This week a cellphone video was posted online which showed two Baltimore Police Officers, Anthony Spence and Severna Bias, confronting a student at REACH Partnership school in Baltimore. Spence then repeatedly slapped the student, and kicked him. The slap is loud enough to hear an audible “pop” on the video. Spence can be heard yelling profanities as he assaults the student. Bias watched. The video of this confrontation went viral.
Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake described the officers behavior as “appalling.” City councilman and vice chair of the public safety committee, Brandon Scott, went on record stating “no one’s child should be treated like that.” Multiple officials from the Baltimore community lamented the incident as further erosion of the relationship between police, and the communities they are sworn to protect and serve. A criminal investigation of the officers began. On March 9, 2016, one of the officers involved in the incident was charged with second degree felony child abuse, second degree felony assault, and misconduct in office. The other officer was charged with second degree felony assault and misconduct in office.
This incident made me recall the video of a student at Spring Valley High in South Carolina being grabbed by the throat and ripped out of her desk by a police deputy, Ben Fields, for refusing to leave class after he had cited her for “disrupting class.” Todd Rutherford, the house majority leader for South Carolina, stated that “I am positive what [Deputy Fields] did to [the student in the video] should not be done to any human being…it should not be done to any animal…if he was on video and a dog bit him and he threw it across the room, he would go to jail.” Fields was fired. The United States Department of Justice launched a civil rights investigation.
I attended high school in a small town (population: about 2,000 people, at the time), and graduated fifteen or so years ago. During my high school education, I cannot recall a police officer or so-called “resource officer” ever being present on campus. Students fought; disrupted class; and brought drugs to school. Everything was handled in-house, so-to-speak: suspension, corporal punishment (“licks”), in school suspension, detention, calling parents, and such. Police were left out of the equation, entirely. Nowadays, virtually every school, regardless of size, has police presence on campus. And schools still have fights between students, class disruption, and students bringing drugs to school. But now, they have police presence, and—apart from creating the “school to prison” pipeline (of which I have previously written about)—all that does is serves to dial up the intensity of student infractions.
I understand that the above incidents involving ex-cops Ben Fields, Anthony Spence, and Severna Bias are representative of “bad apples” and that generally police do not assault students. I understand that Fields, Spence, and Bias are no longer police officers because the values they represent, or represented through their conduct noted above, are not those of any law enforcement agency in this country. But, I see no legitimate reason as to why police are needed in high schools.
Some might cite an alleged increase in violence, mass shootings, and such. This is not persuasive at all. Steven Pinker, the Johnson Family Professor of Psychology for Harvard University, has effectively—and conclusively—demonstrated that we live in the least violence time in human history in his excellent book of 2011, Better Angels of Our Nature: why violence has declined. In fact, violence in high schools (versus violence in general) is actually on the decline, and some 93% of all violent crimes committed by students occur off-campus. See: K. Baum, Ph.D., Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice, Special Report, January 2005 (available in PDF form online); or, Scott Neuman, “Violence In Schools: how big a problem is it?” National Public Radio Report, December 19, 2012, available on-line at http://www.npr.org/2012/03/16/148758783/violence-in-schools-how-big-a-problem-is-it) While the visibility of violence at schools has increased exponentially, the frequency of school violence has declined.
You might reason that the increased presence of police is responsible for the decline. You would be wrong. “One thing we know doesn’t work is more police in schools,” says Tracy Velázquez, Executive Director of the Justice Policy Institute. “There is no evidence that the massive increase in school resource officers after Columbine had any impact on already dropping rates of school violence. And more police in schools mean more arrests for what used to be school discipline issues, with terrible consequences for youth who now are swept up into the justice system.” You can read the stats behind her conclusion here if you need to be convinced further that more cops in schools has no relationship to a decrease in school violence. http://www.justicepolicy.org/news/4829. In fact, some research suggests the presence of police at schools actually has the opposite effect, and instead leads to an increase in disorder at the school. Mayer, M., and P. Leone. (1999). “A Structural Analysis of School Violence and Disruption: Implications for Creating Safer Schools.” Education and Treatment of Children, 22, August, 333-356; The Sentencing Project’s report, “The Facts About Added Danger of Police In Schools,” c. 2013 (available on-line in PDF form). And at best, police presence in schools has no effect whatsoever. See, e.g., Associated Press, “Despite Increased Security, School Shootings Continue,” February 2, 2014, published at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/despite-increased-security-school-shootings-continue/.
For these reasons and others, police do not belong in schools, because at best, their presence has no effect on school violence, and, at worst, their presence contributes to disorder. To say this is not somehow “anti-police” or to imply police are unneeded or unwanted. This is an informed conclusion, based on the actual evidence available concerning the presence of police in schools. I began with two incidents of police violence against students at schools to demonstrate the worst possible instances of police being present in schools, and to demonstrate the increased intensity having police in high schools creates.