Following the mass shooting at a Texas elementary school, schools throughout the country committed to increasing security and enhancing law enforcement presence on campus, in part to comfort parents and students.

However, police inside schools can make some pupils feel even more uneasy. When Black students and other students of color see officers on campus, their personal experiences with policing can leave them feeling frightened and alienated from school.

Malika Mobley, a high school student in Raleigh, North Carolina, has observed three separate school resource police patrolling the campus. Mobley witnessed policemen detaining and pushing a very distressed classmate into the back of a police van on his way home from school. 

“They were crying, ‘Why are you doing this to me? I didn’t do anything,’” said Mobley, co-president of Wake County Black Student Coalition. “I was just forced to stand there and couldn’t do anything.”

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Since 2020, the student group has fought for the removal of police officers from school grounds in favor of investing in counselors and student support workers.

“We don’t see police presence as part of the solution,” Mobley said. “If you really think about why police don’t make us safer, you can draw connections to all types of tragedies that impact the most marginalized among us.”

In recent decades, police officers have established a frequent presence in schools around the country, often in the shape of school resource officers, who are entrusted with forming connections with young people in order to encourage trust in law enforcement, provide security, and enforce laws. Critics claim that having armed police on campus leads to disproportionate arrests and punishments of Black kids, resulting in the so-called school-to-prison pipeline.

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Black students don't feel safe

Researchers discovered that Black children felt less safe around police officers than their white counterparts and that policemen in predominately Black school districts are more likely to regard students as threats.

Katherine Dunn, director of the Advancement Project's Opportunity to Learn program, said that black kids and other students of color are disproportionately likely to have negative experiences with police in schools, ranging from referrals to law enforcement to being arrested or restrained. According to her, the Advancement Project has recorded at least 200 cases of school officials abusing children since 2007.

“It shows all the physical harm that young people experience by police,” she said. “It’s also the experience of being degraded and made to feel like a criminal because you have to walk down the hallway to your class with several armed cops, who are not there for your safety, who you see arrest your friends, assault your friends.”

Is placing police on campus a good idea?

A study of the law’s impact by F. Chris Curran, a University of Florida professor, discovered that increased police presence was followed by an increase in school arrests and the number of reported behavioral issues. He stated that there are numerous elements to consider while choosing the function of police in schools.

“I’d like to see that conversation include thoughtful considerations of potential benefits, decreasing certain kinds of behaviors, but also the potential unintended consequences, if that’s increasing the likelihood students are arrested or potentially increasing racial disparities in discipline and arrest rates,” Curran said.

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While there are examples of school resource officers intervening in gun violence incidents, Curran cautioned that the presence of law enforcement does not always guarantee that shootings or other forms of violence will not occur, or that the officer will be immediately effective in stopping the perpetrator and minimizing casualties.

The National Association of School Resource Officers underlined the necessity of having "a carefully selected, particularly trained SRO on its campus anytime school is in session" in a statement issued this week on best practices for school security in the aftermath of the Uvalde, Texas, shooting.

The non-profit organization has denied that cops contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline. Officers who adhere to its best practices, it claims, do not arrest pupils for disciplinary issues that would normally be handled by instructors.

Texas mass shooting increases police presence 

In the aftermath of the Uvalde, Texas shooting, police presence was enhanced outside schools across North Carolina last week, as it was elsewhere across the country. Wake County schools have 75 school resource officers who are drawn from a variety of local law enforcement agencies.

According to Chalina Morgan-Lopez, a high school senior and co-president of the Wake County Black Student Coalition, the campaign to remove the officers was sparked in part by student accounts of bad experiences with officers, including a 2017 incident in which a school resource officer was filmed picking up a Black girl and slamming her to the ground.

“I think it’s a reasonable response to want more officers in schools, especially from people who genuinely do feel protected by law enforcement, even though that’s not my lived experience,” Morgan-Lopez said. “But I think people need to take into account ... that officers do in fact do more harm than they do good.”