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sound. When I got him out to the parking lot another officer had responded to help me and he opened the back door to his
patrol car. The kid was continuing to swear and struggle against my grip. “Stuff him in here!” my partner directed. “I don’t think
we should put him in the back of the car,” I suggested. I explained the kid looked like he was going to go crazy in the car was
soon as we let go of him. I wasn’t persuasive enough and the other officer scoffed and put the punk into the back of the car. As
soon as the back door closed on him the kid reared back with his head and then flung his head forward towards the partition
barrier between the front and back seat. “Oh shit!” said the other officer as we both saw and heard the huge whump sound as
the kids’ forehead smashed into the Plexiglas. The officer opened his door and pulled the kid out right as the blood started to
pour out of his split-open forehead. We called for an aid car and had the kid strapped down and taken away. We later looked in
the back of the car and could not find a single drop of blood; my partner had moved so fast to open the door and yank the kid
out he didn’t have to clean up any blood in his car.
One of the challenges working in the schools was that my clients were the same problem children day after day, week after week.
Now, working patrol on the streets we’d have some frequent flier customers but never like working in the schools. At any one
given time I’d have a list of about a dozen punk loser trouble making students who were causing 90% of the problems like fights,
thefts, threats, etc. It took a lot of discipline to tolerate some of those teens. Seeing the same kids day after day skipping classes
to go smoke in the woods, never bringing homework home, getting into fights all the time was very frustrating. Most of them
were classified as having learning disabilities so they were a protected species and by law were limited to the number and
duration of suspensions. And invariably, their loser parents tried to protect them and made excuses for them and got mad when
I caught them doing things they shouldn’t have been doing.

Looking back, comparing the high school to what it was like in the 1980’s, to the ’90’s and beyond, I can say that I was
unfortunately the SRO during the meanest, worst years. I mean the school was still a very nice place, and the overall
demographics and funding and community involvement was terrific and compared to other schools like in inner-city places like
Pittsburgh or Washington DC or Baltimore or 500 other cities, NKSH was still very safe. But for a few years, I was there when
there were too many bad kids doing too many bad things and I had to get physical with too many of them and haul them away.
I’m pretty confident with my assessment because I attended that high school as a student in the mid-80’s, and my boys attended
to that school much later, and I no time was as worse as when I was the chief enforcer there. So yeah, I can say that I did my
time in the trenches.

There was one program where they put all the “bad” kids in a portable building. Kids who had been expelled from other high
schools. Because school districts get federal money for each student enrolled, somebody figured out that it would be worth it to
bring in about a dozen of those bad kids. They were, literally, the worst of the worst. Every single one had a long arrest record,
and almost every single one got eventually arrested (by me) again. And again. Eventually most of them got expelled (again) and
eventually the school district gave up on that whole program. Fortunately, I have never seen anything like it again since then in
a public school. It was definitely a different time back then and just that one portable of bad apples made my job considerably
more difficult.

I remember going into the classroom once for an out-of-control student that the teachers and aides couldn’t handle. I walked
in and saw the following: One kid sitting at his desk with a stack of hot-rod car magazines in front of him. Another kid carving
more initials in his desktop. Five kid staring at a movie playing on the TV: “The Hunt for Red October”. I remember this well

Two trends came into fashion back in those days; popular with the teen boys. The first one was the wearing of saggy pants.
Originally a “gangsta” look it was appropriated by white suburban boys and eventually even Justin Beiber, although by the time
he came on the scene that style was on its way out.