Safety in Schools

Students at a couple of hundred NY City schools go through a metal detector every day at school. They first have to remove their shoes, jackets, gloves and belts, and send their backpacks through an x-ray machine. School safety agents stand nearby, poised to step in if the alarm bleats. It so happens that black and Hispanic students in high school are nearly three times more likely to walk through a metal detector than their white counterparts.

The metal detectors were installed in the 1990s when crime rates were much higher; the crime rate has fallen 48 percent over the past 10 years. Crime in schools in the last year alone has fallen 11 percent. The detectors don't detect much. In the approximately three million scans conducted in the first two months of this school year, only a tiny number (less than 200) of contraband items were discovered.