Just one quarter of the nearly 200 New York City public school students surveyed this winter by a youth advocacy group said the presence of school safety agents made them feel safer at school, according to a report issued Tuesday by the Center for Popular Democracy.
But 60% of the students polled by the city group Urban Youth Collaborative said they or someone they know has had a negative experience with a school safety agent — a figure that jumped to 80% for Black students, the survey found.
Nia Morgan, the research and operations coordinator at UYC, said the results show “students have higher priorities than having police in schools.”
The survey comes at a delicate moment for the fate of police in New York City schools.
The Education Department is poised to take over control of the more than 5,000-strong school safety force from the NYPD after protests roiled the city last year in the wake of George Floyd’s killing.
Advocates including UYC have urged the city to go further and completely remove police from schools, while reinvesting more than $400 million in annual school safety funding in school counselors, social workers, and social and emotional support for students.
Defenders of the current system, including Gregory Floyd, the President of Teamsters Local 237, the union representing school safety agents, say the presence of uniformed officers helps keep schools safe, acting as “a sign of authority to let students know who to run to in a time of need, and for the potential troublemakers, who to fear.”
But advocates say the results of their recent survey cast doubt on that assertion.
Of the 174 students surveyed last December and January, only 24% said police made them feel safe at school, while 82% said friends made them feel safe, and 69% chose teachers.
“People say they are there to protect students but they are targeting students,” wrote one anonymous student survey respondent.
More than 80% of the students said they see a police officer on a daily basis, and 60% said they or someone they knew has had a negative interaction with a safety agent. Nearly 70% said they supported the idea of reducing police presence in schools and diverting those resources to other parts of their schools.
Researchers say student activists advertised the survey in their classes, schools, and social media accounts and helped administer the questionnaire to their peers, but did not take the survey themselves. Black and Hispanic students were over-represented in the survey sample, while white and Asian students were under-represented.
The findings also seem to differ from those in the Education Department’s annual school climate survey, which generally show a large majority of students have a relatively positive outlook on school safety agents.
Morgan said the experience of walking through questions with a peer is very different than “taking a DOE survey on a computer,” and might help students feel more comfortable sharing negative experiences, which could account for some of the divergent results.
