NEW YORK — Christina Young remembers the day the cops came for her at school.
She was 15 years old — a sophomore at Murry Bergtraum High School for Business in lower Manhattan. She and four of her friends were sitting together at a table in the school’s large and chaotic cafeteria. It was lunch time but they weren’t eating. They didn’t like eating lunch at school. They didn’t have a reason why really, they just didn’t like to. Instead they used the time to hang out, and listen to music on her friends iPod.
She was playing with that iPod when the School Resource Officers walked in. The officers weren’t an uncommon presence in the cafeteria, she remembers.
“Someone in that cafeteria was always doing something that you weren’t supposed to do,” Young said.
When they showed up, the students went on high alert wondering who the officers were coming for this time.
But that day, Young didn’t have to wonder. When they walked in, she knew it was for her.
As she watched them ask the man who scanned their ID cards when they entered the cafeteria to point out their target she thought to herself that maybe they were there for the group of rowdy boys who had already been asked multiple times to quiet down. But then the employee at the manning the identification station pointed at her and the officers started to walk in her direction. Her heart sank.
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