DHS Is Paying Students to Spy on Classmates in the Name of Safer Schools for Some™

The following is an essay from c99p member Wendy Davis with permission to repost in it's entirety. She has problems posting essays here so I reproduced it in full upon request by dancingrabbit.

H/T: dancingrabbit

The essay and comments can be viewed here.

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The author/s at massprivateI.com (as in ‘Eye’) go full-tilt Godwin, and I don’t blame them a bit. Rather than reconstruct what they’ve written, I’m going to reproduce most of their alert, although I might draw attention to a few of their links with bolds or excerpts. If this ain’t Minority Report pre-crime baseless assumptions from cradle to prison (at least in some locales using some of the related programs), I don’t know what is what is.

“Apparently DHS’s “If You See Something Say Something” spying program isn’t enough. Now DHS/Police want to turn school kids into spies.

The “Project Safe Campus” (PSC) program is an anonymous CASH rewards program that pays students $100.00 to spy on fellow classmates!

According to a statement from Detroit public schools…

“The goal of PSC is to increase the number of anonymous tips coming from the schools. Students who give tips that result in disciplinary action can earn $100 cash rewards.”

This program incentivizes schools and universities to spy on students.
Schools and campuses will RECEIVE $3,000 for EVERY actionable tip DHS/Police receive: (click to see on a separate page, then Go Back)


https://wendyedavis.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/project-safe-campus-pled...

Now the Crime Stoppers program is awarding tip matching donations up to $3,000 per individual student council for supporting and promoting Project Safe Campus in their schools”.

This is an incredibly dangerous program, A school or university that has budgetary issues will now receive $3,000 for every student they report to DHS/ Police!

The PSC program is funded by “Crime Stoppers” which is run by DHS. A ‘Crime Stoppers and Homeland Security’ search returned 108,000 hits. Crime Stoppers is in EVERY police department in the country and will soon be in every school.

DHS is using a clueless ex-NBA player and former Michigan resident to start a new nationwide student spying program, all in the name of SAFETY.

The DHS student spying program goes by a few of different names:

1.) The Louisiana Safe Schools program pays students $2,500 to spy on their classmates.
2.) The Laredo, Texas’s Campus Crime Stoppers program pays students $1,000 to spy on their classmates.
3.) Michigan’s “Fast Fifty” pays students $50.00 to spy on their classmates. [the cheapskates]

Isn’t it interesting these spy programs, got their start in areas where unemployment is high and incomes are low? Why would DHS/Police target low-income areas like Louisiana, Michigan and Laredo,Texas? Unemployed students eager to make some quick cash, now have an incentive to turn in their friends and family for a “fast fifty” or more.

Who in their right mind, thinks it’s a good idea to pay kids and schools to spy on students? Where does it stop? The ‘Greatest Generation’ fought to stop Nazi Germany which turned their school kids into spies. After WW2 Americans fought against the USSR which also turned their school kids into spies.

Have we learned nothing?

Who stands to profit from this brazen spy for-profit scheme? If you guessed DHS and private stakeholders (companies) give yourself a gold star:

“We know that we cannot do this work alone. That’s why we have expanded our collaboration with key stakeholders not only within the DPS family – including our own police officers, citizen patrollers, academic team, principals, staff, parents, students and our contracted security officers – but among outside partners and police agencies,” said Police Chief Stacy Brackens.

Students are being given assessments from kindergarten-college. Every student is given a “THREAT ASSESSMENT” by police and school administrators.

“The Virginia Student Threat Assessment Guidelines (V-STAG) is a school-based manualized process designed to help school administrators, mental health staff, and law enforcement officers assess and respond to threat incidents involving students in kindergarten through 12th grade and prevent student violence.”

V-STAG was developed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Secret Service, and the U.S. Department of Education.

For more info. about students being given threat assessments read:

American students are given threat assessments“.

“Universities are using data analytics to assess students mental health and much more”.

Common Core creates a womb-to-tomb dossier on kids and families“.

