High school students in New York City unfurl giant banners near City Hall during a June 25 rally calling for police-free schools and the defunding of the NYPD.
In 2015, a student-recorded video of the #AssaultatSpringValley went viral; it shows Shakara, a sixteen-year-old Black girl from Columbia, South Carolina, being placed in a headlock, flipped over in her desk chair, then dragged and thrown across her classroom by a school police officer. The student who recorded the video, Niya, was arrested; the cop who assaulted Shakara, Ben Fields, was not charged.
As students begin to return to school, we must invest in the support they need to be safe and thrive. We can’t return to an unacceptable “normal.”
After this assault, young people came together to seek to end the criminalization and abuse of students of color, and support those young people who have experienced police violence firsthand. They wrote letters to the students, Niya and Shakara. They modeled the world they would like to see, a world without police.
When young people and organizers talk about police-free schools, they are fighting for a world that does not yet exist. They’re fighting to dismantle school policing infrastructure, culture, and practice, to end school militarization and surveillance, and to build a new, liberatory education system.
We can’t build the future our students deserve through modest reforms. Instead, we must heed their calls to transform safety in our schools through resources that meet students’ needs. And that includes getting rid of the police.
The police murder of George Floyd forced communities to grapple with the fact that the police who target, terrorize, and kill Black and brown people on the streets are the same police in schools with our children. Over the past year, at least thirty-five school districts have taken steps to end policing in their hallways.
And federal legislation has been introduced to end federal funding of police in schools. It’s called the Counseling Not Criminalization in Schools Act.
Last summer, as school districts from Minneapolis to Denver to Oakland to Phoenix took action to remove police from schools, the National Association of School Resource Officers (NASRO) responded with calls for “rigorous training” and “appropriate use” of police in schools.
But years of research and lived experiences of students show that school police do not make students safe; in fact, they make students less safe, even when certain measures have been adopted to try to increase their training or limit their roles, tactics, and responsibilities.
NASRO is deploying alarmist rhetoric about “potential violence” to justify sustained police presence in our schools; it claims the “unprecedented break” caused by the pandemic could exacerbate violence when schools reopen that school police must be “prepared for.”
As schools reopened their doors in the spring, young people were met with violence—by the police. Two Black girls in two separate Florida school districts were physically assaulted by law enforcement on the same day in January. Yet NASRO has been silent about police assaults against young people.
We have seen this before—school police justifying the criminalization of Black, brown, and poor students in the name of public safety.
In 2014, uprisings had spread like wildfire in response to the murder of Black youth at the hands of police. Young people in the Alliance for Educational Justice moved member organizations to take stronger positions, engage in direct actions, and make clearer connections between police violence, schools, and educational justice.
As we return to school this fall, the federal government has taken steps to provide schools with resources to meet the needs of young people during the pandemic. But instead of guaranteeing restorative, trauma-informed practices, tech companies are swooping up these funds to surveil students (including with products typically reserved for cops).
And the U.S. Department of Justice continues to offer schools hundreds of millions of dollars to police students under the guise of “school safety,” using anonymous reporting systems, social media surveillance, and threat assessment teams that coordinate with law enforcement.
These dangerous and unproven practices will disproportionately criminalize Black and brown students and threaten their safety.
In some of the districts that took action last year to end policing, school policing is simply evolving—not ending.
A few months after cutting its ties with the Minneapolis Police Department, the local school board used tools to digitally surveil their students and hired “public safety support specialists” to provide security and serve as a “bridge” between in-school intervention and law enforcement; many of these “specialists” come from law enforcement backgrounds.
Los Angeles Unified School District voted to rehire the school police officers they previously terminated as “school climate coaches,” which was denounced by students and organizers at Students Deserve and the Labor Community Strategy Center.
As Denver passed the one-year anniversary of its police-free schools resolution, won by Padres & Jóvenes Unidos, and the deadline to remove all school police from schools, the district began expanding the authority of its Department of Safety and is considering installing “community resource officers” with law enforcement backgrounds to replace its school resource officers.
Since the #AssaultatSpringValley, the Alliance for Educational Justice and the Advancement Project have documented more than 150 police assaults of students in their schools—including tasering, pepper spraying, using force, and even sexually abusing students. And these are just the assaults that make the news. We know that verbal harassment, the controlling of students’ movements in classrooms and hallways, questioning and detainment, and referrals to law enforcement and arrests are everyday experiences for students who attend schools with police.
This is why our partners in the National Campaign for Police-Free Schools are demanding police-free schools that include investment in resources that support the whole child; hiring adults that do not fear Black youth; community collective processes that craft alternatives for safety; school-based violence interrupters; restorative and transformative justice; and anti-racist training and decolonizing school curriculums. These demands aim to ensure there are caring adults dedicated to cultivating the genius of Black and brown youth, and ultimately, to shift power in our schools.
As students begin to return to school, we must invest in the support they need to be safe and thrive. We can’t return to an unacceptable “normal.” We must address all the ways “normal” is unjust and unacceptable: drastically underfunded Black and brown schools, privatization and takeover of Black and brown schools, schools where Black and brown students lack access to the same rigorous coursework as white students, and millions of students attending schools with police but without counselors, nurses, psychologists, or social workers. And we must hear the demands of the young people and their allies who have been learning, working, and engaging in the struggle for police-free schools for years now.
An approach that invests in schools without divesting from the harm and trauma caused by policing in all forms cannot claim to be transformative. We must live up to the dreams and imaginations of our young people, who can see beyond normal and envision a new, liberatory education system.