ADVOCACY & POLICY | THE AMERICAS | VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN
Police in Chicago Public Schools: Let’s not settle for progress when students deserve better
WORDS BY LAURA DARCEY | DARCEY@PROXYBYIWI.COM | 12 DECEMBER 2023
Chicago Public Schools has reduced its reliance on uniformed police officers to keep students safe while at school, but students in 40
schools continue to learn under the emotional weight of constant police surveillance. Students deserve to learn in a police-free environment.
Three years ago, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) began re-thinking their security approach following the murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. A subsequent summer of protests and calls to defund the police triggered a fresh examination of how students should be kept safe in schools.Yet as of this month there is still a uniformed Chicago Police officer (also known as a School Resource Officer or SRO) roaming the hallways of 40 schools.
SROs Create Negative Impacts
Black students and community members have complained about the presence of uniformed police officers in schools for years.While SROs are tasked with ensuring a safe and secure campus, opponents say that they target Black children and involve law enforcement in routine disagreements, escalating situations and criminalising Black teenage behaviour. A recent analysis found that students who attend a school with an SRO are four times more likely to have the police called on them than students attending schools without SROs. Discipline matters that could end in the principal’s office instead end, unnecessarily, in handcuffs at the police station.
Pauline Lipman, a professor and researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago said: “All the research pretty much shows the same thing: Police in schools actually don’t keep students safe. Police in schools make Black and Brown students in particular more fearful of going to school. It affects their educational experience and can set them on a path in which various institutions criminalise them”.
Students’ health is also directly impacted by the presence of SROs. Students in schools staffed with police are exposed to the psychological effects of regularly interfacing with law enforcement. Sociopsychological research suggests that an overly pervasive presence of law enforcement operates as a stress-inducing visual stimulus, which can have a detrimental effect on a child’s physical and psychological systems. Toxic stress, caused by this daily activation of a student’s stress response has been shown to have both mental and physical effects that negatively impact learning, health, and influence behaviour.
CPS Has Made Progress
Local School Councils (LSCs) have periodically been given the opportunity to vote to remove the SRO from their school, and many schools have chosen to do so.
CPS has greatly reduced their relationship with the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and has only 57 SROs stationed in schools, compared to 140 in 2019. Nevertheless, while the contract between CPS and CPD has plummeted from $33 million in 2019 to $10.3 million for the 2023-24 school year, only $3.8 million of those saved funds have been made available to schools to hire alternative staff, or fund restorative justice programmes. And CPS is still funnelling millions of dollars to the police department while their school network is woefully underfunded.
This summer CPS also recast its agreement with the police department to better define an SRO’s responsibilities and to give school leaders more control over the officers in their buildings. They have also been in conversations with CPD about the alternative use of mobile patrols which could be assigned to monitor multiple school sites, which may placate concerns around having no police presence on call.
Despite this progress, however, SROs are still present in 40 schools, the majority of which are attended by majority Black and Brown students – the very student population that is most harmed by the presence of police officers.
CPS Should Take Decisive Action
Days after the murder of George Floyd, Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) severed their ties with the Minneapolis Police Department. They recognised that having officers stationed in schools was not in the best interests of their students. In place of police officers, MPS developed a network of Public Safety Specialists, who report to the school district rather than the police department. This means that incidents are more likely to be handled within the school building, and more students are kept away from the police department.
Since 2020, initial data and interviews with students and staff have found that fewer Minneapolis students are being punished, and consequently missing class for suspensions or other punishment, and significantly fewer students are having contact with law enforcement officers due to their behaviour at school.
The national push to remove SROs from schools has stalled in the last year as some school district have second thoughts. A 2022 Gallup poll found that more than half of parents nationwide fear for their child’s safety while at school. Research has made clear, however, that SROs will not assuage these fears. SROs do not prevent gun related incidents, and recent research found no evidence that the presence of police officers in schools reduced crime or promoted safety. Schools must find other responses to this fear.
CPS has shifted the power of this decision to Local School Councils. Yet some LSCs have repeatedly voted to retain their SROs. There are some questions that should be answered locally, but when the evidence is so heavily weighted in one direction, a question no longer remains. It is time for CPS to take definitive action, and not shy away from the facts that research has proven time and time again to be true.
SROs create harmful impacts for students, criminalising teenage behaviour and perpetuating the school-to-prison pipeline. Now is not the time for CPS to skirt around the issue, but to move with authority and remove SROS from all Chicago Public Schools.
i. Chicago Sun Times, At CPS high schools, a stark racial divide on when cops are called on students and arrests, August 2020McEwen, Early life influences on life-long patterns of behaviour and health, 2003
ii. Chalkbeat Chicago, Is Chicago’s shift to restorative justice and fewer school police working? Some say yes., September 2023
iii. Chicago Public Schools, Whole School Safety Planning Process SY2023-24, March 2023
iv. Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, What happened after Minneapolis removed police officers from schools, August 2022
v. Fisher, School-based law enforcement strategies to reduce crime, increase perceptions of safety, and improve learning outcomes in primary and secondary schools: A systematic review, November 2023