It was a warm, sunny afternoon about a week into this school year. As I walked to the bus stop from the high school where I work, I recognized a former student (let's call him Jamal) sitting on the wall of the nearby park. Jamal was engrossed in his phone, probably an AIM conversation. Although he transferred to another school last year, he returned to his old school most days to pick up his girlfriend. I greeted him and he pulled away from the furious presses of buttons just long enough to flash his dazzling smile and say hello.

Moments later, a police van pulled up in front of Jamal and a couple of other young African American boys, none of whom appeared to be together, all of them similarly absorbed by electronic devices. Although none of the boys was acting suspiciously, the officer in the front passenger seat questioned each boy as to what they were doing. It was after school hours, so they shouldn't have been suspected of truancy.

The officer demanded to know why they were there, repeating her questions with a hard tone when the answers were apparently unsatisfactory. My bus arrived, so I reluctantly left the scene. I later learned from a colleague that Jamal had been deeply shaken by the encounter, which had reportedly escalated to the point of the officer becoming angry with him for "having an attitude".<!--more-->

A couple of weeks later, the mother of another student, 17-year-old "Manuel", called me, very upset. She explained that her son had been given a ticket for disorderly conduct because he lingered after school, waiting to say good-bye to a friend. He had been told by a school safety officer to go into the subway station, but had instead paused at the entrance to the subway to wait for his friend.

The tall, lanky brown youth with his prized skateboard looped through his back pack straps was then confronted by an New York Police Department officer. Manuel was ticketed, reportedly for disorderly conduct, because he did not immediately obey the safety officer. He must now appear in court. Manuel is not a student who fights and has no gang affiliation. He has a penchant for skating and video games and sometimes slacks off in his school work. He is not aggressive or disrespectful to authority. Manuel's mother was especially angry because this was not the first or even the second time that her son has been profiled and unjustly ticketed by the police.

While stories like these are nothing new for Blacks and Latinos (we recall the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on July 16, 2009), it is always more disheartening when I hear about it happening to our youth. What was even more heartbreaking for me this time was Manuel's response when I asked his permission to write about his encounter. Having already processed his anger about the incident, he readily agreed. Manuel then added, "But it's our own fault," ( he clarified "us" as meaning a collective us of black and brown folks). "We're always doing stupid things, getting in trouble."

Manuel's mother came to the school to meet with an assistant principal and school safety officer the day after the incident. All parents of students who have been similarly harassed should do the same. Our children need to be safe, but they also need to be treated with dignity if they are to grow into citizens who do the same.

At the tender age of 17, Manuel has already internalized a sense of his people as criminal. That is not okay. It is not okay to police our high school students to the point that they cannot socialize after school. It is not okay that our teenagers are made to feel like convicts who must obey those with badges even when they have done nothing wrong. I understand that there has been an increase in violence in the neighborhood of this school. Honestly, I feel safer knowing that there is a police presence because some of the violence could have been deadly. At the same time, thesensitivity training that is always being mentioned needs to extend to patrolling around high schools.

What chance do our youth have, especially our black and brown young men, if they are being taught that they are criminals, guilty until proven innocent? Anyone who is concerned about how our children are treated by the police and school safety can check out the New York Civil Liberty Union's site for information onthe Student Safety Act. There you will find ways to take action.