Two U.S. agencies are urging school districts “to confront the issue of race discrimination in student discipline,” releasing a report highlighting federal investigations that found evidence of bias in school policing over the past decade.

“Discrimination in student discipline forecloses opportunities for students, pushing them out of the classroom and diverting them from a path to success in school and beyond,” the departments of education and justice wrote in a joint letter. “Significant disparities by race — beginning as early as preschool — have persisted in the application of student discipline in schools.”

Center for Public Integrity investigations have shown that federal enforcement merely scratches the surface of widespread concerns with law enforcement presence on campus.

And a closer look at the data reveals that problems seemingly persist even after federal investigations.

On Maryland’s Eastern Shore, the U.S. Department of Justice found evidence to support complaints that Wicomico County Public Schools discriminated against Black and Latino students and students with disabilities. The Justice Department investigation concluded that staff over-relied on school resource officers to address routine classroom management issues. Black students and students with disabilities were overrepresented in the incidents. Black and Latino students, meanwhile, received “harsher” consequences than white students but were not misbehaving in more serious ways, according to the Justice Department.

The school district, while not admitting violations, signed a settlement agreement in early 2017 that it would address these issues.

The following school year, Black students were referred to law enforcement at three times the rate of their white peers, Public Integrity’s analysis shows. Law enforcement referral rates for students with disabilities remained disproportionately high.

Under the agreement, the Justice Department required the district to submit semi-annual reports to the agency until the end of the 2019 school year, demonstrating its efforts to comply with the agreement.

A Justice Department spokesman said the agency closely monitors compliance with settlement agreements.

“The Department’s settlements also provide for enforcement if school districts do not comply with their obligations under the agreement or federal law,” the spokesperson wrote in a statement to Public Integrity.

The agency did not say if action was taken in the Wicomico County schools case. The district declined an interview request.

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights found evidence to support complaints that the East Side Union High School District in San Jose, California, discriminated against Latino students in discipline incidents. School resource officers in the district ticketed Latino students at more than twice the rate of white students during the 2013-14 school year, often for minor infractions that officers had the discretion not to cite, the investigation found.

The district did not respond to requests for comment. Like Wicomico County, it had entered into a settlement in which it did not admit violations but agreed to make changes.

As part of the settlement, the East Side Union High School District agreed that Office for Civil Rights staff could interview staff and students and request additional reports and data to ensure compliance. The settlement also required the district to appoint a committee to review student discipline data by race twice annually during the 2017-18, 2018-19 and 2019-20 school years.

During that first year, Latino students in that school system were nearly five times as likely to be referred to by law enforcement as white students, the Public Integrity analysis showed. 

The Education Department did not respond to questions about how it monitors districts after settlements are signed.

Public Integrity’s analysis of federal data for the 2021 “Criminalizing Kids” investigation found that law enforcement referrals in schools disproportionately affect Black children and, in some states, Native American and Latino children. In 31 states and the District of Columbia, Black students were referred to law enforcement at more than twice the rate of white students, the Public Integrity analysis found.

A referral occurs when a school employee reports a student to any law enforcement agency or officer, including a school police officer, for an incident at school or during a school-related event.

Under federal law, all arrests are referrals, but not all referrals lead to arrests. Citations, tickets and court referrals are also considered referrals to law enforcement.

School districts investigated by the federal government for discriminatory school policing agreed in settlements to make changes correcting the alleged problems, such as mandating anti-bias training for school resource officers and establishing processes where students and parents can file complaints when they suspect they’ve been discriminated against.

The federal report urged districts to examine their internal data to evaluate whether they violate students’ civil rights and cited several cases resolved over the past two school years. The letter to schools emphasized that racial discrimination in student discipline continues to be “a significant concern.”

Last August, the Office for Civil Rights resolved an investigation that found evidence that school police officers in the Victor Valley High School District in southern California disproportionately issued citations to Black students.

After the settlement, the Victor Valley High School District thanked the Office for Civil Rights for “raising important issues and for working with us to find solutions to these systemic problems,” according to a statement provided to the Victorville Daily Press. 

“Even before the conclusion of the OCR analysis,” the statement added, “the district began taking steps to increase equity for our students.”

In the Davis School District in Farmington, Utah, the Justice Department determined in 2021 that Black students faced discrimination in law enforcement referrals. The investigation also found evidence that the district routinely ignored concerns from Asian and Black students and parents about racial disparities in discipline.

“The district takes these findings very seriously,” the Davis School District said in a statement released after the Justice Department settlement. “They do not reflect the values of this community and the expectations of the district. The district pledges to correct these practices.”

