Just Asking
Are NYC Parents "Bitches" Who Should Be "Body Slammed"?
That's what the head of the New York Police Department School Safety Division said to 850 training agents. Chancellor Klein, what do you plan to do about this?
HEAD OF THE CRASS
By DAVID ANDREATTA, NY POST, March 8, 2005 LINK The head of the NYPD's School Safety Division is under fire from school security officers who charge that he called elementary school parents "bitches" who "need to be body-slammed." In grievance letters to their union obtained by The Post, officers claim that Chief Gerald Nelson, an NYPD official, made the shocking remarks to 850 agents at a training session last month during the mid-winter break. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters yesterday filed an improper labor-practice petition against Nelson with the city Office of Collective Bargaining for allegedly making the remarks, as well as for bashing the union as ineffective. Some of the letters also accuse another high-level official, Edmund Husbands, a supervisor of school safety in Manhattan, of lecturing female officers on bathroom etiquette. Agents claim Husbands demonstrated with a roll of toilet paper how women should clean themselves to keep the bathrooms tidy at Springfield Gardens HS, where the one-day training session took place Feb 25. "Appreciation of the problems our agents face with unruly parents is something I can't quarrel with, but it is disgraceful when the chief refers to them as 'bitches,' " said George Geller, assistant to the union president. NYPD spokesman Paul Browne, speaking on behalf of Nelson, said, the two-star chief "recalls congratulating a school safety agent for dealing with an unruly adult, but not in the language described in the letters. We are looking into the matter." The letters vary somewhat in their description of Nelson's alleged comments. Some state that he said unruly parents should be manhandled into submission, while others claim Nelson made the remarks as he commended an agent for showing restraint with out-of-control parents. "Chief Nelson was asked a question about the lack of security in the . . . schools when the chief made a statement that the parents of the students are bitches and he gives us credit for not knocking these bitches down," one agent wrote. Another officer wrote that Nelson said elementary-school agents had the toughest job "because they had to deal with mothers in the elementary schools that are real bitches . . . [who] need to be body-slammed down to the ground, cuffed and arrested." Officers from Queens and Manhattan schools attended the training session, and the union said it began receiving complaints last week. Browne did not address the accusations against Husbands, but a police source acknowledged that he did encourage agents to conserve toilet paper, as only two bathrooms were open. The complaints come as safety agents, who are not police officers but are trained by the NYPD, near their third year without a new city contract. Mayor Mike says this behavior is unacceptable...and yet does nothing about Carmen Farina and her derogatory comments to parents. Nor does our Mayor ask for her data on The Annenberg Challenge For the Arts when she received $225,000 over three years, 1998-2001, and sister school PS 198 received little, if anything. |