In the aftermath of the death of George Floyd Minneapolis, it became vogue to defund police agencies nationwide, primarily in liberal-run cities.
In addition to municipal police departments, school systems also jumped on the bandwagon, with some cutting their police budgets substantially, with others removing school resource officers from their campuses.
With violent crime running rampant, political leaders are rethinking that strategy.
The Washington Times reported that of the nearly three dozen school districts that removed cops from schools within a year after Floyd’s death in May 2020, some are quietly bringing police back on campus.
Among those districts that either pulled police or significantly slashed their budgets were the Los Angeles Unified School District and the Chicago Public Schools. The reason offered for the pull was that police were “systemically racist,” a charge which has never been proven and has, in fact, been quite disproven.
At that time, the American Civil Liberties Union brought forth a report based on 2017 data that allegedly showed non-white students had a disproportionate number of interactions with in-school police officers, therefore, were more likely to face arrests or other disciplinary actions.
The report didn’t state the frequency with which non-white students offended on school campuses. However, the ACLU had the data they wanted.
“The country was reeling from the George Floyd ‘killing,’” said Jacque Patterson, a Washington, DC State Board of Education member, told the Times. “There’s a trigger there for many people who live in communities that are underserved or marginalized, and so that trickled into the schools itself.”
After police were removed from schools, however, disorder and crime followed. The Times notes that “wild fights, rampant drug use, and an alarming number of guns and knives” have found their way onto school grounds.
Some cities and school districts that defunded their police have made an about-face and have restored funds for the upcoming school year.
“We were seeing a spike in the number of weapons coming into school, and we needed to take a proactive approach to address that,” Scott Baldermann, a Denver Schools Board of Education member, told the Times.
What happened to change the mind of Denver school officials? A shooting last March at East High School.
According to Denver police, 17-year-old Austin Lyle is accused of shooting two school administrators while school administrators were patting him down for weapons. The teen initially agreed to the patdown. However, they shot the two administrators and fled. He later killed himself.
Baldermann was part of a unanimous vote to remove police from Denver schools in 2020, then apparently thought better of it after the two administrators were shot and pushed for the reinstatement of some form of law enforcement.
Under the new policy, the superintendent will determine if police must be stationed at a given school. The updated program allows elected officials to choose policy limits. However, they do not micromanage the day-to-day operations.
Denver’s change of heart is similar to that in the District of Columbia and neighboring school districts. Beginning with the 2021 school year, the Montgomery County Public Schools voted to remove police from their schools.
However, again, a school shooting forced them to reassess their decision, this time when a student shot a 15-year-old at a county high school in January 2022. The district immediately reversed its decision.
Montgomery County’s new program, called a “Community Engagement Officer” program, operates similarly to Denver’s program, with police being dispatched from a central location if needed.
In Alexandria, across the Potomac from the Nation’s Capital, it only took a few months for school administrators to beg for a return of police officers.
In that case, the school board and city council voted to remove police from district schools before the 2021-22 school year. However, several violent incidents during the first two months of the semester, including two students who brought a knife and gun to campus, prompted a change of heart.
Across the Potomac, however, the District of Columbia is amid a complete drawdown of their police presence in schools by 2025, despite a report from the D.C. Council Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety. That report showed police recovered 77 knives, 15 tasers, and five guns at schools during the 2021-22 school year.
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser has been pushing to restore funding for the SRO program. However, she is meeting opposition based on ideological rather than practical reasons.
“It’s all about politics, I’m not going to lie to you,” Patterson told The Times. “I think a lot of times we try to act like politics don’t play a part in the decision-making of actual politicians.”
Patterson noted that some constituent groups in the city are adamantly opposed to having a police presence in schools. He said local officials are “making sure that we appear responsive to the entities that don’t want our SROs and not just arbitrarily reverse course.”
Nonetheless, he noted that families that live in those areas most impacted by the city’s crime issues were more supportive of having police in schools than those who live in safer areas. Across the country, parents are generally supportive of school police officers, according to the National Association of School Resource Officers (NASRO).
“Some of the feedback we were seeing on community surveys were parents, in large numbers, were saying they want the SROs,” Mo Canady, executive director of the group, said. “But some of the school boards, apparently, were so caught up in the activism, maybe they ignored that.”
Meanwhile, Baldermann said respondents in Denver were “overwhelmingly supportive” of returning police to the schools.
He noted that after officers returned to the schools, officers made fewer arrests and issued fewer tickets. He credited that with the fact that officers are no longer assigned to incidents better handled by school administrators.
In Madison, Wisconsin, the state’s second-largest school system, school administrators scuttled the school resource officer program in exchange for a “restorative justice” model, which used psychology to examine the “root problems” of a child’s behavioral issues.
A worker from the YMCA Madison, which provides counselors to Madison’s three middle schools, claims that having police in schools creates a culture that “perpetuates punishment and fear and racism…all these systems of oppression.”
Eugenia Highland Granados continued claiming police officers in school adversely “impacts students of color” and further exacerbate “the school to prison pipeline.”
However, that doesn’t appear to resonate with parents of Madison public school students. A January survey showed that parents, students, and teachers remain concerned about fighting and drug use. Some said weapons were brought to campus with no accountability.
Highland-Granados dismisses those concerns and doesn’t believe it shows a shortcoming in the restorative justice program. She said schools need more than one social justice worker per school to provide the required change in culture.
In addition to municipal police departments, school systems also jumped on the bandwagon, with some cutting their police budgets substantially, with others removing school resource officers from their campuses.
With violent crime running rampant, political leaders are rethinking that strategy.
