Police Don't Belong in Schools

The nearly certain return to in-person schooling in the fall will rekindle the seemingly endless debate over guns in schools, especially on the hips of police officers.  Incidents of mass murder have grown frighteningly more frequent - 178 so far in 2021.  Even before this surge, more than 70% of large high schools in America engaged a Student Resource Officer (SRO).

On Wednesday the Lebanon, NH School Board will vote on the matter of continuing to include a SRO in their budget.  I happen to be intimately familiar with Lebanon, having lived in the area full or part time for 30 years.  I’ve also written a column for the local paper, the Valley News, since 1997.

To say the community is divided is an understatement. A non-binding referendum was inconclusive (1,011-1,006) and, according to news reports, letters and other public comment was similarly divided.  Public comment included testimony to the great discomfort students of color feel with armed, uniformed police presence.  Little wonder, given the recent history of tragic encounters between boys and men of color and the police.

As the former head of a New York independent school for 19 years and as a frequent visitor and “principal for a day” at a number of public schools in Harlem and the Bronx, I have relevant experience.

The history and evidence are clear.

Policing in schools is a relatively new phenomenon, although some history goes back to the 1940s and ‘50s.   There was an understandable, albeit knee-jerk, surge following the mass murders in Columbine and Sandy Hook.  Frequently ignored is that Columbine happened despite armed police in the school.  Today, largely as response to these tragedies, more than 70% of American high schools have SROs.

Like most other schools, the one I led had anxious parents demanding armed security in the wake of these tragedies.  I resisted then, and I would resist now, because there is no evidence that armed personnel have protected any school from that kind of unthinkable assault.  If an angry, crazed person wants to massacre children at any school, an armed guard with a handgun is not much help, policeman or not.  I pointed out that our students were vulnerable to a madman at arrival time, dismissal time, recess and sports events.  The only protection against such tragedy is to have fewer madmen and fewer or no weapons of mass mayhem in our communities.

The more important history is to look at broader social attitudes toward race and crime.  

The 1994 Crime Bill was a major factor in the accelerating mass incarceration of Black men.  

Rudy Giuliani’s mayoral reign of terror in NYC began at the same time, ushering in the “broken windows”  approach to policing; arrest thousands of Black men for petty offenses and crime will be reduced.  And so it was, with enormous collateral damage to communities of color.  At my school, where 32% of high school students were of color, the impact was unambiguous: every student of color reported being hassled, stopped and frisked, or followed in stores by NYC police officers.  Not so for white students, of course.

The presence of police in nearly half of all American schools is a sad and unnecessary extension of the attitudes and policies of that era.  The results should surprise no one.  Arrests of students for minor offenses increased, disproportionately arrests of students of color.  Despite assertions by Lebanon residents, or the apparently pleasant demeanor of the current SRO,  Lebanon’s students of color are fully justified in their claims that an armed police officer is a source of real discomfort.  

One former Lebanon student spoke up in support of police presence: “The officer ‘was there for me when others were not,’ including educators who openly pondered whether Flanders would wind up serving prison time as an adult, he told the School Board.”  

That is a glaring indictment of those educators, not a justification for police presence.

Many assert that a SRO is a good way to de-stigmatize police at a time when public/police relations are fraught.  De-stigmatization may be a salutary goal, but is not schools’ responsibility.  If public attitudes toward police are to change it must come from a change in police attitudes toward the public.  And everywhere in America, police attitudes toward the public - specifically the Black public - are in desperate need of change.  That is as true in a semi-rural community as it is in Harlem. 

There is no evidence that having a police officer in a school makes it safer.  There is abundant evidence that having a police officer in a school changes the climate for the worse, especially for students of color.

Former Lebanon teacher Lindsay Dearborn deserves the last word.

“I know in my bones that when we invite law enforcement into schools for whatever reason and one child, any child, feels unsafe, threatened, feels uncomfortable or is otherwise harmed, then we are all harmed,” she said. “It means our school isn’t working.”