On duty inside schools
Debate rages: Should cops be there? Here’s the history of their involvement.
Marie Owens, the first police officer responsible for the safety of Chicago’s schoolchildren, didn’t have a gun, and her beat ended at the schoolhouse door. Her job was to dig truants out of poolrooms and factories.
Owens realized that juvenile delinquents aren’t born but are the product of poverty and neglect. She thought an assignment didn’t end when she got a child back to his or her classes.
“In my sixteen years of experience I have come across more suffering than is ever seen by any man detective. … I made it a point to go after the fathers of these children who were sent out to work if that father was capable to take care of his family,” the detective sergeant told the Tribune in 1906.
Between Owen’s time and today’s clamor to get police out of schools, the relationship between Chicago’s police and the city’s schools evolved in fits and starts.
The changes began when law enforcement agencies became interested in crime prevention and took notice of a working assumption of sociologists: Like other human activities, crime has a geographical logic. Certain offenders cluster at certain places, and for juvenile delinquents, it can be an after-school hangout.
In 1949, the Tribune reported: “Police, school authorities, and the crime prevention bureau yesterday pushed an inquiry into a teen-age riot Thursday night at a malted milk and hamburger store at 4311 Addison.” Students from the nearby Schurz High School were beaten by teenage offenders armed with blackjacks, who came there from the Albany Park neighborhood. They were looking for trouble and knew where to find it. Therefore, the trick to reducing juvenile crime seemed to be finding an entry into young people’s world.
So the following year, the Chicago Police Department gave 55 patrolmen four weeks of special training and assigned them to an enlarged juvenile bureau detailed to keeping watch on hot spots like the Addison Avenue malt shop.
Cook County Sheriff Joseph Lohman similarly assigned his juvenile officers to watch over the county’s high schools or to be on call from their principals. “The teachers call us more every day and the students have been tipping us off on gang fights and other juvenile crimes,” the captain in charge of the sheriff ’s project told the Tribune.
In 1955, Chicago’s juvenile officers were given an additional responsibility: compiling a file of the city’s street gangs.
But increasingly the system’s weak point was apparent. A youth officer’s time was spent “traveling from district to district by street car in order to handle reports of juveniles in trouble,” the Tribune reported. So the assigned hot spots didn’t get visited, even as the schools were becoming hot spots.
Officer Edward Kazupski just happened to be in Flower Vocational High School for girls when a disturbance began in the lunchroom. The losing side in an intramural basketball game started pummeling the scorekeeper, and when the principal asked for the officer’s help, he was kicked by the students. Kazupski, who was supposed to escort a student to a court appearance, wound up in a hospital, and other cops were summoned to put down the melee.
Similar episodes suggested it made more sense to station juvenile officers inside Chicago’s schools rather than put in a hurry-up call for them when trouble began. Eventually every high school would have at least one police officer assigned to it.
The 1960s and 1970s were turbulent times, broadcast live. Television showed police officers and sheriff ’s deputies in the South beating civil rights demonstrators, and students carried the afterimages into Chicago’s classrooms.
When two former Crane High School students were killed in skirmishes with Chicago cops, James Maloney, the principal, declined to hold a memorial assembly for the all-black student body. A community meeting was held, and Maloney, who is white, refused to resign when someone at the meeting suggested it. Three men picked him up while he was seated, to carry him off the stage, and he fell out of the chair and was injured.
“I then felt the meeting had ended,” Maloney told the Tribune in January 1970. He put in for a transfer, and as the turmoil continued, the teachers forced the school to close until better security was provided. It reopened later that month with 20 off-duty cops serving as security guards in addition to the two regularly assigned to Crane.
Outside were a handful of students picketing, a Tribune reporter observed. “They carried signs attacking the police and calling the school a jail.”
Yet not all students were unhappy to see cops in their school. At a 1969 assembly at Harper High School, Officers George Hudson and Ralph Mispagel and their commander were made honorary members of the student council, as the Tribune reported.
The school’s principal, Daniel J. Trahey, said the patrolmen went above and beyond their assignment to protect the school: They also advised and counseled students.
“This is the greatest thing in all my years on the force,” said Mispagel, a white officer on the force for 23 years, with two spent at Harper. Hudson, his Black partner, had been stationed for nine months at the African American school on the South Side.
Black parents approved seeing cops at Gage Park High School where their children were vulnerable to white students’ hostility. White parents saw the police presence as an infringement on their right to mount a protest that escalated into a weekslong withdrawal of their children from the school.
In order to reduce overcrowding in nearby Black schools, the Board of Education transferred some students to Gage Park, a white school on the Southwest Side. Lunchroom brawls followed, and buses carrying Black students were stoned.
“Just come to the school and see for yourselves what happens when the police have to escort our children out of the school,” the president of the Concerned Black Parents of Gage Park told the Chicago Board of Education in 1969.
That same year, the Cobra Stone Rangers gang escalated its intimidation of children attending Schiller Elementary School near the Cabrini-Green public housing project.
“Members of the gang drove a sound truck in the near north side neighborhood, warning parents of a bomb in the school and urging them to take their children out of school,” the Tribune reported.
By noon, fewer than 300 of the school’s 2,000 students were present. No bomb was found, but at a public meeting the following summer, the school board was asked how it intended to deal with the gang problem.
“We need new measures, like more full time security men and maybe even our own gang intelligence unit,” said Alvin Boutte, a board member and CEO of two banks serving Chicago’s Black community.
Revelations about the dark side of police involvement in schools during the 1960s emerged a few years ago when Yana Kunichoff, an investigative journalist, was able to see the files of the Police Department’s Red Squad, which monitored suspected subversives. Among her findings: a principal labeling a student activist an “agitator” and informants reporting on student meetings.
In a 2017 piece published in the South Side Weekly, she also notes that then-Mayor Richard M. Daley mandated in 1991 that two on-duty police officers be assigned to each high school, reportedly as a reaction to shootings around schools involving youths.
The mass shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999 was another tipping point for the strengthening of policing in schools. The tragedy led to metal detectors being added to Chicago schools, among other measures.
Having to pass through them while being checked by security guards became a hallmark of urban education. Yet they might be an unaccustomed sight to suburban students, as Meaghan Waller, a teacher at Hersey High School in Arlington Heights, realized.
During Black History Month in 1998, Waller arranged for exchange visits between Hersey’s African American club and students at Marshall High School, located in a Black neighborhood of Chicago.
Afterward, a Marshall student said: “You don’t see any security guards, and there are more white people.”
A Hersey student said that when the bus pulled up at Marshall: “We all got really nervous when we saw the bars on the windows.”
Now, a small device has led to a vigorous debate about the appropriateness of having police in schools.
In the age of the ubiquitous cellphone, students are able to keep watch on the cops watching them.
In 2018, police at Marshall High School had a student charged with battery before video surfaced showing the officers dragging her down stairs, kicking her and putting a foot on her. Her father filed a civil rights suit on her behalf.
Notwithstanding that and similar episodes, Chicago’s mayor says the cops are staying. But the student council at Northside College Prep, an elite Chicago school, says they have to go.
So the final chapter of this story has yet to be written.
The 1960s and 1970s were turbulent times, broadcast live. Television showed police officers and sheriff ’s deputies in the South beating civil rights demonstrators, and students carried the afterimages into Chicago’s classrooms.