Texas Cops Ticket Thousands of Schoolchildren to Raise Revenue, Some as Young as 6-Yrs-Old

With the rise of get-tough juvenile crime policies across Texas, the municipal courthouse has become the new principal’s office for thousands of students who get in fights, curse their teachers or are generally “disorderly” on school campuses — even in elementary schools, according to data collected from school systems by Texas Appleseed, a nonprofit research and advocacy group focusing on social and economic justice.

Dallas ISD’s police department, for instance, issued criminal citations to 92 10-year-olds in the 2006-07 school year, the latest year for which such data is available. Alief ISD’s officers issued 163 tickets to elementary school students in 2007. And “several districts ticketed a 6-year-old at least once in the last five years,” according to a recent presentation to the state Senate’s Criminal Justice Committee by Texas Appleseed. Such tickets, often given for “disorderly conduct” or “classroom disruption,” typically are handled in municipal courts or by county justices of the peace and can have fines of between $250 to $500, police and court officials say, though some courts route many students into community service in lieu of fines. [...]

Last school year, police in Houston ISD, with an enrollment of about 200,000, wrote 5,763 tickets to students, its department reported to the Tribune. The number of tickets in Houston has ranged between 4,000 and 6,000 since 2005, according to district data. Dallas ISD, with about 150,000 students, wrote nearly about 4,400 tickets in 2006-07, according to data the district reported to Texas Appleseed. (Dallas ISD officials said they could not immediately provide more updated data.) Officers in Austin ISD, with enrollment of more than 80,000, wrote 2,364 tickets in the 2007-08 school year, according to the organization’s data, a decline from a peak of more than 3,000 in 2005-06.