The policy of school policing

Do you remember the viral video of the school resource officer (SRO) slamming that Black kid to the ground and arresting them? A better question is probably, “Which one?” Is it the one from 2015 when Officer Ben Fields grabs a Black girl from the seat of her desk and piledrives her onto the unforgiving floor of a high school in Columbia, South Carolina? If not, maybe you recall an SRO double slamming an 11-year-old Black boy onto the cold hallway floor in Henderson, North Carolina? Or perhaps you’re thinking about the other 11-year-old Black boy in Farmington, New Mexico, in 2019, whose backpack Officer Zach Christensen yanks off before throwing him against the brick wall of the building exterior and slamming him to the concrete ground. Maybe instead the video of the little Black girl in Lancaster, California, stuck with you, or the one in Kissimmee, Florida, or the little white girl up the road in Broward County.

If we remember any of these gut-wrenching incidents, we also should have the gnawing feeling that school policing needs to change. It hurts to witness those incidents. From this painful place, I lay out an idea of what community policing in schools should look like.

Do schools need police?

Before diving into ideas of practical policy reform, it’s worth addressing a more obvious question. Should schools even have policing? It’s a crucial question because the answers that swarm before us remind us that school policing is a political tool.

History shows us that schools don’t need police to function. Public schools in the U.S. have existed since the mid-1800s. The first SRO stepped foot on a public school campus in 1953 (Weiler & Cray, 2011). The first schools to bring in SROs were in large urban areas that were attracting migrant workers during the postwar period — a period defined by racial apartheid in the South and economic boom beyond it. Workers flocked to places like Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Miami, and the place where the first SRO was employed: Flint, Michigan.

It’s painfully poetic injustice that Flint, the city that was once the first to receive cops in schools, is the same city that can’t provide safe drinking water for its residents. What does this say about our political system? At worst, it raises thoughts of insidious plans by our political elite to control Black bodies before eventually neglecting them altogether. At best, it shows us the hypocrisies that can emerge when political leaders value the wrong thing at the wrong time. Public schools existed for nearly a century without police. More than half of the schools in the United States do not have SROs. It doesn’t take much to imagine the U.S. as a nation without police in schools. Just look at half of the country; look at our history.

Remove the SROs

This context, therefore, raises calls for policy reform that ultimately removes SROs from schools. This reform can be built on a foundation of community policing, which is an organizational strategy requiring regular meetings between neighborhoods and police to set policing priorities (Forman 2004). Community policing emphasizes community involvement, problem solving, and organizational decentralization (Weisburd & Braga, 2019). It includes structured public dialogues between police and community stakeholders and draws on a philosophy of customer service. The problem-solving dimension typically looks to identify ways for police officers to respond to individual community complaints or frequently made grievances. Decentralization leads to dialogue and problem solving at more hyper-local levels.

The outcome of a community policing committee or task force varies widely. The reality often looks quite different from the intention. For example, community policing has helped make previously dangerous, gang-occupied parks and other public spaces safer for community members (Fung, 2004). Community policing also sparked practices like street-level interrogations and the overemphasis on property crimes and “disorder,” which then morphed into racially biased reforms like “broken windows” policing and the “stop-and-frisk” program (Lombardo & Lough, 2007). Such strategies have left collateral damage: neighborhood segregation, gentrification, mass incarceration (Wilson, 1987, 2012).

Keep the bones of community policing

Community policing, therefore, presents an interesting paradox. On one hand, it shows us what can happen when public land is reclaimed and people share neighborhood spaces safely and with civility. However, it also shows us the ugliness of how law enforcement can use the legitimate concerns and fears of communities to alter Black lives for the worst.

So, when thinking about community policing in schools, why not scrap the entire concept? Honestly, we should dispose of most of it. But, the core principles, the bones, are worth keeping and can serve as the springboard for reimagination.

Probably the most prominent push for community policing in schools comes from a joint effort between the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Office of Community Oriented Policing Services and its Office of Justice Programs. They champion a philosophy of community policing in schools that directs SROs to operate more as mentors and problem solvers than as rule enforcers. This strategy is a direct application of the community policing model for adults. The DOJ philosophy specifically encourages kids to be a part of the “community involvement” dialogues, while other models place parents at the center of the engagement — adults talking to adults about kids instead of talking to kids. The DOJ model is a positive step, but including students in the dialogue is not enough.

Community policing was intended to aid and restructure policing, not eliminate it. Existing models and philosophies of community policing in schools seek the same thing, but on the school level. I argue that we should employ the principles of community policing — community involvement, problem solving, and decentralization — to pull SROs completely out of schools. How does this work?

Participatory model

Change starts with student-centered dialogues on the issues that school systems use to justify the need for SROs. Students need be able to talk openly in structured discussions about safety issues. How widespread are student experiences with violence? How much of that exposure to violence happens at school? What do students consider to be violence? What factors motivate peers to turn to violent or harmful behavior? What can students do, as a body, to support one another in addressing or even mitigating those factors? This process gets at the root of issues like fighting, bullying, and mental health struggles.

The structured conversations should be open and participatory. One weakness of standard community policing models is that they tend to elevate a small group of highly engaged community members over a mass public assumed to be uninterested in civic issues. This is how we get “community- sanctioned” processes that improve conditions for a privileged few at the expense of others. Instead, we need mass forums for students to talk in small groups and have students rotate to different groups. This enables all students to be involved in discussing school safety.

This participatory model is not just a plan for addressing student safety. It’s a model for healing and restoration.

These discussions can feed directly into problem solving. At the simplest level, you employ the intellectual capital of an entire school to address root factors affecting student safety. The problem-solving element can focus on two levels. At the lower level are responses to idiosyncratic problems. This creates room for the “customer service” direct response that community policing models tend to generate. Meanwhile, the higher level addresses the more systemic causes. The problem-solving dialogues should lead to proposals for schoolwide or even districtwide programs and reforms, including weaning schools from SROs.

This participatory model is not just a plan for addressing student safety. It’s a model for healing and restoration. The concept is not new. Across Canada, there is a movement to hold truth and reconciliation conversations in schools over the mistreatment of Indigenous people. Diana Hess and Paula McAvoy (2014) write about the “political classroom” where student deliberations help equip students with the skills to live together as a community and society. Meira Levinson (2012) writes about the real-world problem solving that students are capable of when we train them and treat them as citizens. School policing stands in the way of progress.

Ultimately, reforming school policing to remove SROs is about teaching kids to fly. And to quote Toni Morrison (1977), “If you wanna fly, you gotta give up the shit that weighs you down.”

References

Forman Jr, J. (2004). Community policing and youth as assets. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 95 (1).

Fung, A. (2004). Empowered participation: Reinventing urban democracy. Princeton University Press.

Hess, D.E. & McAvoy, P. (2014). The political classroom: Evidence and ethics in democratic education. Routledge.

Levinson, M. (2012). No citizen left behind (Vol. 13). Harvard University Press.

Lombardo, R. & Lough, T. (2007). Community policing: Broken windows, community building, and satisfaction with the police. The Police Journal, 80 (2), 117–140.

Weiler, S.C. & Cray, M. (2011). Police at school: A brief history and current status of school resource officers. The Clearing House: A Journal of Educational Strategies, Issues and Ideas, 84 (4), 160–163.

Weisburd, D. & Braga, A.A. (Eds.). (2019). Police innovation: Contrasting perspectives. Cambridge University Press.

Wilson, W. (1987, 2012). The truly disadvantaged: The inner city, the underclass, and public policy. University of Chicago Press.

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This article appears in the December 2022/January 2023 issue of Kappan, Vol. 104, No. 4, pp. 62-63.