60 baton-wielding police hit, traumatize Thurgood Marshall students

San Francisco – A student fistfight escalated into a violent confrontation with police at Thurgood Marshall Academic High School in the Bayview district Friday. Over 60 police officers came into the school wielding batons, hitting and traumatizing students.

“School should be the place for a safe environment,” said Channing Hale, a sophomore at the school. “But today, it felt like we were on the streets.”

In a press conference later that day, Jackie Wright, a spokesperson for the San Francisco Unified School District, called the incident “an altercation that got out of hand.”

Wright stressed that no weapons were involved amongst the students. She also contended there was no violence at the school, but that assessment differs from the accounts of students and teachers at the scene.

Channing Hale said the police hit her with a baton as she was standing in the hallway, trying to get around the fight on her way to class. “I was told to move by an officer, and then I was hit in the face,” said Hale. She said she fell to the ground after being struck.

Franchischa Maufas, another student at Marshall, said she was hit in the chest and slapped with a stick while walking from one class to another. “The police were all on one of my friends, my home girl,” said Maufas. “When I told the officer to stop, I got hit by a stick.”

Michael Puccinelli, police captain at the Bayview Station, said that police had to respond in full force. “There was a riot going on in that school,” he said. “If we do nothing, we are derelict in our duty and someone might get killed in there.”

Puccinelli said that the police were forced to act, because they were faced with an angry crowd of students, one of whom, he claimed, took a baton from an officer.

“We had to move the kids,” said Puccinelli. “The kids were confrontational.”

The police arrived at around 10:40 a.m. A fire alarm had sounded, bringing students out of their classrooms into the hallways and toward the schoolyard, as they are taught to do at the sound of the alarm.

One of the most disturbing allegations to come out of the incident was the report of a police officer brandishing a firearm and threatening a student in the middle of the hallway.

“We were coming out of the office as the fight was going on, and an officer took his gun out at one of the students and told him, ‘Don’t make me use this,’” said Ely Guolio, a student at the school. “I was shocked.”

Police arrested two students and a teacher, 29-year-old Anthony Peebles, a literature teacher at the school, who was charged with battery on an officer, interfering with an arrest, and suspicion of inciting a riot.

Peebles said he was in his classroom when he heard a lot of noise in the hallway. “I went outside and I saw all of these police with students handcuffed and I wanted to know what was going on,” said Peebles. “I walked into the office and I then saw a girl student thrown out of the door by the police face first.”

He went back to his room and got a video camera to record what was happening in his school. Police seized the camera when they arrested Peebles.

‘The police handled this situation ridiculously,” he said.

“This has been a clear and blatant example of irresponsible decisions by the administrators and the police that resulted in this conflict that escalated,” said Jose Luis Pavan of Youth Making a Change, a program of Coleman Advocates. “It is a case of clear and brutal force focused on African American youth by the San Francisco Police Department.”

Opened in 1994, Thurgood Marshall is a rigorous academic high school with 1,100 students at a site off Silver Avenue once home to Pelton Middle School and later to Phillip and Sala Burton Academic High School. A college preparatory school with a focus on science, mathematics, and technology, Marshall was intended as an alternative to the popular and prestigious Lowell High School, one of the nation’s top performing schools. According to the school district, Marshall boasts a 92 percent graduation rate and average daily attendance.

“This was like our Lowell,” a parent told the Examiner. “We had more students going to (UC) Berkeley than anywhere in the district.”

Students cited a lack of school discipline, lack of school spirit, and administrators who do not try to develop relationships with the students as common concerns since new administrators took over the school this year.

“People see a school like Thurgood Marshall and they feel it is a school that doesn’t deserve to be treated like Lowell,” said Nivia Brown, a sophomore at Marshall. “It is sad, because there are students here who used to be successful, but it seems we are faced with different issues every day from the school officials and other people who should be helping us the most.”

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