Tennessee wants to use civil forfeiture to pay off duty cops to patrol schools

The NRA and other conservative leadership want to use the tragic events in Parkland, Florida, to increase the militarization of our public schools. Calls for teachers to be armed, more “resource officers,” and metal detectors are all ideas that have proven, time and time again, to be pointless. Another problem for conservatives is that the moment they begin telling everybody about how they are going to arm teachers and add more police to schools, everyone has to remind them that those things cost money. However, legislators seem to be much more interested in spending money on guns and people with guns than they are on actual education and the social safety nets needed to minimize violence. A bipartisan group of Tennessee legislators have come up with another shitty idea: using civil asset forfeiture money to pay off duty cops, to work as cops in schools. 

The bill would use civil-asset forfeiture funds, in which law enforcement can seize assets from people suspected of involvement in illegal activity without always charging them, to pay $54 for each day an off-duty officer works with $50 going to the officer and $4 going toward state and local administrative costs.

Officers would be required to carry loaded handguns, but local systems would determine if they wear uniforms or display the weapons openly. The schools also would be in charge of whether rifles could be used.

Civil asset forfeiture is problematic and terrible for a variety of reasons; but the fundamental problem is that legislators cannot divorce it from funding jobs of the people (law enforcement) tasked with “seizing” those funds. By its very nature, the conflict of interest is far too great. Adding more law enforcement into our schools does not make our schools safer, if anything those “resource officers” will begin casing the kids they plan on fleecing later on to pay for their overtime jobs in the schools. 

In unrelated news, Tennessee ranks in the bottom of educational systems in the United States.

The state ranks as the No. 8 least-educated state in the U.S. according to WalletHub, a financial-oriented website that compiles rankings of U.S. states and cities based on the social and economic well-being of their residents.

The education survey, released today, measured 11 metrics to come up with the rankings – including the percentage of residents with high-school diplomas as well as those with associate’s, bachelor’s and master’s degrees. The survey also factors in the quality of education based on U.S. News & World Report’s rankings of public-school systems as well as their ranking of the top 200 U.S. universities.

Tennessee is No. 39 overall for the subcategory of “quality of education and attainment gap,” thanks in part to its No. 35 ranking for “average university quality.” But the state only mustered a No. 43 ranking for both the subcategory “education attainment rank” and the survey as a whole.

Tennessee ranks at the bottom of money spent per student, salaries and wages per student, and benefits pupils. So Democrats and Republicans in Tennessee can find the money to arm adults to walk the halls of public schools, but cannot find the money to arm its students with books, pencils and paper.