| No Images? Click here   The photo above is Jalijah Jones. He just began his junior year at Kalamazoo Central High School in Michigan. Last year a school police officer Tasered him for getting into a fight with another kid -- after the fight had broken up.Jones, who says he blacked out after falling to the ground from the shock of the stun, remembers being cuffed a few seconds later, and the school cops dragging him through the hallways and out of school. He was charged with resisting arrest ― a charge that he is still fighting many months after the December 2017 incident.The police officer who stunned Jones is one of over 80,000 currently stationed in public schools around the country, according to the most recent data available from the U.S. Department of Education, covering the 2015-16 school year. (In 1997, only 10 percent of public schools had police officers, but in 2016, 42 percent did.)There is understandable logic to having more police in schools. But civil rights activists say there’s another negative side to this police presence, once which puts students like Jones – young and impulsive, acting on frivolous teenage passions – in danger of police brutality and criminal charges.In August 2016, HuffPost compiled a minimum count of how often Tasers or stun guns were used by school police officers on children. We have created a new list that builds on and expands the 2016 number. For the past several months, HuffPost has been tracking how often students in schools are Tasered or shot with a stun gun, pepper sprayed or intensely physically punished. HuffPost education reporter Rebecca Klein conducted the investigation.Why did you decide to go back to the same story?The timing seemed right. There has been a tremendous level of support at the federal and state-level for increasing the number of cops in schools after deadly shootings like the one in Parkland. But there is little data tracking the impact these police officers actually have. This year I expanded the database to include students who had been pepper sprayed and body slammed.What surprised you during the reporting?I am always surprised how surprised people are that this type of violence happens in schools. When you put cops in schools, they will use the tools -- or weapons -- they have at their disposal.What was most challenging?Because this data is not collected by any official body, I had to create my own database. That meant combing through pages and pages of local news reports. Still, I know my count is only a very minimum. There has to be a more official count.Anything you want to add?School shootings are incredibly rare. In fact, there's no evidence that they're more common now than they were decades go. Yet, communities are going to extreme lengths to increase school security. We don't yet quite know what exactly that will mean for students -- especially the most vulnerable ones.P.S.: Before you go be sure to read Klein's other stories of civil rights violations in America's public schools.
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