(Thank you, Arne Duncan, Bill Gates***, et.al.., for that last one:
“It is important to note that the DQC is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, Alliance for Early Success, AT&T, and Target, all entities that will profit heavily by having lots of data collected on our children. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is also funding a very alarming student database project called inBloom that already holds data that includes “name, address and sometimes social security number…learning disabilities…test scores, attendance…student hobbies, career goals, attitudes toward school – even homework completion.”

Updated 11/11/2015:
The Missouri University Police Department (MUPD) asked students to report ‘hurtful speech.’

The MUPD sent an email to students yesterday morning urging them to call them and report any hurtful speech they encounter on the campus. Click here to see MUPD’s report a student link.

The MUPD email asked “individuals who witness incidents of hateful and/or hurtful speech or actions” to call the department’s general phone line “to continue to ensure that the University of Missouri campus remains safe.” They suggest that students provide a detailed description of the offender, their location or license plate number, and even to take a picture if possible.

Read Eugene Volokh, who teaches free speech law at UCLA on the ‘call us about harmful or hurtful speech’ emails.

The article has a lot on The U.S. Dept. of Education’s  (USDOE) and the Michigan DOE’s   Restorative Practices (not to be confused with Oakland Fania Davis and Friends’ Restorative Justice program ) program which claims to reduce crime, improve student behavior, restore relationships, etc.   Some of their links didn’t work, so…I didn’t see that there was much there there.  If the author/s are correct about the expanding use of it, its overall aim is to create students more apt to be Cogs in the Vast Corporate Machine: bland, smiling, submitting to authority, and so on, while being forced into interventions by police, psychologists, and teams of some sort.

Bonus material: 

Portugal senses a chance for change after pro-austerity government is ousted; a day after leftist coalition passed vote of no confidence to force out the minority administration, many hope for an end to sweeping cuts and privatisation.

Los Angeles Police Urged to Review Use of Force After ‘Alarming’ Rise in Shootings

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in getting this post up at c99%.

I cannot express how chilling I find it
that DHS is offering students in poor
school districts $50 "rewards" for
"actionable" tips.

Even more alarming in these days of
underfunded public schools is that
schools are being offered $3,000
"rewards"
for "actionable" tips.

Whoever thought that enterprising
capitalists wouldn't come up with a
way to fund public schools without
raising taxes
?

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Only connect. - E.M. Forster

Unabashed Liberal's picture

lately.

Didn't get the details, but sounds as though they are going to disallow smoking (which I don't encourage, of course) in federally subsidized housing.

Problem with this policy is that smoking is an addiction. From what I've read, there are no plans to offer smoking cessation programs, etc.

Whew!

What's next?

Mollie

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Everyone thinks they have the best dog, and none of them are wrong.

gulfgal98's picture

that our own government is infiltrating our schools by using students to rat out one another. When I read this yesterday thanks to a heads up from dancing rabbit, I was shocked and reminded of the video that Don Midwest posted the other day about the high school experiment called the Wave. Programs such as this one and the one requiring federal employees to spy upon one another are spine chilling.

A member of my own family was subjected to a lengthy investigation by Dept and Children and Family Services when someone reported seeing one of her children playing in a nearby playground and he appeared to be alone. The child was there with his two older brothers who were playing basketball at the same time. It took months for my relative to clear her name from the records for neglecting her child due to this one report. They even threatened to take all of her children from her and her husband. This is exactly how these things can mushroom out of control when the system starts automatically assuming guilt based upon hearsay.

To suck children into such an egregious system is horrifying and is just another overt symptom of the sickness of the surveillance state that has taken over our lives. Thank you to Wendy E. Davis for writing this, to dancing rabbit for bringing it to our attention, and to our super duper administrator, JtC for formatting it for this forum.

This is must reading.

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Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy

Pluto's Republic's picture

…one of the sharpest and cleverest voices in the blogosphere.

Wish she could co-publish here with ease.

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____________________

The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato

In case you didn't catch it, Wendy asked
me to pass along her best to you in the
exchange she and I had in the comment
thread to this article at Café Babylon.
So, I'm passing it along! Wink

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Only connect. - E.M. Forster

enhydra lutris's picture

menace to our rights and liberties and then reign in all of those that pre-existed it like the Federal Bureau of Instigators, etc.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --