Growing movement to get cops out of schools
Inspired by the rebellion against police brutality and racism, school boards across the country are being called upon to terminate contracts with local police departments. This is a growing expression of the Black Lives Matter struggle and important step in the movement to defund the police.
Parents and community groups whose children have been victims of abuse or profiling have been pressing school boards to end the practice, but elected officials have been reluctant or unwilling to confront police violence on campuses—until now. By July, there are over fifteen districts that have already terminated contracts, including Minneapolis-St. Paul, Denver, Portland (Oregon), San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, Madison, Milwaukee, Seattle, Columbus, and Charlottesville. Several other districts are in the process of “reviewing contracts.”
Nearly half of all public schools have at least one cop on campus (46%), amounting up to about 20,000 “school resource officers” on primary, middle, and high schools across the country. Cops are disproportionately concentrated in larger urban districts and campuses, especially in schools where students of color make up more than 50% of the student population and where students are designated low-income. Furthermore,
Two-thirds of high school students attend a school with at least one police officer, according to an analysis by the Urban Institute. And 1.7 million students attend schools with police officers, but no counselors, according to an analysis of federal data by the ACLU.
3 million are enrolled in schools that employ police officers but lack nurses; 6 million are enrolled in schools that employ police officers but lack a psychologist; and a whopping 10 million are enrolled in schools that employ police officers but lack social workers.
Ten of the nation’s largest 25 school districts even run their own campus police departments.
Reflecting wider society, the presence of police on school campuses leads to patterns of abuse. Cops are concentrated in poor and working-class communities like an occupying force, and the expansion of their operations onto school campuses target students of color at much higher rates than others. Conditions in Denver reflect the national trend of racial policing in schools:
During the 2018-19 school year, for example, 29% of referrals to law enforcement were for black students, despite black students accounting for only 13% of the district's student population, according to the Advancement Project. And from 2014 through 2019, there were 4,540 police tickets and arrests of students within Denver schools – 87% of them students of color.
Another recent study showed Black students comprise 26% of total enrollment in Oakland public schools, but accounted for 73% of students arrested on campuses.
Policing different communities differently
Predictably, the more that cops engage in policing a specific population, the more that group becomes criminalized and repressed whether or not actual crimes are committed. This phenomenon, referred to as “pro-active” policing, reflects how “law enforcement” and police powers are pervading into every aspect of society.
Furthermore, the police have acquired virtual immunity from prosecution from the state, especially when the victims are black and brown. This is referred to as the “doctrine of qualified immunity.” As one report explained:
Under the doctrine of qualified immunity, public officials are held to a much lower standard. They can be held accountable only insofar as they violate rights that are “clearly established” in light of existing case law. This standard shields law enforcement, in particular, from innumerable constitutional violations each year. In the Supreme Court’s own words, it protects “all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law.” It is under this rule that officers can, without worry, drag a nonthreatening, seven months pregnant woman into the street and tase her three times for refusing to sign a piece of paper.
Qualified immunity permits law enforcement and other government officials to violate people’s constitutional rights with virtual impunity. Today, we hear about police shooting after police shooting where officers are rarely if ever held accountable by the criminal legal system, either because prosecutors decline to charge, because grand juries decline to indict, or because juries decline to convict.
The police are also given the legally-sanctioned right to lie, entrapping untold numbers of people in alleged crimes that they never committed. Despite their image as defenders of the social order, most crimes against people are never reported, pursued, investigated, or solved. The police are very deliberate in how and who they police.
Recent studies have also shown that cops are reviewed according to the funds raised through ticketing and prosecutions, as opposed to upholding some kind of “justice.” After the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, a federal investigation found that racial disparities were connected to how cops policed the Black population differently:
The disparities were rooted in the city’s reliance on the police department and courts for local budget revenue: Federal officials found that city officials worked together at every level of enforcement — from city management to the local prosecutor to the police department — to make as much money from fines and court fees as possible, ranging from schemes to raise total fines for municipal code violations to asking cops to write as many citations as possible.
This range of power gives the cops complete control over the situation and encourages them to see themselves above the very law they supposed to enforce. It allows them to determine the outcomes of every interaction to their advantage. The discretion afforded by this wall of immunity also means that policing is often situational, and conducted differently depending on which population is being policed.
As an apparatus of the capitalist state, the primary function of the police is to enforce property relations, not to protect people. The police prosecute property crimes more than any other crime, so the property-less and the poor become the most heavily policed. Since wealth and property are disproportionately concentrated in more affluent and white geographical zones, and not in Black, Brown, and poor communities, cops direct their policing towards these communities more aggressively, and policing itself is a designed to preserve the existing order.
Since police deployments and actions are racialized and focused in poor and segregated places, police reproduce inequality, racial stratification, and segregation through criminal legal enforcement actions that constrain mobility. In other words, when police routinely intervene in the everyday lives of citizens, they impose interaction costs that deter residents from moving freely.
Policing in the schools with disproportionately black, brown, and working-class students is an extension of the maintenance of this existing social order. Like in the wider community, the police typically turn all forms of interaction into situations where physical control and punishment are more likely the outcome.
