A school principal in Ohio has blocked police from entering her school, telling them she feels threatened and that she doesn't require their presence to deal with a bomb hoax one of the students made.
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The Columbus police entered Ridgeview Middle School after a report of a student making a bomb threat. It was already clear that it was a hoax at this point. However, the police like to show face and strike fear. They still wanted to investigate the matter.
However, Principal Natalie James was having none of it and refused the two on-duty cops entrance to the school. Her reasoning was that they were not allowed to enter without the security personnel present. She runs that school, and her word is law. Or, at least in her head, it is.
"She shows no respect to anyone," one parent of a student at the school said. "The principal at that school is pretty much a czar — she makes her own rules, and her opinion is the only one that counts." The face-off with the police wasn't the first for the principal either. She's already well-known for being a rabble-rouser.
What followed was a ten-minute argument between the principal and the police. Ultimately, she won, and the police turned around. "The police can't just go all over the building and do whatever you want to do," she told them in footage from the bodycams. "I don't have any hate toward the police, but all of this escalated-ness and so forth and so on, I do not feel safe, I don't feel comfortable."
I feel she has a point. Police presence in a place of learning is unhealthy. But then again, neither do bombs.
Principal Found To Act Unlawfully With Police
Of course, in the US, the police are allowed to enter schools especially if there is a possible threat. She was making up whatever law she was citing before, and although the police didn't raise a fuss, the law was on their side. Brian Steel, President of the Capital City Fraternal Order of Police, spoke about the incident.
"What she did was illegal. You can't make a policy that trumps state and local law," He told The Post. "That's not how that works." But, for this principal, it's her school and her rules. She's the one responsible for her students, and that's where the buck stops.
