Police in schools don’t make kids safer

Perhaps it was an accident of geography that put a police officer in my high school. We were, after all, located across the street from a police station.

We often saw police officers. And they often saw the Black boys. It was always clear to me who the police made sure to check in with when they passed through. To be fair, they also checked in with some of the nonBlack students who were more regularly in trouble.

The School Resource Officer program (SRO) started in the 2008-2009 school year after the tragic death of Jordan Manners the year prior. Manners was a freshman at C.W. Jefferys who was found dead in a school stairwell with a gunshot wound to his chest.

It was with this climate in mind that GTA school boards such as Peel and Toronto launched the SRO program. By integrating policing into schools, they reasoned, students would be safer and youth crime could be prevented before it became disastrous.

Nearly a decade later, that same reasoning is still put forward. It is seriously flawed. Putting police officers in schools puts vulnerable and racialized students in danger in a space that should be safe.

For Black students, racial biases affect their schooling practically from the first day they walk in with their too-big backpacks and their squeaky new shoes. A study from Harvard found that while Black students make up 18 per cent of the American preschool population, they account for over half of the out-of-school suspensions.

Activists point to data like this as evidence of how early the school-to-prison pipeline begins. It doesn’t take much more for a four-year-old Black kid with a history of suspensions to become a ninth-grader who is known to his school’s police officer.

The TDSB and the city’s police insist the program should continue. At last week’s Toronto Police Services Board meeting, Deputy Chief Michael Federico said that officers work in collaboration with the school in “capacity building, youth engagement and youth development.” When an armed police officer goes into a building full of children, he said, they are “not engaged in law enforcement or security; they are engaged in community capacity building.”

It’s a truly cynical bout of wordplay. A police officer is exactly a law enforcement officer; at what point does she clock out and become a community capacity builder?

(And, if that is the case, why are the SROs placed in schools that have higher populations of racialized and immigrant students? Aren’t all communities in need of having their capacity built?)

I put the statement to Karl Gardner, a member of No One is Illegal, who said, “It’s an empirically untrue statement.”

“Your distance from the law is really reduced when there’s a cop walking in your hall,” he said. “This person can say that they’re not a police officer and they can feel like they’re not because on a day-to-day basis, they’re not doing police work. But they are.”

No One is Illegal and several other organizations have called for an end to the SRO program.

It’s worth noting that a panel headed by Julian Falconer in 2008 made several recommendations to increase student safety; none included allowing armed police to regularly work in schools.

Yet the TDSB and the police are asking students and parents to wait for the result of a review of the program being conducted by Ryerson University. As Gita Madan from Education, Not Incarceration noted in a fiery speech in front of the police services board last week, Ryerson is the only university without a faculty of education.

“There’s a serious lack of transparency about this review,” she said by phone on Wednesday. There is ample evidence already, she says, that having police in schools does not work.

“Students who might already have a history of really negative interactions with the police are expected to come to school and interact with an SRO as if that person is not a police officer.”

Seeing a police officer at your kid’s school palling around with the students can make parents feel secure. But a police presence doesn’t have the same effect on kids who engage with it mostly when they’re at their worst.

Our schools should be safe for all students. Police officers don’t make schools safer; for many kids, they make them scarier. Vicky Mochama is a co-host of the podcast Safe Space. Her column appears every second Thursday. She also writes a tri-weekly column for Metro News that mixes politics, news and humour.