“[Students of color] don’t feel safe around campus security,” Southern California high school junior Bethel Albe says in an interview with The Progressive. “They feel like they’re more at risk of getting stopped, they’re more at risk of being viewed as someone that they’re not. It’s a very restricting environment to be in for myself and my peers.”
For Albe, profiling and criminalization at the hands of school resource officers—law enforcement personnel who work in schools and often carry firearms—has become an increasing concern at Chaparral High School. And Albe isn’t the only student of color who fears cops on her campus. For marginalized students across the country, school is feeling more and more like a prison.
Campus policing isn’t new, but its origins show it is both disproportionate and targeted. In 1948, the Los Angeles Police Department created what is widely believed to be the first security unit in the United States to patrol newly desegregated schools. In 1957, the New York Police Department warned of “undesirables” on high school campuses, referring to Black and Latinx students. That same year, a committee in NYC was “formed to study juvenile justice,” proposing the placement of an officer on every campus. Ten years later, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, school police officers criminalized, injured, beat, and arrested Black students across the country for protesting racial disparity in their K-12 schools.
Since the 1960s, the weaponization and racism of police in schools have only become more apparent. Youth of color are more likely to face exclusionary discipline, hyper-surveillance, and are overrepresented in arrests and use-of-force incidents. A report conducted by the Advancement Project, an organization that pursues racial justice, even found that schools with larger populations of students who receive free lunch face increased police assaults. Since 2011, 80 percent of victims of police assaults in schools have been Black students, and 60 percent of all attacks have led to serious injury. In more than half of the incidents the Advancement Project analyzed, police officers received no disciplinary consequences.
The #AssaultAt Report also found that the fourth most common type of police assault against Black and Latinx students between 2011 and 2021 was sexual misconduct and violence, occurring in twenty-seven cases across the country.
Tyler Whittenberg from the Advancement Project tells The Progressive that school policing creates greater anxiety among students of color, especially around sexual assault. “It places students at risk of physical harm and police sexual violence on a regular basis,” he says. “Students are less trusting of adults, less likely to speak out and be honest with a trustworthy adult.”
Students of color are not blind to these instances of police assaults. Every incident on their campuses serves as a reminder and warning of school resource officers’ disciplinary power. The culture of school policing forces students to live in fear of the consequences of speaking up about police abuse towards students. At the same time, students feel unable to express themselves as teenagers without being punished.
Iowa City High School senior Reem Kirja says there are long-term repercussions to attending school in an environment like this. “Over time, that internalized message can cause students to disengage from school, lower their aspirations,” she says. “Instead of nurturing potential, the system ends up limiting it.”
Lydia Machuma, a high school junior from Texas, said that campus police officers create an environment of fear for students of color at her school. “I’ve felt nervous around them, and I’ve seen classmates go silent or tense up when they walk by, even if we’ve done nothing wrong,” she said. “It’s not about disrespect—it’s about survival.”
Especially at a time when police brutality dominates headlines, school resource officers pose a genuine and immediate threat that disrupts the educational environment and the ability for students to learn in their classrooms.
High school junior Ikeoluwa Esan from Chandler, Arizona, says that overcriminalization allows educational leaders to promote their discriminatory beliefs without facing consequences. “You’re seeing all of these instances in which people of color are being punished rather than actually being able to be educated. You decide to give them these huge punishments for minor infractions, and they could have been spending that time on their education,” she says.
A twenty-one-hour car ride away from Esan, students in Durant, Mississippi, deal with the same prejudiced and violent policing. Kameisha Smith, a program director with the Nollie Jenkins Family Center, which works to build community and provide civic education for youth and families, says school police officers intimidate students when they enter schools in her community and treat them aggressively throughout the day. She explains, through working with high school students, that campus security has put students in handcuffs and taken them to local police stations from school property without contacting parents.
Smith also relays a recent incident involving a fight at a Mississippi school: “To disperse the students, the officer went through two cans of mace. Didn’t care if they got up noses to students with asthma, and it lingered a long time.”
