Nearly 6,000 firearms seized from New York City schools this year, says association of school safety officers

It’s a disturbing trend that has affected the city’s school system since the start of the year.

Gregory Floyd, head of Local 237, said: “When someone finds a weapon in the school, the next day there will be more weapons because children say they have weapons.

Floyd said school safety officers, who were unarmed, were seizing brass knuckles, stun guns, knives and metal pipes from the students. It’s a problem that’s getting worse in city schools – and a problem Witness News first reported in 2016.

Floyd said school safety officers seized 24 guns this school year, but in a typical year, they only take a handful of guns from students.

In December, high school student Susan E. Wagner on Staten . Island organized a walkout to protest the increase in gunfights campus. Last month, a 15-year-old student at Maspeth . High School shoot another student Just a few steps from the school.

As evidence of the prevalence of guns in the city’s schools, Floyd showed investigative reporter Kristin Thorne a surveillance video of a gun falling from the waistband of a student at Port Richmond High School on Staten Island while the student was carried by another student. on the hallway.

Last month, shortly after the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, Mayor Eric Adams addressed the number of guns that students were bringing to schools in the city.

He showed three loaded guns that school safety officers seized last week. One was found in the backpack of a 13-year-old child.

Adams begged parents to look through their child’s backpack and room.

“Parents are not just parents,” he said. “They’re a lifeguard.”

Floyd said what would also work is filling the roughly 2,000 vacant school safety officer positions.

Floyd said before COVID, the city employed 5,500 school safety officers, but that number has dropped to about 3,500.

The NYPD told Eyewitness News that the city only has a few hundred safety officers.

“Because of attrition and the fact that during COVID, certain school safety staff classes were postponed under the previous administration, the city began the school year,” the NYPD said in a statement. with fewer than hundreds of employees,” the NYPD said in a statement.

Floyd said even as the city moves to hire more school safety staff, it will take 17 weeks to clean and train them for the position — leaving no time for them to be available in September.

Witness News asked how many handheld metal scanners the NYPD has for schools in the city, but they did not comment.

“The NYPD does not comment on specific security implementations,” the department said in a statement.

If you want to see how many firearms were seized this school year from your child’s school, visit School Weapon Database. If you don’t see your child’s school in the database, that means the NYPD doesn’t record any firearm seizures at the school.

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