Neither district responded to requests for comment for this story.

Some school systems cited in the report, including the Minneapolis Public Schools, decided to remove law enforcement. The districts were among those defunding school police after George Floyd, a Black man, was murdered in Minneapolis by a white police officer in May 2020.

The East Side Union High district also removed police from schools in 2020, canceled its $700,000 contract with local law enforcement and used the funds to hire social workers and expand student mental health services.

But some of those changes have been short-lived. Across the country, districts are reversing those decisions amid concerns about rising violence in and around schools.

In Wicomico County, Maryland, the district has doubled down on the presence of law enforcement. Officials want to add more funding for resource officers for the upcoming school year.

The post Fighting back against racial bias in school policing appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

DeMarcus Jenkins has seen the presence of law enforcement in schools from different angles — as a student, high school teacher and education researcher.

As districts around the country reexamine their relationships with school police, Jenkins is studying how cutting ties with law enforcement can lead to more equitable approaches to ensure students are safe in school.

Having law enforcement on campus doesn’t guarantee that because school policing has unintended consequences for some children. A 2021 Center for Public Integrity investigation found that students with disabilities, Black children and, in some states, Latino and Native American children are disproportionately referred to law enforcement for behavior such as refusing to leave class or having shoving matches with classmates. Referrals can lead to arrests, criminal charges or citations that require students to appear in court.

“A world without police, or a world where schools are free from law enforcement interference, is a notion or an idea that scares people,” said Jenkins, an assistant professor at the Penn State University College of Education. But “the idea … is not one that says, we just need to remove law enforcement from schools, and that’s it, right? It’s not just [about] dismantling something. It is also about rebuilding.”

Without officers on campus, some districts hired more counselors and social workers to help students. Others turned to restorative justice programs as a way for kids to resolve conflicts with each other.

After the Oakland, California, school system voted to disband its police department, the district kept its corps of unarmed security officers but had them focus less on enforcing rules and more time on fostering relationships with students.

In Minneapolis, the school district worked with city government to hire community members trained in de-escalation techniques to bolster security. Known as “violence interrupters,” the employees patrolled neighborhoods surrounding high schools at the end of the day to intervene in potential conflicts.

But change isn’t always easy. In the wake of mass school shootings and perceived spikes in on-campus crime, some districts that terminated contracts with police turned back to law enforcement.

Among those places is Denver, where the school board suspended its 2020 policy removing school police from campus after a student shot and injured two deans at East High School in March. A safety plan required the student to be searched before entering the school each day. Two unarmed district security officers were in the building when the shooting happened.

The Center for Public Integrity spoke with Jenkins recently about the challenging process of making schools safe for all students.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. What drives public conversations around law enforcement in schools?

The conversation around [school resource officers] is perpetual, and then it has these moments where it erupts, related to what’s happening in schools as well as political conversations around gun violence. Mass school shootings alarm parents and families and people who are interested in schools to revisit the questions around, “How are we preventing school shootings from happening? How are we making sure that folks in schools are safe?”

There is this notion that more police officers, surveillance, carceral approaches and tools will ensure safety. That’s not just in schools but even in neighborhoods and communities.

Q. How difficult is it to get across the message that there are other tools that school districts can deploy to address shootings and other violence?

When you think about mass school shootings, at least in the past few years, we’ve seen that the presence of law enforcement in schools has not worked to prevent shootings.

If our concern or our focus is preventing young people from being shot when they are in their learning environment, that allows us an opportunity to ask different questions like, “What is it that people may need that they are currently not getting, that would allow or that could serve as better prevention?”

Districts have done different things around social and emotional health support. They’ve done different things around mutual aid and other ways to support their communities and families that are connected to schools. And other places have done some work with restorative justice, and I think those are opportunities for us to say what we have tried over the past 60 or so years in placing resource officers in schools has not proven a hundred percent effective.

Q. In the aftermath of school shootings, how do people argue against the presence of law enforcement in schools?

When community members, parents and educators are arguing for the removal of school resource officers, they have an orientation that realizes that school police or law enforcement do not make all kids feel safe.

There are kids who come from particular backgrounds, primarily Black and Latinx youth, LGBTQ youth and youth who have disabilities. Research has suggested and shown that those populations do not always feel safe with the presence of SROs. There’s also an abundance of research that documents how the presence of SROs in schools increases and exacerbates the school-to-prison pipeline, where youth who come from marginalized backgrounds are funneled out of schools into criminal justice systems.