The Washington Times reported that of the nearly three dozen school districts that removed cops from schools within a year after Floyd’s death in May 2020, some are quietly bringing police back on campus.
Among those districts that either pulled police or significantly slashed their budgets were the Los Angeles Unified School District and the Chicago Public Schools. The reason offered for the pull was that police were “systemically racist,” a charge which has never been proven and has, in fact, been quite disproven.
At that time, the American Civil Liberties Union brought forth a report based on 2017 data that allegedly showed non-white students had a disproportionate number of interactions with in-school police officers, therefore, were more likely to face arrests or other disciplinary actions.
The report didn’t state the frequency with which non-white students offended on school campuses. However, the ACLU had the data they wanted.
“The country was reeling from the George Floyd ‘killing,’” said Jacque Patterson, a Washington, DC State Board of Education member, told the Times. “There’s a trigger there for many people who live in communities that are underserved or marginalized, and so that trickled into the schools itself.”
After police were removed from schools, however, disorder and crime followed. The Times notes that “wild fights, rampant drug use, and an alarming number of guns and knives” have found their way onto school grounds.
Some cities and school districts that defunded their police have made an about-face and have restored funds for the upcoming school year.
“We were seeing a spike in the number of weapons coming into school, and we needed to take a proactive approach to address that,” Scott Baldermann, a Denver Schools Board of Education member, told the Times.
What happened to change the mind of Denver school officials? A shooting last March at East High School.
According to Denver police, 17-year-old Austin Lyle is accused of shooting two school administrators while school administrators were patting him down for weapons. The teen initially agreed to the patdown. However, they shot the two administrators and fled. He later killed himself.
Baldermann was part of a unanimous vote to remove police from Denver schools in 2020, then apparently thought better of it after the two administrators were shot and pushed for the reinstatement of some form of law enforcement.
Under the new policy, the superintendent will determine if police must be stationed at a given school. The updated program allows elected officials to choose policy limits. However, they do not micromanage the day-to-day operations.
Denver’s change of heart is similar to that in the District of Columbia and neighboring school districts. Beginning with the 2021 school year, the Montgomery County Public Schools voted to remove police from their schools.
However, again, a school shooting forced them to reassess their decision, this time when a student shot a 15-year-old at a county high school in January 2022. The district immediately reversed its decision.
Montgomery County’s new program, called a “Community Engagement Officer” program, operates similarly to Denver’s program, with police being dispatched from a central location if needed.
In Alexandria, across the Potomac from the Nation’s Capital, it only took a few months for school administrators to beg for a return of police officers.
In that case, the school board and city council voted to remove police from district schools before the 2021-22 school year. However, several violent incidents during the first two months of the semester, including two students who brought a knife and gun to campus, prompted a change of heart.
Across the Potomac, however, the District of Columbia is amid a complete drawdown of their police presence in schools by 2025, despite a report from the D.C. Council Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety. That report showed police recovered 77 knives, 15 tasers, and five guns at schools during the 2021-22 school year.
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser has been pushing to restore funding for the SRO program. However, she is meeting opposition based on ideological rather than practical reasons.
“It’s all about politics, I’m not going to lie to you,” Patterson told The Times. “I think a lot of times we try to act like politics don’t play a part in the decision-making of actual politicians.”
Patterson noted that some constituent groups in the city are adamantly opposed to having a police presence in schools. He said local officials are “making sure that we appear responsive to the entities that don’t want our SROs and not just arbitrarily reverse course.”
Nonetheless, he noted that families that live in those areas most impacted by the city’s crime issues were more supportive of having police in schools than those who live in safer areas. Across the country, parents are generally supportive of school police officers, according to the National Association of School Resource Officers (NASRO).
“Some of the feedback we were seeing on community surveys were parents, in large numbers, were saying they want the SROs,” Mo Canady, executive director of the group, said. “But some of the school boards, apparently, were so caught up in the activism, maybe they ignored that.”
Meanwhile, Baldermann said respondents in Denver were “overwhelmingly supportive” of returning police to the schools.
He noted that after officers returned to the schools, officers made fewer arrests and issued fewer tickets. He credited that with the fact that officers are no longer assigned to incidents better handled by school administrators.
In Madison, Wisconsin, the state’s second-largest school system, school administrators scuttled the school resource officer program in exchange for a “restorative justice” model, which used psychology to examine the “root problems” of a child’s behavioral issues.
A worker from the YMCA Madison, which provides counselors to Madison’s three middle schools, claims that having police in schools creates a culture that “perpetuates punishment and fear and racism…all these systems of oppression.”
Eugenia Highland Granados continued claiming police officers in school adversely “impacts students of color” and further exacerbate “the school to prison pipeline.”
However, that doesn’t appear to resonate with parents of Madison public school students. A January survey showed that parents, students, and teachers remain concerned about fighting and drug use. Some said weapons were brought to campus with no accountability.
Highland-Granados dismisses those concerns and doesn’t believe it shows a shortcoming in the restorative justice program. She said schools need more than one social justice worker per school to provide the required change in culture.
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Comments
2023-08-24T08:55-0400 | Comment by: Ed
ROFL, be glad I'm not the Chief of a PD in one of these areas. After the defundment I would not return instead I would be sending my Detectives out after you had a shooting, knifing, or tragedy strike your schools. Eugenia Highland Granados needs to put down her crack pipe, how damn dumb can anyone one person be.
2023-08-24T08:55-0400 | Comment by: Ed
ROFL, be glad I'm not the Chief of a PD in one of these areas. After the defundment I would not return instead I would be sending my Detectives out after you had a shooting, knifing, or tragedy strike your schools. Eugenia Highland Granados needs to put down her crack pipe, how damn dumb can anyone one person be.