Movement to sever ties with school police builds
Michael had a history of fighting at school, so officials asked a campus police officer to meet with the boy. The situation quickly turned violent, with Michael kicking the armed officer, who then cuffed the boy’s hands and feet with zip ties before putting him in the back of a squad car and citing him for battery. Michael was 5. A kindergartner. The 2011 incident in Stockton involving a small African American boy is one of countless cases across California that have spurred more than a decade of activism to eliminate police in schools, a movement with relatively little momentum — until now.
The recent protests against police brutality have pushed education officials in the Bay Area and across the country to eliminate agreements with police, which in many cases include paying uniformed and armed officers to patrol campuses or provide security on school grounds. At the same time, school officials in California
summon police tens of thousands of times each year, federal records show.
Oakland, San Francisco, West Contra Costa and Los Angeles are among the many districts moving to sever ties with police in response to calls for reform and to redirect funding spent on law enforcement following the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police.
Yet, racial bias doesn’t play out only in policing, and addressing it in schools will require more than cutting ties with cops, say education leaders and activists.
Creating change for children of color in schools would not only require eliminating police departments, but addressing the disproportionate suspension rate of Black and brown students in virtually every school, they say. It would mean more money for counselors and support staff, and less reliance on 911 for minor matters.
“It does feel like we’re on the brink to actually change something,” said Jessica Black, organizing director for the Black Organizing Project, which has led the effort to eliminate Oakland Unified’s police department. “We have to allow for the space for that to happen. We’re really talking about changing hearts and minds.”
The current climate is a dramatic shift from policies implemented in the past several years, as communities across the country boosted security and the presence of armed guards on K12 campuses following deadly school shootings in Parkland, Fla., and Newtown, Conn., among others.
But community organizers, and more recently public officials, say the presence of law enforcement in schools impedes learning because it creates an environment of fear and hostility, especially for students of color.
“Policing dehumanizes Black and brown students on the street and in schools,” said Linnea Nelson, education equity staff attorney with the Northern California American Civil Liberties Union. “Police are trained to approach conflict by arresting people.”
Across the country, more than 14 million students were in a school with police, but no counselor, nurse, psychologist and/or social worker, according to a 2019 national report by the ACLU. In Michael’s case, a counselor might have helped.
Instead, the Stockton Unified School District paid $125,000 to compensate his family after the officer cuffed and cited the little boy.
Yet, even if districts cut official ties with law enforcement, that will not eliminate police — or racial bias — from school grounds.
Principals, teachers and school staff in California call police more than 25,000 times each year to address an issue with student, according to the most recent U.S. Department of Education data. And that figure is generally considered far lower than reality given errors in reporting.
In Oakland, the district’s police department, which includes 10 sworn officers, is summoned to schools about 2,000 times each school year — for student behavior as well as theft, vandalism, lockdowns, disgruntled employees, suspicious adults and more. About 600 of those calls are serious, calls that would need to be handled by police whether the district has its own department of not, said the Oakland school’s police Chief Jeff Godown.
The 1,400 others are considered security checks, perhaps a student making a threat or calls to confiscate a small amount of marijuana from a student — incidents currently handled by the district police officers administratively, meaning no one is cited or arrested, Godown said.
The officers don’t patrol the halls or school grounds, unlike school security officers assigned to schools in other districts, the chief added. They show up only when called.
“Every time (officers) step foot on a school ground, it’s because somebody called them,” he said.
The Oakland school board is expected to vote Wednesday on whether to eliminate the district police department, a decision that most of the board, the superintendent and even the police chief support. But if that happens, Godown said, the district will need a plan not only to address what will happen when one of those serious calls comes in, but how schools will handle the other situations.
“Whether you want police in schools or not, 300 times a semester, you’re going to have police in schools,” he said.
School board member Jumoke Hinton Hodge said she opposed the elimination of the district police department because those officers are trained to work in the schools. Without them, a 911 call will bring Oakland police — an unknown presence with a history of civilrights violations and brutality allegations, she said.
Superintendent Kyla JohnsonTrammell said she will work on a plan, with community input, to address the safety needs of students and staff without a district police department.
Kilian Betlach, principal of Elmhurst United Middle School, supports eliminating the district’s police department.
“We want students to feel safe. We don’t want to feel safe from our students,” he said. “I do think that the events that have happened, which aren’t new, they are galvanizing a national attention in a way that will lead to folks looking at these issues differently.”
Oakland is one of 19 school districts in California with its own police force. Los Angeles has 410 sworn police officers, 101 nonsworn school security officers, and 34 support staff. Snowline Joint Unified, in San Bernardino County, is among the smallest, with five sworn officers and nine employees total.
In addition to those with independent police departments, many districts contract with their local law enforcement agency to provide school resource officers, who are sworn and armed and typically assigned to schools for security after 40 hours of specialized training. Others employ school security guards, who typically have no law enforcement training.
The Los Angeles school board will consider a proposal this month to phase out its police department. Denver, Minneapolis and other cities are severing ties with local law enforcement, and thousands of protesters took to the streets in New York City last week urging school administrators to do the same.
The goal everywhere, Betlach said, is to reduce student interaction with police. That means shifting funds to hire more counselors or other trained staff to care for students who need help, or to address behavior issues without calling in an armed officer, officials said.
But districts also need to look at their own policies and practices, experts say.
Despite state policy changes reducing suspensions across the state in recent years, schools continue to disproportionately suspend Black students, according to a report by the UCLA Civil Rights Project.
In 2019, researchers found suspensions caused a loss of 36 days of instruction per 100 African American students, compared to three days for every 100 Asian American students and 10 days for white students.
“There’s an awareness that we’re not dealing with a level playing field here, and it’s not just how police treat Black students,” said Dan Losen, an author of the study, which The Chronicle obtained exclusively prior to publication.
While suspending Black students more often than students of other ethnicities is nearly universal, the gaps between students of color and their peers varies greatly, Losen said. And officials are suspending the same students referred to law enforcement — more often Black students, and especially those with disabilities.
“To me there's big differences in the attitudes of the teachers and principals in how they respond to kids from one district to the next,” he said. “There really are things schools can do and do differently than they’re doing now.”
Like spending on people who can actually help students in trouble, said supporters of eliminating police in schools.
In a letter to the Oakland school board last week, 45 principals and assistant principals said they want counselors and other support staff, not a police department.
“The historic overpolicing of communities of color, the ubiquitous images of ongoing brutality, and the unambiguous voices of our youth make clear that the presence of police undermines our efforts at establishing safety,” they said. “Time and again, courageous students have told us that police make them less safe — ‘period’ — and we cannot ignore those whom we would serve.”