Jo Erickson
Across the United States, hundreds of thousands of students are arrested or given criminal citations at schools each year. A large share are sent to court for relatively minor offenses, with Black and Hispanic students and those with disabilities disproportionately affected, according to recent reports from civil rights groups, including the Advancement Project in Washington, and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in New York. The reason behind these alarming statistics is that there are more police officers present in schools to make those arrests.
As a response to the Newtown, Conn., shooting, school districts across the nation are considering proposals to place more police officers in schools. This is raising alarm about whether many of these issues and misbehaviors are better handled in the principal’s office.
Since the early 1990s, thousands of districts, often with federal subsidies, have paid local police agencies to provide armed “school resource officers” for high schools, middle schools and sometimes even elementary schools. Today, schools and education authorities are under pressure to provide adequate security in the wake of the tragedy at Newtown. With no clear guidance from the White House, which has left the decision of placing more police in schools to individual school boards, the problem of more student arrests is still on the rise.
The effectiveness of using police officers in schools to deter crime or diffuse a threatening situation where there may be armed intruders has not been proven. Critics believe that the presence of police in schools will only inflame situations, creating a surge in arrests or misdemeanor charges for essentially nonviolent behavior — including scuffles, truancy and cursing at teachers — that sends children into the criminal courts.
“There is no evidence that placing officers in the schools improves safety,” said Denise C. Gottfredson, a criminologist at the University of Maryland who is an expert in school violence. “And it increases the number of minor behavior problems that are referred to the police, pushing kids into the criminal system.”
In Texas, students have a higher-than-national-average arrest rate. Police officers based in schools write more than 100,000 misdemeanor tickets each year, said Deborah Fowler, the deputy director of Texas Appleseed, a legal advocacy center in Austin. Students have often never heard of legal aid and they may face hundreds of dollars in fines, community service and, in some cases, a lasting record that could affect applications for jobs.
In February, Texas Appleseed and the Brazos County chapter of the NAACP filed a complaint with the federal Education Department’s Office For Civil Rights. Black students in the Bryan school district receive more criminal misdemeanor citations, four times the rate of White students.
De’Angelo Rollins is one of the students filing the complaint. De’Angelo Rollins was 12 at the time and had just started at a Bryan middle school in 2010 when he and another boy had a minor scuffle and they were given citations. After repeated court appearances, De’Angelo pleaded no contest, paid a fine of $69 and was sentenced to 20 hours of community service and four months’ probation.
“They said this will stay on his record unless we go back when he is 17 and get it expunged,” said his mother, Marjorie Holmon.
A spokeswoman for the Bryan school said, “Allegations of inequitable treatment of students is something the district takes very seriously.”
“While schools may bring in police officers to provide security, the officers often end up handling discipline and handing out charges of disorderly conduct or assault,” said Michael Nash, the presiding judge of juvenile court in Los Angeles and the president of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges.
“You have to differentiate the security issue and the discipline issue,” he said. “Once the kids get involved in the court system, it’s a slippery slope downhill.”