Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/school-police/)
Madison is one of about 49 public school districts nationwide that, according to Education Week, have trimmed or eliminated school policing programs since 2020. While some districts that removed police officers have reported largely positive results, in Madison, some students, parents and educators are considering what they believe they’ve lost.
Students can be ticketed by school resource officers or by local police departments to whom school staff members refer students viewed as disruptive. From misdemeanor offenses to such potential felony offenses as gun possession or assault, students can be cited under local ordinances. There is no centralized database of how many school districts employ that kind of discipline.
For Madeline Borrelli, a special education teacher in Brooklyn, N.Y., having NYPD-trained law enforcement officers in schools is a cut-and-dry issue: “School safety agents,” she said, using their official job title, “ … should not exist at all.”
Every day, I walk into school greeted with silencing stares from armed police officers. They’re not facing the windows or the doors looking out for a stranger who could walk in and hurt my friends and me. Their eyes are on us, not some external threat. We walk past them silently, afraid that anything we do or say will be perceived as a “threat” that will lead to suspension, arrest or worse, physical harm.
Our schools have normalized this fear by allowing officers to patrol our hallways and criminalize us. In my county, a police officer was celebrated for tasing a Black freshman girl three times inside her school cafeteria.
Juvenile Court Judge Michael Nash said this particular pot of money should not be diverted to support the L.A. district’s school police force.
This story originally appeared on iWatchnews.org by the Center for Public Integrity. In the wake of critical news reports, Los Angeles school police and administrators have agreed to rethink enforcement tactics that have led to thousands of court citations yearly for young students in low-income, mostly minority neighborhoods. The Center for Public Integrity and the Los Angeles-based Labor-Community Strategy Center each performed their own analysis recently of previously unreleased citation records obtained from the Los Angeles Unified School District Police Department, the nation’s largest school police force. The Center found that between 2009 and the end of 2011, Los Angeles school police officers issued more than 33,500 tickets to students 18 and younger, with more than 40 percent handed out to kids 14 and 10 years old. That was an average of about 30 tickets a day.