIU technically operates under the DOE, the documents appear to have been compiled at least in part by police officers and repeatedly encourage educators to reach out to law enforcement, raising questions about the collaboration between schools and police at a time when the city has ramped up the targeting of gangs. As The Intercept has reported, in recent years the NYPD has massively expanded a secretive “gang database” that lists tens of thousands of New Yorkers, mostly black and Latino men, even as gang-related incidents make up a fraction of crime in the city. Police can add individuals to the database based on a set of broad and arbitrary criteria that include the people they associate with and locations they frequent — criteria that critics say effectively punish entire communities. You don’t even have to commit any crimes to be added to the database, and there is no clear way for people to learn whether they are listed on it or why. Most individuals in the database are young — and a recent report by the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College noted that as many as 30 percent were children when they were added to the database. That has raised questions about the role of 5,500 “school safety officers” employed by the NYPD and stationed inside schools, who can also designate students as gang members. While the extent of the cooperation between school-based officers and the GPIU is not clear, the latter also relies on a series of “identifiers” of gang association, including clothing, colors, language, and hand signs, and encourages educators to watch for clues of gang affiliation on students’ backpacks, hats, and notebooks.

The police department, under the leadership of new commissioner Dermot Shea, is also finding new ways to target young New Yorkers. Last month Shea announced a “new youth strategy” aimed at identifying “opportunities for intervention with young people early in the progression that risks turning them into criminals.” The initiative designates 300 police officers as Youth Coordination Officers and taps into the existing School Safety Division to “enhance information sharing” with police outside schools. Hailing the initiative, Mayor Bill de Blasio said last week that it would “[stop] crime before it even happens.” But youth advocates fear that effectively placing children and teenagers under police surveillance both inside and outside school will only funnel more of them into the gang database and the criminal justice system more broadly. And they warn that if guidelines like those outlined by the GPIU are any indication, police are fundamentally ill-equipped to deal with youth-related issues or to train educators on gang interventions. “The documents show how the DOE is using gang identifiers and indicators that have the same very subjective and arbitrary criteria that the NYPD relies on,” John Cusick, a litigation fellow at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told The Intercept. “It’s the same type of surveillance apparatus.” “These criteria fit into a long pattern of criminalizing students of color,” he added. “You are essentially priming teachers who are otherwise supposed to be interacting with their students and teaching them to now have to identify alleged gang or crew activity.” A spokesperson for the DOE wrote in a statement to The Intercept that the Gang Prevention and Intervention Unit is a “resource for schools to provide awareness training to schools that identify potential influences and risk factors, or support a student who has been a victim of gang violence.” “Our schools are safe havens and our student safety work is grounded in the belief that students must be supported through academic and social interventions,” the spokesperson wrote. A spokesperson for the NYPD did not answer questions about how police work with schools in identifying alleged gang members, instead referring to a recent press conference highlighting the new initiative.

Source: NYC Department of Education via the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund; Screenshot: The Intercept

A Mashup of Myths The Gang Prevention and Intervention Unit has operated in the city’s schools since 1994. At one point, the unit was run directly by the NYPD, which under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani took over security operations in the city’s public schools in 1998 — a widely criticized arrangement that remains in place to this day despite a recent effort to limit police’s role in schools. According to the little information about the GPIU available on the DOE’s website, the unit aims to take a “proactive approach to gang activity.” Other material distributed by the DOE notes that the unit assists “schools and community organizations in recognizing the early warning signs of gang involvement.” The work of the unit consists primarily of professional development trainings, gang and bullying prevention programs, and initiatives in collaboration with “local, state, and federal agencies,” the GPIU guidelines suggest. According to the DOE, the unit has two staff members and the handbook “has not been used under this administration.” The DOE spokesperson said that the unit was meant to be “preventative” and that schools reach out to the GPIU “to help better understand how to support students.” Norbert Davidson, a former school safety officer in charge of the unit, told WNYC in 2011 that he visited dozens of schools each month and had trained hundreds of school administrators. Davidson did not respond to a request for comment. In addition to the guidelines, the set of documents reviewed by The Intercept also includes two lists that name several dozen “crews” — many of which merely indicate street addresses or public housing developments. One of those documents notes that the “GPIU is not responsible for this list of crews which has been compiled by other law enforcement agencies,” even though, as a unit within the education department, the GPIU itself is not supposed to be a law enforcement agency. In fact, from its definition of a gang to a list of recommended strategies to fight them, the handbook paints a picture of youth criminality that is steeped in law enforcement lingo and appears to have been written by police rather than educators. That raises questions about the sometimes muddled relationship between police and schools. During a 2018 City Council hearing about the gang database, Shea, who before being appointed commissioner led the NYPD’s anti-gang efforts, testified that teachers can serve as sources for the identification of gang members. And the DOE itself has been tracking gang-related disciplinary infractions: a spreadsheet obtained by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund shows that the DOE lists both “gang related behavior” and “violence — gang related” as categories for disciplinary incidents. It’s not clear what criteria the department uses to make those determinations. The DOE did not answer questions about its protocol for accusing someone of gang involvement. The department’s spokesperson wrote that “the DOE does not track or share a database of information regarding students involved in alleged gang-related behavior.” “The question that needs to be posed is, either schools are conducting these assessments based on these broad and subjective criteria, and if not, who else is involved? Who is conducting all this? There’s not a lot of transparency,” said Cusick. “You would assume that these criteria and other factors would be publicly available, especially when you’re subjecting students to certain disciplinary infractions that are specifically tagged as gang-related.”

Source: NYC Department of Education via the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund; Screenshot: The Intercept