Netflix series takes on police in schools

‘13 Reasons Why’ arc based on study he co-wrote moves advocate to tears

Until last week, civil rights attorney Amir Whitaker had never watched Netflix’s “13 Reasons Why.” Jumping into the eighth episode of the final season without any context, he at first was disoriented — and amused — by the series’ trademark high school melodrama.

Then he reached a development in the story that brought tears to his eyes: A student uprising against school resource officers (SROs) at the series’ fictional Liberty High, based in part on an ACLU study that Whitaker co-wrote to illustrate the negative effects on students’ wellbeing of an abundance of police and few mental health resources.

“As it unfolded, and the students stood up and grabbed the bullhorn and started chanting, ‘No SROs’ and all that stuff, I literally got teary-eyed and was thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, this is on ... Netflix,’ ” Whitaker said. “‘This is in pop culture now.’ ”

According to the streaming platform, the episode, “Acceptance/Rejection,” draws on the 2019 report “Cops and No Counselors,” which found that “there are more than 14 million students in schools with police but no counselor, nurse, psychologist or social worker.”

The study was among more than 500 pages’ worth of research and reporting the writers of “13 Reasons Why” consulted on the subject, said Netflix, which stressed that the series is a dramatization, relying on fictionalized portrayals of real-world events.

“We started writing the season by asking how Liberty High would respond to everything that’s happened at their school,” the “13 Reasons Why” writers said in a joint statement. “We researched what schools have implemented to make campuses ‘safer,’ and we chose to have Liberty institute many of those measures. And then we explored the conflict that emerged, at Liberty as it often has in real life, between young people and the adults who are trying to protect them with measures that may be overly stringent, eroding of trust or even harmfully misguided.

“We were informed and terribly troubled” by the ACLU report’s findings, the statement continued. “And this goes right to the heart of the problems at Liberty High School: This is a troubled, traumatized community that is over-policed at the cost of services that might truly help things get better.”

Released June 5, the final season of “13 Reasons Why,” which sparked controversy for its handling of teen suicide in Season One, landed as protesters across the country demanded the removal of law enforcement from schools and other community spaces in response to the recent killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks and other Black victims of police violence.

“Now students themselves are being more vocal in expressing that police presence actually does not make them feel more safe,” Whitaker said. “And the research shows that it harms everything from school climate to graduation rates ... We do more harm than good when we put police in schools.”

The conflict in “Acceptance/Rejection” begins when students Justin Foley (Brandon Flynn) and Diego Torres (Jan Luis Castellanos) get into a hallway argument that escalates into a physical fight. Though Justin, who is white, throws the first punch, Diego, who is Latino, is immediately singled out when an armed school resource officer arrives on the scene.

The officer’s move to target Diego aligns with the ACLU study, which states that a “surge in police officers contributes to a biased application of discipline and over-criminalization of students of color,” and that “nationally, Latinx students were arrested at a rate

1.3 times that of white students.”

Also fueling the student outrage is a prior incident from the sixth episode, in which police fired blank bullets through the halls while executing an activeshooter drill. The teachers and teens — who were not warned of the stunt ahead of time — feared for their lives. Some made panicked calls to their loved ones.

The “Cops and No Counselors” report mentions similar lockdown drills in which “officers pretend to be intruders, banging on doors and shooting blank bullets.” And Whitaker said the ACLU has “heard stories” of real students traumatized by extreme approaches to emergency preparedness.

The eighth episode sees the students of Liberty High stage a walkout in opposition to the distressing active-shooter drill, increased surveillance and the final straw: Diego’s arrest.

Whitaker was inspired by the episode’s diverse group of demonstrators, which included not only students of color — who are more likely to be profiled and harmed by SROs — but also white students, in a united front.

“Half the students in this country are white, and their schools are impacted too,” Whitaker said. “We can’t win this fight without them. Not just the fight for police out of school, but the fight for racial justice.”

That fight’s momentum in recent weeks has brought Whitaker’s study “back from the dead.” In addition to seeing the issue of over-policing in schools represented on “13 Reasons Why,” he has also seen data from the report shared all over social media and even adopted by protesters.

“We just need people to keep hashtagging, keep sharing the report,” Whitaker said. “I was at a protest two days ago, and someone actually had a sign that had one of my numbers on it ... and that was one of the highlights of my career.”

Whitaker would have welcomed more acknowledgment of police brutality toward Black students — particularly Black girls — in “13 Reasons Why,” and he admitted his “lawyer brain” occasionally caused him to pause and laugh at some of the show’s soapier moments.

But ultimately he felt the episode “did a good job of trying to unpack” the layered issues around police in schools, and “share with the general public why they’re important.”

“They literally talked about six or seven areas of the school-to-prison pipeline, from the Latino student being arrested for the fight — and not the white student — to the security, over-criminalization, overpolicing,” he said. “They looked at the really complex issues of it, and they put it in a digestible pill that everyone can understand. In the future, it would be great to see more stuff like this.”