Schools in several cities try police-free campuses
PHOENIX — The group of protesters started out small, just a handful of students who told officials at school board meetings why they wanted police out of Madison, Wis., schools.
Over four years, their numbers grew but not their results. So they took to yelling from the audience and making emotional pleas about how police make students, especially those from minority groups, feel unsafe.
But officers remained at four high schools in the Madison Metropolitan School District until George Floyd’s death by Minneapolis police.
That’s when the school board president, who had long-resisted removing police, had a change of heart. Madison quickly joined cities such as Minneapolis, Phoenix, Denver and Portland, Ore., in abandoning partnerships with police on campuses.
Police officers assigned to schools wear a uniform, carry guns and get specialized training. Critics say having armed police on campus often results in Black students being disproportionately arrested and punished, leading to what they call the schools-to-prison pipeline.
Supporters say police make schools safer and that having someone trained to deal with young people is more effective than having random officers respond to large fights and other problems.
The movement to pull police from campuses has been decades in the making but grew substantially with student activism in the past four years, said Judith Browne Dianis, executive director of the Advancement Project National Office, a nonprofit group focusing on civil rights and justice.
“We were noticing that when you have police in schools, you have a culture clash. And that culture clash is that their job is to protect people but also they enforce the criminal code, and they were enforcing criminal code on regular teen behavior,” Dianis said of the early beginnings of the movement.
Recent national data on arrests at schools is hard to come by, but studies from a few years ago show that Black students are disproportionately punished both in schools and by law enforcement.
During the 2015-16 school year, Black students accounted for 15% of total enrollment but 31% of students were referred to law enforcement or arrested, according to the Civil Rights Data Collection put out by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.
Students of color are also more likely to be enrolled in a school with an officer. While 42% of high schools in the 201314 school year had officers, 51% of high schools with large Black and Latino populations had them.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Madison, Wis., school board President Gloria Reyes said she understood institutional racism in police departments but believes it also exists in school administrations and that getting rid of police on campuses altogether isn’t an allin-one solution.
After Floyd’s death, students protested outside Reyes’ home, and once the teachers union spoke out, she felt it was time for change.
The school board established a committee to create a new school safety plan. Reyes still worries about what will happen when a big fight breaks out and police who don’t know the students and lack special training show up.
That’s a major concern for Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers.
Canady says school resource officers are carefully selected and trained to work with teenagers. They’re usually veteran officers who have volunteered with young people, such as coaching sports or leading church youth groups.
“We train our people to be really thoughtful about arrests, and we want to do everything to avoid an arrest,” Canady said.
His organization trained 10,000 school resource officers last year, which he estimates is roughly half those in the country. They usually get about 40 hours of training before they’re assigned to a school and have ongoing instruction, Canady said.