TDSB let pressure trump research
Police are like the press — exasperating but essential. Can’t live with cops, can’t live without them.
Except in our high schools, where students shall henceforth be shielded from the very police meant to protect them from peril.
Toronto District School Board trustees, entrusted with the safety of our students, have concluded that police were creating an unsafe learning environment in our schools. And so a decade-old program that relied on specially trained community police officers to keep the peace with students and staff in the wake of high school deaths has itself been killed.
The TDSB based this conclusion on the results of a voluntary questionnaire in which a minority of students, mostly from minority groups, replied that police made them uncomfortable in various ways: 11 per cent felt intimidated and 14 per cent felt watched or targeted.
That roughly one in 10 kids might be leery of cops is hardly surprising. That a solid majority, 57 per cent said they felt safer with a police presence, is surely interesting.
Either way, you can’t fault students for offering opinions in a confidential questionnaire, even if it’s not a scientific sample (given the chance, they might also demand more days off and less homework). But you can certainly question why the adult trustees in the room didn’t think this through.
The idea, or ideology, that the best remedy to minority discomfort is to disown the police — because the only good cop is an absent cop, black, brown or white — is a leap in logic. If professionally mellow community police aren’t in your comfort zone in the schoolyard, what happens when hardened cops confront you on dark streets at tense times?
If students can’t get habituated to shooting hoops with police in their learning years, and community cops can’t learn how to relate to students in their youth, how does that bring everyone together going forward?
Feeling the heat from protests by Black Lives Matter, Toronto’s Pride has already banished uniformed police from parade floats on the same dubious premise that crosspollination and proximity sow the seeds of tension, not trust. What next? Shall we demand the removal of uniformed campus police from the University of Toronto, lest some students feel picked on? Ban the Ontario legislature’s protective service? Outlaw security guards in shopping malls? Ask police to stop patrolling certain neighbourhoods lest they feel unfairly targeted?
The trustees responded to pres- sure tactics, not research. Misreading their own questionnaire, they refused to wait for a more rigorous review undertaken by Ryerson University for Toronto’s police board.
Other big cities, such as Vancouver, Ottawa and Mississauga, have similar programs that place police in schools, and they remain popular. An independent study in Peel found the police presence an “overwhelmingly positive” measure that boosted confidence and relationship-building. And Toronto’s separate system is in no hurry to give up the School Resource Officer program. Catholic trustees are happy to have the police help.
Amid the fervent protests from pressure groups at the TDSB, it’s easy to forget the impetus for a police presence.
Teachers’ unions long ago eased their members out of the responsibility to patrol high school hallways, given fears of violence or intimidation from some students.
When Grade 9 student Jordan Manners was fatally shot in the hallway of C.W. Jefferys Collegiate a decade ago, the TDSB joined with the separate school board and the police to introduce the SRO program.
After a second teen was stabbed, and yet another caught with a loaded handgun, the school welcomed the program: “If you come into Jefferys today and see the positivity that is going on organized by this partnership with the police, you can’t deny the fact that there is a place for the police in the school,” principal Monday Gala told the Star earlier this year.
But the popularity of police in that once-troubled school shouldn’t blind us to the fact that the program was in many ways colour blind. Despite the perception that police pick on minority schools, the 36 uniformed cops rotated through 75 schools across the city — eyeing kids at-risk and rich alike — including posh locales such as Riverdale Collegiate, Northern Secondary School and Etobicoke School of the Arts.
Now, students in specialized arts programs and gifted classes are also in the sights of the TDSB, which worries that minority students aren’t sufficiently represented. Rather than raise their game by ensuring the broadest selection of students, there is talk among trustees of gutting the programs.
Whether it’s community policing or specialized schooling, Toronto’s trustees are too often tempted to tear down programs rather than persevere and make them better. That’s not much of a lesson for students learning how to live in the real world. Martin Regg Cohn’s political column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. mcohn@thestar.ca, Twitter: @reggcohn