Crime in D.C. schools
Last April, TBD reporter Sarah Larimer filed a Freedom of Information Act request to D.C. police for all records of incident reports at public and private schools in the District going back to 2009. This past August, after Larimer took a job at Grantland.com, the documents started to roll in. The police sent TBD a document listing every incident (PDF) as well as hundreds of individual incident reports. They’re presented here with all original spelling intact and only the names of suspects and victims redacted in the rare cases that they’ve been left in. Some of the reports are heartbreaking, some are bizarre, and more than you’d think involve weaponized tape dispensers. There are lots of banal incidents, and a couple that should probably be feature stories (like this one). You can download the original spreadsheet we made here or sort these data yourself in the table below.
–Data wrangling by Andrew Beaujon, Caroline Smith, and Ryan O'Malley.
| Event Date sort | Complaint No. sort | Police District sort | School sort | Event Type sort |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 12/16/2009 | 9178858 | 3D | Bell Multicultural High School | Simple Assault |
| Weapons: Hands/Feet/Teeth14 - Fist Property: None Specified | Description: The event occurred inside of Bell High School. C-1 (a student) was playing ping-pong during his lunch period. While playing the game S-1 (Dean of Students) came over to the ping-pong table and pick the table up and slammed the table down demanding C-1 take off his hat. C-1 complied and walked away from the table. S-1 told C-1 to come back and he did. C-1 and S-1 got into a verbal altercation. W-1 requested for C-1 to back up. S-1 told W-1 that he had this and continued to argue with C-1. C-1 reports that S-1 told him they could take this outside. W-1 stated that she continued to tell S-1 that he needed to back down but S-1 refused. W-1 had herself slightly between the both of them. The incident escalated into a physical altercation. W-1 reports that S-1 pushed C-1 against the wall and then picked him up and threw him on the ping-pong table. The table broke to the floor. School Securtiy requeste dfor the School Resource Officers to respond to the cafeteria side of Bell High School. When Officer Williams and Officer Fernandez responded they observed that C-1 was being restrained way from S-1. Officer Williams and Sgt. Jones (Security) took C-1 from the students that were restraining C-1 and began to escort C-1 towards the MPD office located on the Lincoln side of the building. S-1 came through the the crowd of students pushing C-2 out of the way. C-2 fell back hitting her head and leg against a game table and fell to the floor. S-1 put his arm around C-1's neck and began to punch C-1 about his body while Officer Williams was still restraining C-1. Officer Fernandez grabbed S-1 and restrained him. Permanent link | |||