Jarred Weisfeld - Are school police going too far?

After the Uvalde school shooting, Texas required armed officers on every public school campus. Supporters say the policy improves safety, but critics argue it has led to thousands of incidents involving force, arrests, and aggressive policing over routine student misconduct. Has the pendulum swung too far?

Jarred Weisfeld is CEO of Objective Entertainment, President of Start Publishing, and a school safety advocate. He joins the show to discuss the balance between school security and student rights, whether police officers belong on every campus, and how schools can protect students without turning disciplinary issues into criminal matters.

Transcript

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Welcome back to the Lawrence Larson Show. Well, after the tragedy and the shooting at Uvalde, Texas, Texas put police in every school, and now we're told that kids are sometimes being tased, hog tied, or arrested over vapes and dress codes. I thought we'd talk to Jared Weisfeld, uh, who is the CEO of Objective Entertainment, president of Start Publishing, and a school safety advocate. Jared, welcome to the program. Hi, thanks for having me, Lars. So I've always advocated for school resource officers. In fact, I don't even like calling them SROs. I'd rather just call them cops in school. Uh, but was it a mistake to do what Texas did after the shooting at Uvaldi? Absolutely not. Every school in this country deserves to have a police officer or armed security guard inside of it. So they made the right call. Here, the New York Times looks like they singled out a few instances of uh misbehavior, but they also don't account for the thousands and thousands and thousands of lives that have been changed by having the school resource officers uh inside of the schools. Well, and in fact, if you've got misbehavior by cops, then you correct it through either training or or or firing uh or discipline or something where you say you're you're out of line, but what about the examples that they offer up? Is this something that's the regular standard standard operating procedure for officers in school? Because it certainly doesn't sound like it. No, it's not. The problem is that they're not the the amount of training that they have was limited because they needed to get into those schools quickly after Uvalde. So the schools and the state should offer more training to those officers. But at the same time, you have to realize that a lot of these issues are probably coming from schools that have very large gang violence. Yep. And so and so, like they that's why they're treated as what they're being treated is because there's a lot of gang violence going on in these schools, and the kids don't know that you have to respect police officers anymore. So when you get out of line, right, what's gonna happen? You're gonna get disciplined. Now, I'm not saying you should get tasered, but you know, clearly there was a reason why that child got tasered. Um, and you're not hearing the whole story, you're only hearing half of the picture. Which, by the way, I don't even know how the New York Times got any of those records or any of the video, because there are laws protecting minors and their and and their rights. So it it's really bizarre that that even happened in the first place. Well, uh, you know what I suspect? I suspect that perhaps teachers unions, which tend to side with the left, might have leaked some of that information out and given some of the more extreme examples, the New York Times. I mean, if I had to think who would have that information, people who work within the schools, who would be inclined to give it to the New York Times for negative use, probably the teachers' unions or members of the teachers union, individual teachers. What do you think? Yeah, but even so, the New York Times should know that you can't broadcast the face of a minor um anywhere on the internet. Right? There's FERPA violations, there are all kinds of violations that protect not only the victim but the accused, because they're minors. Well, although I I've got to tell you, they got a research. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, look, when I worked as a Daily Street reporter, I'd have people saying, Well, you can't put a minor's face on the air. Well, if the minor is accused of a crime, as far as I'm concerned, the public ought to know who that person is. And and they aren't just automatically protected because they're a minor. If you've got a minor accused of murder or rape or some other serious uh criminal act, I I think there's every reason to tell the community, and this is who we're talking about. Because oftentimes those kids are out in the community. They may be babysitting your kid on Friday night. No, I I understand what you're saying, but what I'm talking about is this is going on in a school environment. Like schools had cameras. Yep. So why the schools would let those cameras, I mean, I'm all for it. If there's a kid that murders a kid and you have it on camera, sure, release it. But in this instance, right, you're in a school setting where there's other kids all over the place. So there's school cameras. I have no idea how they got their hands on them. I have no idea how they got their hands on the police reports. I mean, it's it's kind of staggering to me that they were actually given that information, even more staggering as they put it up. But yes, I agree with you, is that we need more training. Um, and we also need less, like if you saw deep down in the in the article, it also talked about how people want police officers in the schools. How they, you know, their tasks are usually let kids in, make sure they don't have weapons. So um they specifically pointed out areas in which that they believe them to be problematic. Now, I'm not a political person, but you do have a Senate race going on over there, and you have a whole bunch of other things that all of a sudden this pops up. But uh it's just it it sounds to me as though the state just needs to spend more money on training, but the state wants to protect the students, they don't want another Uvalde. I think every parent should want that to be the the justification of having police officers in the schools so you don't have another mass shooting inside of a school. I'm talking to Jared Weisfeld. Yeah, Jared is the president of Start Publishing and a school safety advocate. I I also find kind of amazing the New York Times uh, I guess, breathless presentation why teenagers were arrested, charged with crimes, and even jailed. Well, so be it. I mean, Jared, I can't tell you the number of times that I've heard uh, you know, that in schools in my uh my uh neck of the woods, uh they'll say, Yeah, this kid got caught with a gun at school. Great. Did he get charged of the crime? No. Well, why not? It's a crime if he's underage, if he's brought the gun to the school grounds, those are two crimes. Shouldn't he be charged with the crime? And the schools seem to take the attitude that no, you can't charge the poor little darlings with a crime, even if they've committed a crime, as though there's a big bubble over the school and and the laws of the rest of the community don't apply on the campus. Would you agree? No, I agree. So the reason why I got involved in advocacy, school advocacy, is because there was an incident at my kids' school where a child brought a box cutter to school. Yep. And it was confiscated later on that day. The same child who was still in school created a kill list of kids that he wanted to kill. Then later on that day, right, he looked on his Google Chromebook, not killing anyone. So that kid was allowed to remain in school. So the question is, and nobody was notified, by the way. Like the parents were no nobody had any idea that this had occurred. So, except the administration. So instead of, you know, being transparent about it, they hid it. And why'd they hide it? Because they hid it because there's a better chance of you not finding out than them having to admit that they have a problem. Unbelievable. Jared Weisfeld, who is a school safety advocate. Jared, thanks so much. I appreciate the time. By the way, a lot of you probably think that waking up in the middle of the night is just part of regular life. But doctors now say those nighttime wakeups in the middle of the night, they could be affecting your long-term health. That means inflammation, immune function, even memory, and mental clarity. Now, I used to think of a mattress as just a piece of furniture until I got my ghost bed. I love my ghost bed, because ghost bed doesn't build mattresses like furniture. They build engineered sleep systems, serious health equipment that's designed for your relief and recovery, not looks and not fluff. Your body ought to be healing while you sleep, not trying to fight to get comfortable. Ghost bed's engineered cooling helps prevent overheating. 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