Q. Did you have school resource officers in your schools while growing up?

My engagement with police in schools happened, not only as a child or youth navigating schools but also as an adult working to educate my students. I went to public schools all my life, and we had school resource offers in the schools that I attended. I also was a high school teacher for a number of years, and I worked in schools where there was law enforcement present.

When [students] express frustrations about their interactions with law enforcement in the morning or after school, and in other parts of their day, that would completely shift how they approach school and how they interact in the classroom. And a lot of that also complicates, for me, how I approach my work.

There is a need to really center the voices and the perspective of the people who are deeply engaged in the school and learning processes and center their visions and their realities for how they imagine schools to function and to run.

The post Disentangling the debate over school police appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

When he heard the news of a shooting at his old high school, Endi Montalvo-Martinez fell into a panic. Montalvo-Martinez has a cousin who attends Des Moines’ East High and an aunt who works as a paraprofessional there.

His relatives were unharmed, but it wasn’t a victimless crime.

The incident marked the first fatal school shooting in the district’s history and reignited debate over the need for police officers on campus.

Police say six teenagers fired dozens of shots onto school property during a March 7 drive-by shooting, killing a 15-year-old boy, the intended target, and critically wounding two East High students who were bystanders.

The 15-year-old, a former Des Moines school student, was no longer enrolled in the district. It is not clear why he was on campus that day.

In September, Public Integrity wrote about the Des Moines school district’s decision to remove resource officers from schools as part of our Criminalizing Kids series, which scrutinized the use of law enforcement and courts as a response to children’s conduct at school. The district replaced officers with safety coordinators, unarmed campus monitors, and restoration facilitators, which are staff who help students develop conflict resolution skills.

Montalvo-Martinez, an Iowa State University freshman, helped lead the campaign to remove officers from school during his senior year at East High.

Non-white students and children with disabilities in the Des Moines schools are referred to law enforcement at rates much higher than their share of the student population, federal data show. An internal data review by the district found that Black students in the district were arrested at nearly six times the rate of white students.

“I personally did not have a traumatizing experience with an SRO but a lot of my friends have,” Montalvo-Martinez said. “Having an SRO present doesn’t really create a healthy learning environment.”

In interviews with Public Integrity last year, students in Denver and Milwaukee shared similar sentiments. The two school districts removed resource officers from schools but opted to rely heavily on law enforcement presence or beefed-up school security forces.

In response to the recent shooting, Des Moines school leaders announced that security staff and city police officers would increase patrols at district high schools and in the surrounding neighborhoods. 

Thus far, there are no plans to bring officers back into schools.

“The easy path is to bring back the police officers,” said Joe Enriquez Henry, state political director for the League of United Latin American Citizens of Iowa. “We need counselors and mental health professionals.”

Petitions demanding the return of resource officers to Des Moines’ schools are circulating in the district. School board member Maria Alonzo-Diaz is not sure that’s the best approach.

“Parents have said: ‘I would feel a lot better if we had the police back in the schools,” Alonzo-Diaz said. “We have to think about education and what our goal is for our kids. What impact does it have on our kids and what is it that our kids are saying? My intent is certainly not to question or shame a parent for wanting SROs back in school, but we don’t often think about education from the perspective of a child.”

In a survey conducted during the winter of 2021 before the recent shooting, about 38% of high school students indicated that it was helpful to have a resource officer at their school.

The Des Moines Police Department did not respond to requests for comment.

In the days after the shooting, Montalvo and current East High student Lyrics Sellers worked with the Des Moines Black Liberation Movement to write a statement challenging an emerging narrative that school resource officers would have prevented the deadly shooting.

Recent research does not show that police presence in schools prevents school shootings or gun-related incidents.

“Thinking that SROs prevent or resolve conflict is not true. Their only role is to criminalize students,” Montalvo-Martinez said.

“If the decision is made to bring them back and they see that it doesn’t really resolve the conflict that they were seeing, then that’s when an honest conversation as to how to better assess the situation, how to better prevent acts of violence, will happen.”

The post Shootings shape the debate on school policing appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

In 2020, Virginia passed a law that allowed principals to decide when to alert police if students committed a possible misdemeanor.

Organizations that work on juvenile justice issues championed the change, hoping it would slow the state’s school-to-prison pipeline after a 2015 Public Integrity investigation revealed that students in Virginia were referred to law enforcement at nearly three times the national rate.

This week, lawmakers rolled the law back. 