Albe says that at her school, students of color are disproportionately policed compared to their white counterparts. “Some of my friends who are not students of color have fewer issues with campus security. Whenever I leave class, there is a lot more pressure. My peers in Black Student Union, Arab Student Union, and Hispanic Student Union get into a lot more run-ins.”
Students from across the country say that campus police officers often overstep their responsibilities on campus. Administrations are no different, they say, employing exclusionary discipline even for slight incidents.
Similarly, campus police exert their power by using excessive force and violence. Attorney Andrew Hairston of the Texas Appleseed Project, a nonprofit that advances social, economic, and racial justice to solve systemic issues, points to an incident from April in which a Texas school police officer assaulted a seventeen-year-old Black girl at Beaumont United High School after a fight on campus. “The police officer responded by kneeing this girl in the face while she was on the ground and defenseless,” Hariston says. “This girl was sent to an alternative education program for thirty days.”
Hairston explains that while proponents of school policing frame it as a solution to gun violence in schools, campus security often fails to actually protect students. “Uvalde is the most prominent example,” he says. “This boy was able to get this firearm and go in there; police officers were not effective in any way. These were agencies that should have responded if their purpose was to serve and protect.”
While students across the country face discriminatory criminalization on their campuses, they are also increasingly banned from learning about the systemic oppression underlying it. In recent years, book bans, anti-Critical Race Theory laws, and textbook redactions have forced students to remain in the dark about the historic injustices that cause current-day over-policing. For students, not teaching about systemic issues exacerbates zero-tolerance policies for student infractions on their high school campuses because of the lack of student cognizance necessary to advocate for racial equity.
“With zero-tolerance policies, the context of the issue isn’t taken into account,” Esan says about racism in school policing. “It makes it more difficult for students to learn about the historical significance. It’s harder for students to combat the policy issues they see in their schools.”
For its part, the new Trump Administration has contributed to broad criminalization through its stringent border policies, even removing protections that make schools off-limits to immigrant enforcement operations. Since January of this year, students who come from immigrant communities have faced an increased fear of campus security and what school resource officers could mean for their future in the United States.
“Even when I know I’m not doing anything wrong, there’s still an instinctive fear when I see school police,” says Kirja, who comes from an immigrant family. “For many immigrant students across the country, that fear runs even deeper; it comes from knowing that misunderstandings could have serious consequences.”
Machuma says that facing policing pressure as an immigrant student often extends outside of the classroom. “There’s always this thought in the back of your mind: What if something small becomes a legal issue? The fear isn’t just about school—it’s about what could happen to families too.”
With the recent rollback of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, students say that school policing has become a bigger source of fear because of the lack of protections they now have against it.
Albe says that recent actions have pushed out and excluded students from advocacy spaces, especially students of color who have progressive views on equality, and limited their ability to advocate for marginalized groups.
Campus overcriminalization and punitive disciplinary actions are issues that are impossible to ignore for students. The U.S. criminal justice system already disproportionately incarcerates
people of color, and school policing increases the likelihood of the school-to-prison pipeline and effectively ruins students’ educational ability. Across the country, students are pleading for restorative justice programs that prioritize them over prison.
“Students are not criminals, and they shouldn’t be treated like they are,” Kirja says. “Schools should handle discipline internally through educational approaches . . . . Students deserve the same presumption of innocence that adults are guaranteed.”
For Esan, restorative justice means prioritizing mental health before a disciplinary incident occurs rather than punishing students after one. It means rehabilitation over criminalization. She says schools should invest “more in support services for students, rather than investing in punishment for students. Ultimately, changes should focus on equity, not just on equality.”
The main objective of school police isn’t and has never been to protect and serve, and students of color nationwide feel this dynamic every day in their classrooms. Hairston explains how the discriminatory roots of school resource officers encapsulate their purpose and usage today. “Policing criminalizes the existence of historically underserved young people like Black and brown children,” he says. “Police officers are in school to reinforce social inequality.”
Students agree: “If the goal was to protect students, [school police] wouldn’t create environments that make students feel as if they’re criminals,” says Albe. “It reaffirms the social context throughout our nation that [students of color] are criminals.”