The murder of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer on May 25 sparked international outrage, including weeks of protest against police brutality and the criminalization of Black and brown people.
Students of color are far more likely than white students to be pushed out of schools and into the criminal justice system. They are more likely to be suspended, expelled, and arrested.
It also paved the way for the removal of police officers from public schools around the country—something education and civil rights activists have spent years fighting for.
In June, school districts from Denver to Oakland acted swiftly to end contracts with police departments as unrest over Floyd’s killing spread. This is a startling turn of events, given how long advocates have been pushing for the removal of police from schools, seemingly to no avail.
Students across the country—and especially students from marginalized communities—have been subject to increased security measures in the past two decades, including a greater reliance on school resource officers (SROs), due in part to the rise of school shootings.
Students of color are far more likely than white students to be pushed out of schools and into the criminal justice system. They are more likely to be suspended, expelled, and arrested, studies show.
In Minneapolis, just one week after Floyd’s death, the city’s school board voted to cut ties with the police department, effective immediately. The district had been paying $1.1 million per year to place eleven school resource officers in its middle and high school buildings.
Critics of such arrangements argue that public education funds would be better spent on support services for students. In the Twin Cities, advocates have spent years pushing for a greater investment in counselors and social workers, rather than school-based officers who represent a law-and-order approach to disciplinary issues.
Greta Callahan and Shaun Laden, who together lead the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, said in a statement that they support the removal of police officers from schools and want to see resources redirected towards “people who can meet the needs of our students, including providers of mental health supports and education support professionals.”
Callahan and Laden also echoed the calls of activists who are working to build community policing models that prioritize racial justice, and argued that police officers have become “symbols of fear” for many students.
They were likely surprised to learn, then, that the Minneapolis Public Schools is planning to swap out one type of officer for another in response to the canceled contract with the city’s police force.
When the nine-member school board voted to end its annual contract with the Minneapolis police, district superintendent Ed Graff was tasked with creating an alternative school safety plan by mid-August of this year.
Rather than push more resources towards mental health workers or counseling staff, it appears that the school district is simply planning to hire eleven new law enforcement officers.
Rather than push more resources towards mental health workers or counseling staff, it appears that the school district is simply planning to hire eleven new law enforcement officers.
These replacement officers will work under a new name—Public Safety Support Specialists—and will not be employees of the Minneapolis Police Department. They will also not be allowed to carry a gun, unlike school resource officers.
Other than that, the duties of these new public safety specialists sound a lot like those of a site-based police officer. A listing for the position was available on the district’s website until July 19, when the application window closed.
A cached version of the job description can still be viewed, however, and it says applicants should have a degree in law enforcement or a similar field, will work to address crime and safety issues, and will serve as a liaison to the Minneapolis police department.
This is quite similar to the job description for an SRO, as outlined in this overview developed in 2015 by researchers for the Minnesota House of Representatives. And that raises questions about whether Minneapolis’s widely publicized removal of SROs in response to Floyd’s killing is little more than sleight of hand.
We’ve seen this movie play out before, actually.
In 2012, officials in Camden, New Jersey, disbanded that city’s police force after years of corruption and increasing crime rates, and required officers to reapply for their positions. While Camden is often cited as a police reform success story, others caution observers to look beyond the headlines.
Camden resident Stephen Danley wrote an opinion piece for The Washington Post recently, warning that the attention being heaped on the city’s police reform work is “oversimplified and dangerously misleading.”
Disbanding the police department was an undemocratic process, Danley writes, that was accomplished against many community members’ wishes. He argues that the crisis in Camden, which included rising crime rates, was prompted by years of punishing funding cuts, and this forced the city to agree to a restructuring of its police force.
In other words, the truth is much more complicated than the sound bite. Any successful reforms that have taken place in Camden should be credited to local, grassroots activists and not to the top-down makeover foisted upon the police department, as Danley and others have insisted.
In Minneapolis, the removal of SROs may prove to be similarly complicated. While money will no longer be going from the district to the Police Department, it is being directed to others who will be doing essentially the same job, not to new counseling or support service positions, as advocates had wanted.
The Minneapolis Public Schools, in a Facebook post, attempted to explain its decision to replace SROs with Public Safety Support Specialists. Many commenters, however, weighed in with further questions about whether or not these positions are truly necessary.
Union president Callahan, in an email, calls it “a Band-Aid solution.” What Minneapolis schools need, she says, is “fully funded schools with the recommended student-to-counselor ratios in place,” not simply SROs with a different title.