Police-Free Schools Are More Important Than Ever for Ending the School-To-Prison Pipeline
What does safety mean for Black and Brown students inside school systems that don’t see them as students, but rather a threat?
What does it mean for Black and Brown students who don’t have the opportunity to show up in spaces “unarmed” when people view the color of their skin as a weapon?
These questions, among many others, highlight the realities of students in K-12 schools and beyond the school itself.
At the age of 15, I can remember in high school thinking to myself: why is there such a significant presence of police, or as schools defined them, “resource officers,” inside of the school? Schools were meant for learning and nurturing, but the presence of police perpetually contradicted this. Instead, it accentuated controlling the lives of Black and Brown students and keeping them surveilled and docile. Their existence and violence were based on misguided fear of them being “criminal” and the inability to control themselves.
As protests continue in response to the choking death of George Floyd by Minneapolis Police and the continuous killings of other Black and Brown people, it has brought increased attention to a question that has plagued America for decades. This question situates itself in K-12 schools across the country — what is the role of police, and is there a need for them?
On one side of this question, reformers image police as the institution of protection and safety and believe that they can correct the wrongs of this institution by investing more money into it. On the other side, people are emerging into an abolitionist vision that builds models today for how we want the future to be. As a means to get to that future, they recognize the significance of divesting from police and investing back into communities — addressing not only the symptoms but the root causes of them.
The latter of these sides imagines an effort to dismantle a system that has robbed Black and Brown people from education — the school-to-prison pipeline. This “pipeline” is the trend where punitive policies, and the consequences of these policies, have led to children being funneled out of schools and into the criminal justice system. The “pipeline” doesn’t function on its own; it’s built around systems of injustice, like police, meant to perpetuate violence.
Police were not something the United States has always had — its history within this country began as a slave patrol. Fueled by the need to preserve an economy that was run by enslaved Black and Brown people, early police institutions tasked themselves with preventing slave revolts and chasing down runaways. It continued to adapt after the Civil War, where many sheriffs assumed the responsibility of enforcing segregation and disenfranchising freed people who were previously enslaved.
As an institution that was, and still is, rooted in racism, white supremacy, violence, and the oppression of Black and Brown people, these have continued to run deep in the modern systems we see today, like our K-12 schools.
The insertion of police in schools dates back to the 1950s, and even before then in the 40s. In 1953, Flint, Michigan placed the first documented school resource officer (SROs) in its schools as a way to restore, build, and maintain relationships between the local police and the city’s youth. Many states followed suit by adopting their own SROs and implementing police departments operating under the discretion of the school district. By the 1970s, more than half of the states had school districts that adopted a policing infrastructure into their schools.
The school’s reliance on police officers meant that there needed to be something that would allow them to control and assert their power over students. With the school being a focal point of much of the history of racial and social injustice, it allowed police to respond with violence veneered with safety, protection, and discipline, all intended to suppress the very voices of those seeking justice.
What further solidified the response of violence between police to our youth was the “War on Drugs,” which was declared by President Richard Nixon in 1969 and executed by President Ronald Reagan in 1982. The execution of these policies led to amplified policing of Black and Brown people, zero-tolerance policies that entered into schools, and created yet another way that police could assert their power.
Congress established mandatory minimum sentencing that disproportionately affected Black and Brown communities. The “War on Drugs,” in essence, was a war on communities of color designed to stamp Black and Brown people as criminals. The trickle-down effect is that our criminal justice system, or rather injustice system, continues to impact Black and Brown people disproportionally and our schools are no exception.
States and school boards would continue to increase policing and expand on what fell under zero-tolerance by adding inconsequential matters and normal student behavior that would be penalized in an environment that only ever needed nurturing and understanding, not policing. As a result, students would fall victim to the school-to-prison pipeline, experiencing suspension, expulsion, and arrests designed to keep them away from learning.
In Pennsylvania, the School District of Philadelphia’s memorandum of understanding with the Philadelphia Police Department is just one example of the heightened policing of students. Under this agreement, police officials must be notified by the school when specific incidents occur and give Philadelphia police sole discretion about how events are investigated and who is taken into custody.
Philadelphia’s school district has 218 schools and serves over 13,000 students, where 86% of them are students of color. Across the board, Philadelphia schools have suffered from the layoff of staff, school closures, and divestment in school resources, requiring students to attend schools that lack nurses, counselors, and other support staff. Despite the cuts in the Philadelphia budget, they have consistently invested in policing its students by employing over 350 SROs across its 213 schools. Criminalization is something that Black and Brown students experience nearly every day, from arrests and suspensions due to disciplinary misconduct to unannounced searches with metal detectors — but they don’t have to.
If this history teaches us anything, it’s that police are built on the legacy of racism, the presumption of guilt based on the narrative of being criminal, and the heightened policing of Black and Brown communities. The demand is simple — defunding and divesting from the institutions that bring legitimacy to police and reimagining what public safety should look through an abolitionist framework by investing back into our communities. For K-12 schools, it’s a step towards destroying the perpetuated narrative of Black and Brown people as criminals and shifts the focus to restorative practices for students rather than punitive and violent measures.
In practice, Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS), and others, have already begun to abandon their contracts with their city’s police department and imagine what this future looks like. The MPS school board chairwoman, Kim Ellison, said in an interview with the Star-Tribune that “I value people and education and life.” She continued and stated, “Now I’m convinced, based on the actions of the Minneapolis Police Department, that we don’t have the same values.”
Safety doesn’t exist when there are discrepancies between our values and how we view certain students. Moreover, students shouldn’t be forced to interact with a system that sees them as a threat.
We need to imagine what our schools look like without police, the resources that need to go back into our communities, and a new system that heals instead of destroys as a means of public safety.
It’s not much a matter anymore of how schools should make this shift toward police-free schools — it’s been shown that it’s indeed possible.
Thus, if it’s a matter of when schools should make the shift, the answer to that is now.
Mustafa Ali-Smith is a writer, organizer, and graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania’s Master of Liberal Arts program with concentrations in criminal justice, education, and race. You can follow Mustafa at @MustafaAliSmith.
