Last night I attended (via Zoom) the Police-Free Schools Teach-In hosted by the Anti-Racist Education Alliance. I was there as an ordinary citizen, not as a blogger, so I didn’t take notes. That was probably a mistake, because now I want to write about the experience and I have nothing but recollection to rely on.
The presentation was so well-researched that I think it should be required for all employees of the Howard County School System. Parents, too. If we are going to take a deeper look at whether we want to have police in our schools we need to be informed about how they got there in the first place and what the results have been. If the mission of schools is to support students, then this is ‘homework’ that is long overdue.
Here are a few thoughts that I am mulling over today.
Putting police in schools didn’t start until the 1950’s. But, once the door was open, it became more and more an accepted practice. Interestingly enough, communities continue to find money to fund police in schools when they will not allocate funds for social workers, counselors, mental health initiatives, and other services which directly support students.
Having police in schools has transformed how student behaviors are viewed and responded to. In essence, ordinary actions that were dealt with for generations before police were in schools have taken on new terminology that labels them as crimes. Pushing or shoving is now “assault”. Taking a piece of candy or a pencil is now “theft”. Talking back or arguing is “insubordination” or “disorderly conduct.”
You might think that the end result of approach would be a wide variety of kids being cited and perhaps suspended, because these are behaviors that happen across the board. Not so. The statistics show, over and over again, that it is Black and Brown students whose behavior is criminalized and punished. I would argue that this happens because of an implicit bias which looks at the very same behavior in white students and gives them the benefit of the doubt. Black and Brown students, on the other hand, are looked at as innately more dangerous and in need of ‘control’.
The longer we allow this to continue, the more it teaches white students that either: Black and Brown students are inherently more ‘criminal’, or: that schools use police in schools to harass Black and Brown students but the entire system is okay with that. Just imagine what it is teaching Black and Brown students: in every moment you are potentially a criminal. Your education is not as important as your compliance.
You also might think that such a “law and order” approach would make schools safer. It hasn’t. In fact, the numbers indicate that the more we put police in schools, the more the documented undesirable behavior increases. It’s not a success. It hasn’t made schools safer. And yet we keep spending more money on it.
This is what we, as a community, need to face:
*Police weren't always in schools.
*Their presence has served to criminalize student behavior.
*The way that police are used in schools increases the likelihood that Black and Brown students will be singled out and stigmatized.
*And, most of all, having police is schools has not made schools any safer.
Don’t we want to spend our community resources on practices that will actually have a lasting impact on students and the school environment? How can we justify spending more and more money on a program that unfairly targets some students more than others while not making schools any safer?
There was so much more to last night’s presentation. I was especially impressed by the variety of alternative approaches that we could be using if we decided to put students first and respond to the underlying causes of difficult behaviors. I will check with AREA to see if the session was recorded and/or if they will be doing it again any time soon.
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