WE PROTEST POLICE IN THE STREETS, SO WHY DO WE LET POLICE IN OUR SCHOOLS?
The Fear Of Black Students And White Savior Ideology In Educators And Policymakers Is Keeping Police In Under-Resourced Schools Despite Their Role In The School-To-Prison Pipeline And The Well-Known Harm To Students.
In the wake of the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, police violence has again been brought to the forefront of our country’s discussions as a systemic issue that must be addressed. Over the last 13 years I’ve taught in high schools at Chicago Public Schools, I have lost students to police violence. Every time a Black person is murdered by the police, I, like many others, am outraged. As an educator, I picture my own students, their families, or even my own colleagues being in their place.
Instead of just being upset, why are we as educators not taking an obvious step and escorting police out of our schools?
There is a large body of research that shows that having police in schools negatively impacts student learning and makes kids feel unsafe. It took the murder of Philando Castille in 2016 and George Floyd, but the Minneapolis Public School Board voted last night to cut ties with the Minneapolis Police Department. We have examples in Chicago and across the country of police abusing our students in schools. This includes police tasing a student, body-slamming a 12-year-old, flipping a student’s desk and dragging them across the floor, slapping and kicking a student, and arresting students as young as six years old.
Yet we often brush these off as the actions of ‘one bad cop’ and fail to see the systemic connections to policing, racism, and prison. Outside of schools, politicians make the ‘one bad cop’ argument all the time and then invest millions more into failed policing and criminalization.
We ignore the fact that even though schools across the country need more resources for educating students, policing in school budgets gets hundreds CONTINUE READING: We Protest Police In The Streets, So Why Do We Let Police In Our Schools? - PopularResistance.Org
