Schools are bringing police back to campuses, reversing racial justice decisions

In the summer of 2020, Denver school leaders quickly banned police officers from campuses, directing the money to social workers and psychologists. The city, like many across the country, was rocked by anti-law enforcement protests following the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.

Board members of the school cited this as a major reason facts which showed that black students were much more likely to be arrested than white students.

But a wave of violence that hit Denver city schools this year has brought about a sudden turn of events. Armed officers were quickly deployed for the last weeks of school this spring. And in the fall, school employees will return to Denver schools on a permanent basis as fears for student safety have increased.

In the three years since Mr. Floyd, just as the wider movement to discourage police faltered as crime rose, the push to remove police from schools has stalled and in many cases reversed amid America’s unrelenting epidemic of gun violence. Communities across the country that had banned school workers, from Alexandria, Va., to Pomona, California, have changed course. And some larger cities that have removed officers, such as Seattle and Washington, are engaged in contentious debates over bringing officers back.

The newfound pressure is unfolding as Florida prosecutors seek a criminal conviction for Scot Peterson, the longtime Parkland school resource officer who waited in a niche on campus instead of confronting the gunman who killed 17 people in 2018. the first in the nation against a member of law enforcement for inaction in a school shooting — has raised questions about the duty of campus officials during school violence. Jurors began deliberating on Monday whether Mr. Peterson was guilty of child neglect, among other charges.

The resource officer debate also comes after the nation set a record for school shootings in 2022, punctuated by the murder of 19 elementary school students and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas. a CBS News poll conducted after the Uvalde shooting showed that 75 percent of parents of school-age children wanted armed security on their campuses.

The role of school counselors is as complicated as ever. They serve not only as armed protectors, but also as counselors and disciplinarians, trying to prevent problems before they arise.

However, the evidence is clear that their presence leads to disproportionate suspensions and arrests of black and Latino students. And the Parkland and Uvalde shootings exposed the police’s failure to stop mass killings, raising the question of how effective they really are.

The decision to bring officers back to Denver schools was largely prompted by parents mobilizing after shootings this year. Luis Garcia, a popular football player at East High School, was shot in February in his car near campus. Less than six weeks later, a 17-year-old student at the same school shot and wounded two school administrators; he was later found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot.

“I’m an angry, frustrated parent,” says Dorian Warren, whose son attends East High School. She said she came to the issue “speaking as a woman of color and as the mother of an African American child.”

While police work results in disproportionate punishment for students of color, Ms Warren said they were also disproportionately victimized.

“You have to do what you have to do to keep these kids safe,” she said. “And I feel like we’re gambling every time we don’t.”

Another mother, Heather Lamm, said her son, Jasper, a football teammate of Luis, was traumatized not only by the shootings, but also by several lockdowns at his school due to threats of violence that went unfulfilled.

Decades ago, schools relied on local law enforcement for campus security, but typically did not install armed officers on campus. That changed amid the fear of crime in the 1990s. The 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School in suburban Denver further convinced school leaders that more campus security was needed.

Today, districts have different regulations for hiring armed officers. Most are sworn officers assigned to schools by local chapters, although some school districts use private security officers and a few have their own police departments.

Despite popular support for armed officers in schools, there are plenty studies have shown that such police action does little to prevent shootings or gun violence. Ben Fisher, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who focuses on the intersection of schools and criminal justice, analysed nearly three dozen school police studies and wrote that the presence of officers “contributes to higher student punishment without improving school safety.”

“I think it’s kind of the American imagination of what the police do,” he said. “If there is a social problem that seems persistent enough, our impulse seems to be to put more police to work. And so it feels like that’s another thing that’s happening with schools.

As was the case in Parkland, there is no guarantee that school officers will be enough to stop a mass shooter, even if they receive a lot of active shooting instruction. At Mr Peterson’s trial, prosecutors presented evidence about the course he underwent mass shooting scenarios, with video simulations and live actors, and argued that he was not following what he had been taught. Mr Peterson has said he was unable to determine where the shots came from, and that he acted by sealing off the school and organizing responding officers.

After Uvalde and Parkland, the duty to confront school shooters has become increasingly apparent, law enforcement officials say.

“We all sign up for that,” said Denver Police Department Chief Ron Thomas in an interview. “To protect life and property. Aside from the legal obligation, I think there is an obligation that we as police officers take on to protect people.”

School police officers say they try to build relationships with students so that tragedies can be avoided. “Ninety percent you’re a guardian, 10 percent you’re a warrior,” said Rudy Perez, who spent 23 years as an officer for the Los Angeles Unified School District, which killed more than 100 officers in 2020.

Mr Perez, now the assistant police chief in Golden Valley, Minnesota, said he believed several shootings were prevented while he worked at schools in Los Angeles by connecting students with services. “And guess what, you never heard of it because it didn’t happen,” he said.

Activists against cops in schools say adolescent misconduct is all too often criminalized, such as an incident last year in Tennessee where a school resource officer sprayed pepper spray and arrested a teen after he refused to play kickball in gym class. A video of the episode went viral and students staged a strike there.

In 2020, the Denver school board unanimously agreed to remove officers from schools, but this month voted 4 to 3 to reverse that policy, following a controversial board meeting.

Tay Anderson, a school board member and parent who was one of the most visible activists during the 2020 race justice protests in Denver, voted against returning officers to schools, believing they contributed to the “school-to-prison pipeline” .

“It was rooted in fear,” he said of the board’s decision.

The Denver Police Department and the school district are now formalizing an agreement to ensure that police remain on their jobs. Chief Thomas said his staff was working with the city’s children’s department to find alternatives to arrests and subpoenas. And during the summer, school officials will receive specialized training, including classes on adolescent brain development.

“Kids running down the hall, screaming, using foul language, that’s a matter of school discipline and we let the schools handle that as they see fit,” said Chief Thomas, adding that his officers would only focus on criminal infractions.

“Beyond that,” he continued, “we will certainly serve as a deterrent to an active shooter situation.”