Safety Law News for 4/7/14

  • Colquitt County, Georgia educators and law enforcement conduct campus sweeps for drugs several times each school year, using dogs to check out lockers and cars at the schools.
  • Baltimore County, Maryland officials unveiled a $3.7 million in school security system, including a “OneView” camera system that will make security footage available in real time to county police as well as to the county schools’ Department of School Safety and Security.
  • School resource officers in Fairfax County, Virginia are now receiving suicide awareness and intervention training.  The goal is to improve inter-agency collaboration with school officials, social workers, and counselors as they identify kids in crisis and provide them with meaningful intervention.
  • A federal court panel rules that a school resource officer who used chemical spray on a high school student a second time, when she was allegedly incapacitated, non-resistant, and writhing in pain on the ground, was not entitled to qualified immunity against a claim of unreasonable force, even if the first use of chemical spray was reasonable due to the student’s resistance. [J.W. ex rel. Williams v. Roper].