Critics of the move fear the change will have severe consequences for the state’s Black and Latino students and children with disabilities, who, as Public Integrity’s analysis revealed, are already more likely to be referred to law enforcement than their peers.

The old law drove up referrals because many school administrators thought it required them to report any potential crime and even minor incidents. The new legislation, which will again mandate that schools report to police incidents such as alcohol and drug offenses and fights, is expected to be signed by Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican. 

During his campaign, Youngkin made repealing the 2020 law a legislative priority. He seized on public concern about two in-school sexual assault cases as proof that the law was flawed. And some lawmakers suggested that the law made it easier to cover up the assaults, even though, as potential felony crimes, the incidents already fell under the state’s mandatory reporting requirements.

Advocacy organizations such as the Virginia-based Legal Aid Justice Center would prefer that school administrators continue to have discretion in reporting potential misdemeanor crimes. With the law’s passage, law enforcement could be involved more often in cases that a student code of conduct could address.

“They’re sweeping kids up because these communities of students are over-surveilled and over-policed and perceived in ways that shuttle them into the court system,” said Amy Woolard, director of policy at the Legal Aid Justice Center. “We have to reckon with that.”

The federal government’s definition of “referrals to law enforcement” includes all contact students have with officers, including arrests, citations, tickets and court referrals, that could negatively affect the students. Research shows that those youth are more likely to be pushed into the juvenile justice system.

After a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd in 2020, school systems across the nation reexamined their relationships with law enforcement. Some districts, including several in Virginia, canceled their contracts for police services and instead spent the money on student support services.

“I saw conversations about school resource officers opening up in ways that we have not seen in the past, driven by communities and driven by students,” Woolard said. “Any time you have a loud, thoughtful, emphatic new approach to a conversation, there’s going to be pushback as well.”

That’s what is happening in Virginia, where the legislative push for mandatory reporting of potential crimes is part of a coordinated effort to tap into parent concerns over school safety.

Youngkin also wants a school resource officer in every school in the state. Lawmakers in the Republican-majority state House passed legislation this month that would require the change, but a companion bill has stalled in the Democratic-led Senate.

While research shows that the presence of school resource officers can reduce some forms of violence, their presence comes with trade-offs: more suspensions, expulsions, police referrals and arrests that disproportionately affect Black students.

Public Integrity’s 2021 analysis of the latest data available, the 2017-18 school year, found Virginia’s schools were still collectively reporting students to law enforcement at three times the national rate and more than any other state.

In this case, “being No. 1 is not something to be prized,” Woolard said.

Youngkin’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

The post Virginia wanted to report fewer kids to police. Now it’s reversed course. appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

ORLANDO — The preschoolers filed offstage in royal blue caps and gowns, hugging their parents and ready for treats to celebrate their 2018 graduation from Trinity Learning Academy. All but one.

A 5-year-old took center stage, dancing to upbeat music, legs kicking in white tights and shiny white shoes.

“When Jesus says yes, nobody can say no,” she sang as her aunt recorded the moment. “When Jesus says …”

Her dark eyes shone. Her black curls bounced. This was Kaia Rolle. A diva who hugged strangers.

Barely a year later, the world would meet Kaia as a wailing first-grader, forced from her school in zip ties by two Orlando, Florida, police officers and charged with battery. Police body cam footage captured her cries — “Don’t put handcuffs on me! Help me! Help me!” — and stirred outrage around the world, bolstering calls to remove cops from schools and impose a minimum age children can be arrested in Florida.

Now, dancing Kaia lives only on her aunt’s cell phone. In her place is an 8-year-old with extreme post-traumatic stress disorder, separation anxiety, oppositional defiance disorder and phobias of simple things like bugs. She rarely smiles. Strangers get a wary look. Police officers terrify her. 

About this series

Students of color and those with disabilities face encounters with law enforcement at school at a higher rate than their peers. The Center for Public Integrity in collaboration with USA TODAY and Univision examined these disparities on a national level.

Read more

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“We know she’s in there,” said her grandmother, Meralyn Kirkland. “We just don’t know how to bring her out.”

It seems inconceivable: Educators calling cops on elementary school kids for typical child behavior. Temper tantrums. Fighting with other students. Stealing spare change and crayons. 

Sometimes they’re arrested. Sometimes they’re not. No one knows exactly how many young children are arrested each year in school. Incomplete federal databases, differing definitions of “arrest” by states, and national records that mix multiple types of law enforcement action against kids make it impossible to parse an accurate count.

