Pioneer in school policing looks back on success in HackensackSunday July 8, 2012, 11:55 PM
BY REBECCA D. O’BRIEN
STAFF WRITER
The Record
When Detective Kenneth Martin left his patrol in the projects to roam the halls of the Hackensack school system, there were no cellphones, no anti-bullying laws and little precedent for his assignment — interacting with students. That was 24 years ago, and Martin was just 10 years out of high school himself.
KEVIN R. WEXLER/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Detective Kenneth Martin is preparing to retire after 24 years in school policing in Hackensack. Now Martin, 52, is retiring from the position he largely defined as New Jersey’s first school resource officer, a role informed as much by community policing tactics as by Martin’s deep familiarity with the city.
“My approach is to be visible,” Martin said, though at 6 feet 4 inches and 300 pounds, this seems less an approach than an inevitability. “I get out there and interact with students.” Trust, he said, is critical.
“But I have a line, and once they cross that line, they’ve gotta be held accountable for their actions,” said Martin, who also serves as the schools’ liaison to the Police Department.
That line lies in the gray area between juvenile misconduct — the acts and attitudes that schools traditionally addressed internally — and the criminal behavior that lands kids in serious legal trouble.
Police presence in U.S. public schools has increased dramatically over the past three decades, from fewer than 100 cops nationwide in the late 1970s to a peak of roughly 15,000 in 2003. Scholars and policymakers decry this trend, saying overzealous policing endangers students, undermines the educational mission and engenders distrust in vulnerable communities.
They argue that posting police in schools has transformed discipline into criminalization. A 2011 study by the Justice Policy Institute reported that school resource officers had little impact on crime rates in schools, and may encourage dropouts and juvenile arrests.
In place of distrust, Martin leaves “big shoes to fill, literally and figuratively,” said Hackensack Police Chief Tomas Padilla, who credited Martin with shaping the resource officer position with a deft hand. “Somebody once described Kenny as a guidance counselor with a badge,” Padilla said.
Though he wears a bulletproof vest every day, Martin has never drawn his gun on school property. He does not yell. The students cherish him; they consider the school a safe haven, and turn to him with tips and concerns.
“He’s going to be next to irreplaceable,” said Hackensack High School Principal James Montesano, who was a student at Hackensack High in Martin’s early years as SRO. “He is so part of the fabric of our community.”
Martin was born in 1959 to fourth-generation Hackensack parents. He graduated from Hackensack High School in 1978 and enrolled at Bergen Community College, but left after a year to work full time — as a supervisor for armored trucks at a local bank. When the Police Department test came up, in 1986, Martin took it and passed.
He was assigned to the Hackensack housing projects, then in the grips of a crack-induced crime epidemic. His partner, Allen Ust, trained Martin in community policing, a relatively new theory in urban crime prevention.
“Ust’s technique was to go out there, meet the people, be visible, stay out of the police car, and just walk around,” Martin said.
Ust, who later served as the Bergen County undersheriff, said the two worked closely with local youth. “They knew Kenny was a friendly person,” Ust said.
By the early 1980s, the Hackensack Police Department, frustrated by years of emergency calls from the schools, began to assign officers to patrol them. Until Martin came to the schools position, in 1988, the officers stayed in their cars, responding only to crises.
“All the training Ust gave me, when I was assigned here, I took that training with me,” Martin said, sitting in his well-worn office on the first floor of the high school. His phones rang constantly.
Martin has upgraded security at the schools, locking the doors, installing cameras, walking the hallways. For years he accompanied Hackensack’s teams to away games, guarding the locker room. Students began to tip him off to fights in the hallway, imminent drug deals and parties, suspicious characters in the area.
Though he took the lessons of the streets into the schools, much of Martin’s work in the quarter-century since has been keeping the streets out of the schools, which serve roughly 5,000 students.
When Martin first arrived, the biggest problems were drugs and brawls fomented by “outsiders,” Martin said.
“Now the kids from other towns know me,” Martin said. “They know if they came here, they’d automatically get arrested. I have a very good relationship with other schools, because I trained their officers.”
Today, school officials said, 85 percent of their student trouble has to do with social media and cellphones, which have enabled a 24-hour cycle of bullying, “sexting,” and the unchecked spread of gossip, media and teenage vitriol.
“All of this is coming from outside into the school, and so kids are saying, ‘Why are you dealing with this inside the school? It has nothing to do with the school’ — but it does,” Martin said. “It impacts the school community.”
Kids bring other problems to school — broken homes, mental illness, abuse, weapons. Martin once had a girl’s father arrested for sexual assault; he has hauled kids in for selling drugs. Recently, a handful of middle schoolers brought sharp objects to school, threatening to cut themselves.
The father of two girls — the older, Taylor, graduated from Hackensack last month, with a perfect attendance record — Martin is particularly attuned to teenage culture.
“People ask me, ‘Aw man, are the kids worse than they were when I was in school?’ and my answer to that is, ‘No, they’re not worse,’Ÿ” Martin said. “Technology has changed things so much. Things are the same, it’s just they’re doing it in a different way.”
While Hackensack has long simmered with latent racial tensions and police mistrust, Martin believes police should be accountable to the people they serve. “If I’m gonna deal with any youth, I’m going to explain to them what I’m doing and why I’m doing it while I’m doing it,” Martin said.
In this sense, he addresses a frequent criticism of school policing: that it violates student rights and marginalizes at-risk youth.
“Problems that used to be treated as education moments are instead treated as a law enforcement matter,” said Paul Hirschfield, a sociology professor at Rutgers University who specializes in youth, criminal justice and schools. “The issue is when police become overzealous and fail to tolerate any insubordination.”
Hirschfield said school policing can create hostility to the criminal justice system. Ust disagrees.
“When young people see a police car riding down the street, they have no connection to that officer,” Ust said. “But when you have police in schools, they can approach them. Their job isn’t to lock kids up for no reason, their job is to protect the students.”
“I try to avoid filing complaints against a juvenile when I can,” Martin said, though he declined to provide numbers. But in some cases, he said, the courts may be the only way to get students support. “It’s a tough lesson to learn, but juvenile laws are different,” Martin said. “When they do go to court, our society says it wants to rehabilitate our kids, not crucify them or lock them up.”
Padilla, the chief, said Martin has kept “thousands” of kids out of the criminal justice system. “The bottom line is to discipline, to teach,” Padilla said. “Sometimes, things that could escalate into complaints and courts can be better handled at the school level using school personnel.”
“I guess it’s an art,” Padilla said. “You have to know when you need to be soft and when you need to be hard. Martin is also one of the toughest guys you’ll ever meet.”
Still, Montesano, the high school principal, said: “He always knew that the kids came first, and that kids make mistakes.”
Martin serves on several local and national school safety boards, and has received many awards.
Later this month, the National Association of School Resource Officers will honor Martin with its 2012 Exceptional Service Award at its annual conference in Reno.
Nobody has been officially tapped to succeed Martin, though Padilla said an officer had been trailing him.
Martin is spending this summer as he always does, working in the police department. He plans to spend the rest of the year “getting my life together.” Afterward, he hopes to stay involved in Hackensack.
He may not have a choice — Montesano said he plans to reach out for advice. “I told him, don’t change your phone number.”
Email: obrien@northjersey.com