Police academy

How to make schools less safe

WE HAVE a friend—seriously, we have a friend—who at one point in his life had children in four different school environments: One was at college, another in high school, a third in middle school, and the baby was still in grammar school learning his ABCs.

At the college and high school campuses, the schools had police. Real, live, grown-up police with badges and guns and everything. The middle school had security officers patrolling the hallways.

The elementary school had a sign out front: No guns allowed.

Which child do you think our friend worried most about?

In all of the debates about police and security at our public schools, nobody on the other side of the issue has ever been able to answer this simple question: If police are needed in the stands at football games on Friday nights, then why aren’t they needed in the hallways on Tuesday mornings?

The nation has a fever just now, and like most fevers, this one can do some good. Fevers occur to burn off infections or kill destructive bugs. The protests happening all over the United States—in response to police brutality—can draw attention to abuses that must end. It might not be pleasant, but fevers never are.

But fevers can also make us delirious. We the People don’t need to become irrational and disconnected while we fight this infection.

This past weekend, your statewide newspaper ran an AP story on the debate about “police-free schools.” Didn’t we just debate police-free occupied zones like the CHOP in Seattle, and didn’t most thinking people—including liberal pols in Washington State—put an end to that nonsense? After several shootings.

But some people aren’t educable. And still attend protests with “Defund the Police” signs. And keep arguing that police must be removed from all schools.

The article noted that several cities from Oregon to Colorado to Wisconsin have taken steps to pull cops out of schools. One school board member in Denver told the press that he “would like school resource officers to remain a specialized unit within the Police Department, but go to schools only when called.”

Such as after a shooting?

Mark Twain once said God created idiots for practice—then he created school boards.

But just when some of us thought that common sense wasn’t at all common any longer, the AP story came to the rescue, as well as the editors at this paper who decided to republish the story: The article was filled with people saying STOP!

One principal in Denver, who happens to be a member of an Indigenous tribe in Colorado, said it’s irresponsible to eliminate “resource officers” in schools. Resource officer being another euphemism for “cop.”

“Generalizations and romanticizations aren’t getting us anywhere when our democracy needs our public schools more than ever,” she told the press.

A principal at a Chicago school, in which the students are mostly minority kids, says an officer at her school stopped dismissal at her school one day last year after a neighborhood shooting: “That, to me, was worth the money that we spend on school resource officers alone.”

The school board in San Francisco had its mouth all set to cancel an agreement with the local police before its African American Parent Advisory Council weighed in. Some on the council saw police in their schools as the only time kids saw police in a positive light. The school board has decided that calls for immediate discussion.

If there’s been a rash of police hurting kids at local schools, we haven’t heard about it. In fact, all the interactions we’ve had with these Resource Officers shows them to be mainly kid friendly. They know many of the students by name, especially any students who may be—another euphemism here—challenging.

And one would think that any bad cop at school would find himself on social media in a heartbeat. For we suspect there are more smart phones per capita on American school campuses than anywhere else.

Nobody should pay for the sins of others—not police, not anybody. But if all police are banned from the campuses of public schools, the cops wouldn’t be the ones paying the price. Instead, much younger people might suffer for such a mistake.