Cops and schools

Some long overdue rethinking in a fraught time

This is hard to imagine for Chicagoans, but both the Minneapolis Public School Board and the Minneapolis teacher’s union have resolved to sever the school district’s ties with the Minneapolis Police. The groups agree that it isn’t money well spent. The board passed a resolution and the union drafted a letter to end the relationship between the schools and the police. Minneapolis Public Radio reports:

The district’s current budget puts over $1 million toward funding 11 school resource officers in the district’s buildings. School Board Chair Kim Ellison said she wants to end that contract because she can no longer trust the city police department’s values.

“It’s just gotten to the point where I don’t think in good conscience I can give another dime to the Minneapolis Police Department. It’s an agency that’s not correcting its mistakes,” Ellison said.

Now, the idea that the board and the union are banding together strains credulity enough here in Chicago. But we CPS constituents scarcely have a way to process that the line item in Minneapolis Public Schools is a scant million bucks. We spend more than that just on school police misconduct settlements. The actual current CPS budget allocation for police presence in the schools is $33M.

Police presence in CPS schools has been subject to scrutiny since the 2014 cover-up of the police murder of Laquan McDonald and the subsequent imposition of federal oversight on CPD. Two follow-up studies since then examined information on school policing and it is not flattering. A 2015 University of Chicago study finds that arrests are made less for safety threats to the school community than for challenges to adult authority, reinforcing vast disciplinary disparities between schools and regions of the city. A 2017 study from the Shriver Center on Poverty Law, “Handcuffs in Hallways,” details the massive growth of policing in Chicago Public Schools since the 1990s and its impact on student safety. Schools have not significantly increased in safety, but student arrests number in the thousands every year.

Furthermore, one demographic group stands out as disproportionately targeted: 75% of those arrested in Chicago Public Schools are black boys. This targeting begins as early as preschool with disproportionately high suspension rates for black preschool and kindergarteners. (Did you know preschoolers could even be suspended?)

There is a reason the phrase “school-to-prison pipeline” was coined. If you don’t know what that refers to, this article covers the Chicago context, and here is one with a more national focus. Do read them. The importance of this reality for black and brown students in our schools cannot be overstated.

Kids in Chicago who are arrested, even as young as 10 years old, get another added bonus—being listed in the CPS gang database. Some 33,000 were added to this permanent database in the last two decades. The list itself is understood to be so flawed and fraught with error that it is also under review and should probably just be thrown in the garbage.

As a result of all the reevaluation, finally some reform measures were announced last August, including training for officers assigned to schools. Can you imagine that for all these years such officers haven’t been trained to work with youth? Additionally, the new rules prohibit school officers from intervening in disciplinary situations. (Again the questions: wait, officers are involved in school discipline issues?)

Community activists and youth leaders have long advocated doing what the Minneapolis Public School Board intends—remove police presence entirely from the schools. They push for those millions being spent elsewhere to better effect: on student support structures.

Well folks, if you have some opinions about these issues it’s your lucky day. You can weigh in on this question yourself, right now. The new measures outlining reforms for police in CPS are open for public comment until Tuesday, June 2nd. You can read the measures here on the CPD website, and offer your thoughts on an email form following the text. For good measure why don’t you also send your thoughts to the mayor at letterforthemayor@cityofchicago.org or on twitter @chicagosmayor. She has indicated she is not entirely positively inclined toward police presence in schools.

The imperative of ending racism in this country built on racism won’t be easy. But there are some very obvious changes we can make to move in the general direction of closing the massive race-based disparities in justice in our country. One of the big ones is dealing with police in schools and the normalizing of the school space as one of institutionalized surveillance and fear for black youth. This will involve shutting down the school to prison pipeline, decriminalizing the act of being a young black boy in school, and dismantling the little police states that some of our Chicago public schools have become.

Can we do this in Chicago? Do we have the will?