It’s not if you police, it’s how
Americans are a reactive people, and social media has sent that trait into overdrive. I thought about that after returning from a rally in Oakland Monday for “Police-Free Schools.” Some in the peaceful crowd wore black “Defund the Police” masks. Three people held up an “Abolish The Police” banner.
Pittsburgh isn’t the only community having such conversations. We’re having them because most Americans have seen video of police killing George Floyd in Minneapolis. That happened a month ago today. The four officers involved were fired the next day, and, by June 3, all four officers were charged with either murder or aiding and abetting murder and manslaughter.
Demonstrations calling for police reform, most but not all of them peaceful, have swept the nation. A committee in the Pennsylvania Senate (not known as a bastion of progressiveness) passed bills Monday that ban most chokeholds and require police departments to have a use of force policy. More than 10 groups are demanding that Pittsburgh Public Schools pull school police officers out of the buildings and end the “opendoor policy” that has city police in schools far too often, in their view.
They point to cases where police overstepped. In 2017, an 18year-old senior spent a night in the Allegheny County lockup after officers accused him of taking a fighting stance and acting aggressively, although security footage showed the police lied. A 10-yearold girl had to go before a magistrate for drawing her name on a file cabinet with a Sharpie.
That wouldn’t have happened when I was in school in the 1960s and ’70s, when a lot of people said the country was going to hell in a handbasket. But we now have police in the schools (although, in the city schools’ case, unarmed police) largely because of the nation’s reaction to more than two decades of highly publicized mass murders.
It started with Columbine High School on April 20, 1999. A pair of students at the Colorado school shot and killed 13 people, wounded 21 others and then killed themselves. It was then the worst school massacre in American history. It’s been surpassed twice since.
A few timid gun-buying restrictions were proposed in Congress then but went nowhere. That August of 1999, The Associated Press reported that 4 of 5 Americans polled said the schools in their communities were relatively safe — but two-thirds said posting officers in the schools was a good idea anyway. Blacks were more likely than whites — 30% to 10% — to say schools in their community were either “not too safe” or “not safe at all.”
Fast-forward 13 years to the morning of Dec. 14, 2012. A troubled 20-year-old kills 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. He also killed his mother, who owned the guns used in the rampage, in her bed, and then shot and killed himself.
Both parties in Congress approved plans to fund hundreds of police officers in public schools. Democrats saw that as a rare way to find agreement with Republicans, who firmly opposed stricter restrictions on firearms. That stance would hold even after Feb. 14, 2018, when a 19-year-old former student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., opened fire there with a semiautomatic rifle, killing 17 and injuring 17 others.
Student survivors of the Parkland violence pushed for gun-control measures — and got pretty much nowhere. That’s why after every high-profile shooting — there have been several since Parkland — the satiric website The Onion gets to run a story with the same headline: “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.” Hence police in the schools. As we react to yet another violent event — this time at the hands of law enforcement — it is certainly reasonable to question whether putting teenagers in the county lockup or little girls in front of the magistrate is the best way to deal with events that in previous generations might have brought only suspension or detention.
But then suspensions also are too frequent, say critics. And Pittsburgh Public School officers made a strong case this week that the 20 men and women scattered among the schools have stopped students from bringing weapons and drugs in, and stopped armed adults from entering, too.
In the end, it’s not so much the presence of police, but how they police that matters. I’m reminded of the last day of school, my junior year, when my friend, Jimmy Brunhuber, slid down a pole from a second-story window after failing Spanish.
Jip slid right past the principal’s office. He had some explaining to do, but nobody called the cops. The irony is Jip grew up to be a prison guard.
We should allow the possibility of redemption. Had my friend the escapee been sent to jail as a teenager, his arrest record might have kept him from guarding against escapes.