If you haven’t seen Ava DuVernay’s Netflix documentary 13th, and if you haven’t read Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow, they’re both excellent, eye-opening resources for anyone looking to form an opinion on police officers in Howard County public schools.
Some of you may be wondering why I didn’t suggest resources having to do with Columbine, Sandy Hook, or Parkland. That’s because I don’t necessarily believe that school shootings are the reason why there are police officers in HCPSS. Why don’t I believe that? Because HCPSS has police officers in only a quarter of its schools; if shootings were the real reason, we’d have police officers in all of our schools. Not to mention the lack of evidence that police officers in schools prevent school shootings.
HCPSS has had police officers in high schools since 2001, but in 2012, they decided to launch a pilot program, bizarrely named “Passages.” Ostensibly, the program’s purpose was to bring in police officers to “help middle school students navigate the often challenging ‘middle’ years.” Sounds innocuous enough, until you dig into the details: the #1 duty expected of the program’s school resource officers is to “enforce laws and/or arrange for school administrative action for offenses.” I’m curious to know what law enforcement has to do with helping kids navigate the middle school years. Most curious of all is the fact that this policing program was piloted in just six middle schools, all with significant Black and Latinx populations. “Navigating the ‘middle’ years,” indeed.
Furthermore, the 2015 Memorandum of Understanding between HCPSS and the Howard County Police Department sets forth an agreement on the purpose of School Resource Officers. In reading the verbiage, I see a lot of phrases like “preventing crime and disorder,” “keep order on school campuses,” etc., and on page 3, it states that the SRO’s primary responsibility “is to keep order on campus.” I see no mention of active shooter situations, no procedures specific to active shooters. It states that the SRO’s primary duty is law enforcement – not security.
Between the 2012 “Passages” program and the 2015 MOU, it seems to me that the intent of having SROs in schools is to police the students rather than to protect them. And therein lies the problem.
DuVernay’s documentary and Alexander’s book both demonstrate clearly that after the passage of the 13th Amendment, policing evolved to be a new system of oppression against Black Americans and eventually Latinx and Hispanic immigrants. After the Civil War, white people were conditioned to see Black people as monsters, criminals, animals. Dangerous. Something to fear. Black people were thrown in jail for the most minor offenses so they could be exploited for cheap or unpaid labor. The Jim Crow era kept “uncivilized” Blacks separate from whites. In the wake of the civil rights movement, the Republican party crafted a political strategy to appeal to white southern racist Democrats and draw them to the GOP. This strategy, beginning with Richard Nixon and continuing through the Reagan and Bush years, was centered around leveraging white fear and propagating false narratives of Black criminal behavior, drug activity, and violence. Whenever a GOP candidate or elected official waxes poetic about “law and order,” “fighting crime,” “safer neighborhoods,” “thugs,” or other such fear-mongering phrases, you’re seeing this strategy at work. The end goal was, and still is, to make white people fearful of Black people and to give the GOP a political advantage, as they proclaim themselves to be the saviors who will be “tough on crime.”
(Side note: where have we heard that racist trope recently? Oh, right – Trump.)
This racially-motivated mischaracterization of Black Americans spilled over into many aspects of society. It’s the driving force behind police brutality and the over-policing of Black and brown neighborhoods. It’s the reason for white flight and NIMBYism. And in our schools, it’s why there are disparities in discipline and police officers exacerbating the school-to-prison pipeline.
The data is clear. While SROs can be a positive presence for some, our Black students have made it clear that they have been negatively impacted by the presence of SROs in Howard County schools. This does not achieve the goal of an environment conducive to learning, nor does it achieve equity; rather, it achieves the goal of continuing to criminalize Black behavior – all in the name of “safety.”