As New York cautiously begins in-person schooling with a laser-sharp focus on COVID-19, it’s as good a time as any to rethink how we achieve holistic safety in schools for all students, all the time. A growing body of evidence says that a critical first step is to defund the budget for cops in schools — and invest in counselors, mental health service and wrap-around services for young people and their families instead.
New York City spends over a quarter of a billion dollars a year on over 5,000 School Resource Officers (SROs) — a fancy name for NYPD personnel on payroll to patrol schools. This number is staggering; it’s more than all guidance counselors and social workers combined. And despite recent claims made by Mayor de Blasio and the City Council, the SRO budget has neither been defunded nor transferred to the Department of Education. More sobering still: Even if pledges to transfer SROs to New York City DOE oversight at some future point were to come to fruition, such a shift is unlikely to save the city money or reduce the burden of school policing on students.
For years, the New York Civil Liberties Union, The Center for Popular Democracy and The Urban Youth Collaborative have been ringing the alarm on the harm created by filling public schools with police. Prime among their findings: The presence of SROs increases overall arrest rates by turning disciplinary problems into criminal problems. Placing young people in the criminal justice system increases their time out of school and is a major predictor of school failure and future incarceration.
Black students are much more likely to be arrested than their white peers, while those with disabilities are the most likely to be arrested. SROs are also authorized to place children on the NYPD’s “gang database” for things like wearing suspected gang colors or having unexplained pocket money.
Law enforcement lobbies and status quo politicians have doubled down on their insistence that school police are necessary to keep kids safe — but the research consistently fails to show this. Last month, a new study found that the only effect of police in schools was to increase the number of discretionary arrests. In other words, school “safety” agents actually have no measurable impact on frequency or degree of harmful behavior. Neither did the authors find any evidence of cops in schools preventing the most terrifying of school violence outcomes — school shootings — noting that in some of the most high-profile incidents, such as at Parkland High School in Florida, armed police were in fact present.
Yes, it’s true: Schools can be a place of danger for young people. The U.S. Department of Education found that 4% of young people reported carrying a weapon at school. But they also reported that schools are actually the safest place that young people spend time. And filling schools with police and metal detectors sends the message that young people are in danger and a source of danger, which actually undermines their sense of safety.
What, then, is proven to keep children actually safe? A well-funded school environment with a full range of support services, easily accessible to every student and their family. In July, the National Center for Education Statistics, the U.S. Department of Education and the Department of Justice issued a report showing that the absence of adequate mental health services was a major predictor of school violence.
In addition, they found that problems like bullying and crises in the home were major sources of insecurity. The solution to these problems is to increase investment in counseling and mental health services, address harmful behavior by young people through restorative interventions, and provide wrap-around support for students and their families.
Many teachers, students and parents have come to rely on school police to create a stable learning environment for as many students as possible. But this investment in school policing is the direct result of underinvestment in better alternatives. When schools are well-staffed, have high-quality support services and treat young people with mutual respect, disciplinary problems plummet.
A growing number of cities — from Portland, Me. to Oakland, Calif. — have ended their use of school police and reinvested the funds in counselors and support services. New York City signaled its intention to address this issue, but instead passed the buck in a budgetary sleight of hand.
The students and families of this city cannot afford this kind of political maneuvering. The City Council and mayor should begin a credible process of working with parents and students to develop alternatives to school policing that will actually make school environments safer. The evidence is clear: it’s long past time to get cops out of schools.
Vitale is a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and the author of The End of Policing.
