Police in public schools harm students, leading to far-reaching socioeconomic inequalities alongside less safe schools

The impact of police in public schools on Black students

School policing also disproportionately targets Black students (opens in a new tab).¹⁶¹ Research continues to demonstrate that Black students are arrested at higher rates when police are present in schools (opens in a new tab).¹⁶² Research in the area of office referrals, suspensions, and expulsions in public schools shows that Black students are not receiving disproportionate school disciplinary consequences due to higher rates of misbehavior. On the contrary, Black students do not misbehave (opens in a new tab) more than their White peers.¹⁶³

Outcomes are even worse for Black girls in public schools. Research (opens in a new tab) by the U.S. Department of Education shows that Black girls are four times more likely than their White peers to be arrested, three times more likely to be referred to police, and two times more likely to be physically restrained.¹⁶⁴

Moreover, policing students at school is ineffective and costly. Research (opens in a new tab) by the National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine demonstrates that school police neither make schools safer nor avert school shootings.¹⁶⁵ Instead, police in schools negatively affects (opens in a new tab) these schools’ climate and student safety.¹⁶⁶ Heavily policed school atmospheres (opens in a new tab) can alienate and increase anxiety in students, create a sense of mistrust between peers, and result in adversarial relationships between students and school officials.¹⁶⁷

Nonetheless, local and state governments, as well as the federal government, continue to spend millions of dollars on the school policing infrastructure. This includes school police officer salaries and benefits, weapons, surveillance technology, and expensive monetary settlements following instances of excessive force and abuse perpetrated on students by police in schools. Between 1999 and 2019, state and federal governments invested close to $2 billion on school police (opens in a new tab).¹⁶⁸

Since the 2018 mass shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida and the passing of the federal STOP School Violence Act, many states have begun their own school police grant programs to the tune of hundreds of millions more dollars for school police (opens in a new tab).¹⁶⁹ This allocation of funding toward police comes in contrast to years of budget cuts to education spending in school districts across the country.

Placing police officers in schools also creates a significant threat to the physical and emotional safety of Black students and students with disabilities. A new study (opens in a new tab) by one of the authors of this column and his co-authors finds that of the 285 instances of school police officers physically and sexually assaulting students between the years 2011 and 2021, more than 80 percent of the victims of police assaults at school were Black students. Additionally, more than 25 percent of police assaults were on students with disabilities or students with reported mental health concerns.¹⁷⁰

Black girls in particular were vastly overrepresented at nearly a third (30.7 percent) of all reported police assaults against students. Similar to the lack of police accountability that sparked protests following the murders (opens in a new tab) of Mike Brown, Breonna Taylor, and many others, this study also finds (opens in a new tab) that the offending officers suffered no consequences in well over half of the incidents. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1

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New police surveillance technologies in schools only make matters worse

Placing police in school and the growing trend of student surveillance merely creates the illusion of safety and security. There is no actual peer-reviewed evidence on the efficacy of surveillance measures being implemented in schools, including student device and social media monitoring, facial recognition, and weapons abatement technology. Instead, studies show that these technologies are flawed (opens in a new tab), and in many (opens in a new tab) cases (opens in a new tab), simply do not work (opens in a new tab).¹⁷¹

What’s more, government surveillance chills free speech (opens in a new tab) in public schools.¹⁷² Similar to the disproportionate impact of police in schools, these new surveillance technologies (opens in a new tab) place students of color, students with disabilities, and LGBTQ+ students at greater risk of harm, including exclusionary discipline and increased contact with law enforcement.¹⁷³

Policies that are effective at promoting safety and care in public schools

Students need support and care as they attempt to navigate both adolescence and an unprecedented global health crisis. School police are incapable and ill equipped to meet students’ social, emotional, and mental health needs in this moment.

Instead, students’ needs should be met by implementing proven, evidence-based practices performed by individuals trained to support young people. These trained individuals include restorative justice practitioners, counselors, mental health practitioners, and other qualified support personnel who are regularly trained in trauma-informed, youth-centered practices.

In short, the treatment of student trauma requires holistic student support services that address the root causes of the issues students are facing, not policing or criminalization. 

Ultimately, to achieve school safety and foster nurturing learning environments, school leaders and policymakers must implement strategies that create cultures of care that seek to prevent and repair harms, while also teaching students and staff how to be accountable for their actions.

—Tyler Whittenberg (opens in a new tab) is deputy director of the Opportunity to Learn Program at the Advancement Project. Jessica Alcantara (opens in a new tab) is senior staff attorney for the Opportunity to Learn Program at the Advancement Project. For more information about the national campaign to remove police from schools, visit www.policefreeschools.org.