Like in the wider community, the police typically turn all forms of interaction into situations where physical control and punishment are more likely the outcome.
Distributing punishment becomes “pro-active” in order to use force as an example to discourage all forms of behavior except submissiveness. Any form of resistance to this type of control is then escalated into a more dangerous situation, where the cops can deploy violence and increase the charges.
A recent study of the New York Police Department illustrates this. On the beat, the cops engaged in “work slow-downs” as part of a protest against city policies in 2014-5. The less they work, the more the “crime-rate” dropped. As was reported in the journal Nature,
New York Police Department (NYPD) to effectively halt proactive policing in late 2014 and early 2015. Analyzing several years of unique data obtained from the NYPD, we find that civilian complaints of major crimes (such as burglary, felony assault and grand larceny) decreased during and shortly after sharp reductions in proactive policing. The results challenge prevailing scholarship as well as conventional wisdom on authority and legal compliance, as they imply that aggressively enforcing minor legal statutes incites more severe criminal acts.
Policing children and youth
Police on campuses also use the same forms violence towards kids that their parents and larger community experience off the campuses, often traumatizing children for life. In one case, cops arrested young children in Florida schools for what were described as “behavioral outbursts.” In one case, a six-year old African-American girl was physically subdued and handcuffed by a school resource officer, who then charged her with “misdemeanor assault” for her “behavior”. This led one commentator to conclude that the “threat to the students is the officers themselves.” Acts of violence by school cops are becoming more common and widespread.
Rather than just the actions of bad apples, the problem is systemic. The policing of children has become an institutionalized function for the capitalist system, which has intensified the means to contain, control, and criminalize whole populations in proportion to widening inequality, poverty, and resistance. Young working-class students of color are being socialized to either enter the ranks of the low-wage workforce, where submission and following orders are paramount. Those that resist or won’t assimilate are corralled into the “justice system” and the increasingly for-profit carceral system.
For example, the federal Department of Justice has played a role in providing grants to school districts to hire cops. One study of this program found that the funding mechanism was linked to the number of arrests made, leading to a 21% increase in arrest rates per officer on campuses where the grants were issued.
Not only does policing not protect people, but people are generally safer without cops, especially children.
Not only does policing not protect people, but people are generally safer without cops, especially children. In policing their subjects from an increasingly younger age, cops are backed by a justice system that is structured to recreate criminalization and subjugation as a form of social reproduction, leading one advocate to conclude that
research and the experiences of young people of color have taught us that police in schools create a toxic school climate and fuels the school-to-prison pipeline. Police-free schools are essential to the well-being of our black and brown youth.
From defunded police to fully-funded education
Removing police from campuses and reinvesting those funds in student programs and resources is an important first step. Some districts are re-investing funds away from policing and towards meeting students’ material needs. In Portland, the money retained from defunding of the police is being earmarked for more services like counselors, mental health workers, and nurses. Other districts are reinvesting the resources in culturally-relevant programs and curriculum, such as ethnic studies classes for all students. West Contra Costa Unified School District plans to reinvest $1.5 million from the police to support African-American student achievement.
Another step is the fight to fully fund public education. Budget cuts and austerity are another facet of structural racism in education. Schools have been facing severe cuts for over the last ten years, disproportionately impacting low-income and students of color. The Covid-19 pandemic and capitalist recession is leading towards another eventual round of school defunding, teacher layoffs, and accelerated privatization, while the rich and corporations get massive government bailouts.
The Black Lives Matter movement is exposing the major divides between the police and those who are policed. The movement is shedding light on how police departments have been qualitatively transformed into repressive authoritarian regimes who serve as the bulwark for a highly unequal society. A growing share of the public budget is being used to fund police while our schools and communities face austerity and hardship. For example, the total amount state allocations for police has been virtually increasing each year since 1977–reaching $115 billion by 2017—without an end in sight. With growth, power, and impunity also comes an increase in police violence.
This convergence of factors explains why it is imperative that education workers and unions join in solidarity, and lead or support the movement to get cops off school campuses.
We can already see how the movement in the streets is giving the unions confidence to fight back against injustice. The Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, for instance, led in the fight to get cops removed from schools. The Chicago Teacher’s Union set an example for how to build a solidarity campaign, taking a public stance and marching with students and community members to demand police be removed from schools. The United Teachers of Los Angeles have also come out in favor of de-funding the police and removing them from campuses. National education unions such as the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA) need to be unequivocal about what side they are on—and support the movement.
Successes on this front can strengthen and lay the basis for further struggles, including impending battles against education budget cuts and austerity, to remove police associations from organized labor altogether, and the others that lie ahead.
Justin Akers Chacón is an educator, activist, and writer in the San Diego-Tijuana border region. His recent works include No One is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the US-Mexico Border (with Mike Davis, Haymarket Books, 2nd edition, 2018), and Radicals in the Barrio: Magonistas, Socialists, Wobblies, and Communists in the Mexican-American Working Class (Haymarket Books, 2018).