But a USA TODAY analysis of federal crime reports identified more than 2,600 arrests in schools involving kids ages 5 to 9 between 2000 and 2019. That’s an average of 130 children a year and surely a vast undercount. The newspaper culled 28 million arrest records from more than 8,000 law enforcement agencies that participated in the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System over two decades. Reporters talked to dozens of criminologists, psychologists and attorneys to interpret the results. 

Among agencies consistently contributing data to the FBI, arrests dropped from about 165 a year in 2000-2009 to 78 a year in the following decade. The decline may have been driven in part by the growing body of research that shows harsh punishments can do more harm than good and are often applied unfairly to Black children and those with disabilities.

Even so, cases like Kaia’s continue to pop up as schools turn to law enforcement officers to deal with discipline issues. 

No one has studied what life looks like in the years after very young children are arrested, experts say. Because of the nature of trauma, it can be hard to say how one incident plays out over the course of a life. 

USA TODAY spent time getting to know Kaia and two others who faced police action in school as young children. What was clear was that their experiences left an indelible imprint on their lives.

Kaia’s grandmother said she is watching her grandbaby die “bit by bit, day after day.”

Malachi Pryor, who was 7 when he was handcuffed and dragged across a hallway in his Denver school after a shoving match with another child, went to therapy because he was convinced he was a bad kid.

Evelyn Towry, who was pinned in a chair and arrested at age 8 in Idaho after hitting her teacher, was scared to go back to school, became terrified of police officers and clung to her mother in public.

The incidents that trigger such arrests are often minor.

Evelyn wanted to wear a cow hoodie. Malachi’s classmate mocked a drawing of Sonic the Hedgehog.

And Kaia? Kaia wanted to wear sunglasses.

‘She looks like a baby’

When Kaia was born, she nearly died. Her skin turned blue. Doctors lost her heartbeat. The emergency team went to work and Kirkland began to pray. 

God, if you let my grandbaby live, I will raise her in your faith and always be there for her.

Within seconds, Kaia let out a squeak like a mewling kitten. Then she took a big breath and wailed. 

Kaia’s problems at school started in kindergarten. By then, she had developed severe sleep apnea due to enlarged tonsils and adenoids. She woke up frequently. Sometimes she stopped breathing. She slept two or three hours a night.

During the day, she fell asleep while drawing, watching television or riding in the car.

“She’d be talking and she’d go totally quiet,” Kirkland said. “You’d be waiting for the next sentence and look in the rearview mirror and she’d be snoring.”

In school, the sleep deprivation took its toll. She’d throw tantrums, kicking and crying. Kaia’s teachers learned to let it play out until she calmed down.

That didn’t work on Sept. 19, 2019, when Kaia was a first-grader at Lucious & Emma Nixon Academy, a charter school in west Orlando. Following a bad night, she’d come to school bleary-eyed and cranky.  

Early that morning, her teacher told Kaia she could not wear her sunglasses in class and took them away. Kaia started screaming, kicking and hitting staffers, including school employee Beverly Stoute. Kaia tried to run away when a teacher’s aide led Kaia to an office. Staffers blocked the doors.

School resource officer Dennis Turner witnessed some of Kaia’s outburst, according to police documents. But by the time he moved to arrest her, Kaia was calm. Video from Turner’s body camera shows Kaia quietly sitting in an office with a staffer.

Orlando police officer Sergio Ramos arrived to take Kaia to the Juvenile Assessment Center. He brought zip ties because handcuffs were too big.

But once Ramos saw the little girl, he called his sergeant and objected.

“Sarge, this girl is tiny,” he told his boss. “She looks like a baby.”         

Turner insisted the arrest continue. On the body cam footage, one staffer seems to be wiping away tears. 

“The restraints, are they necessary?” another staffer asks.

“Yes,” Turner answers. “And if she was bigger, she’d have been wearing regular handcuffs.”

In his arrest affidavit Turner wrote: “Victim Beverly H. Stoute stated both verbally (and) in a sworn written statement that Def. Rolle kicked her on the legs several times and punched her several times on both arms without permission. Stoute further stated she wanted to press charges and would testify in court.”

The defendant stood 3 feet, 10 inches.

The body cam video shows Kaia, wearing a red shirt and a red barrette on her braids, warily eyeing the zip ties being held off camera.

“What are those for?” she asked.

“It’s for you,” one of the officers answered.

Ramos turned Kaia around and secured the girl’s hands behind her back. Kaia began to wail.

The officers led her out of the school, passing blue slides on the playground as they approached the black and white SUV.

“I don’t want to go in the police car,” Kaia cried.

“You don’t want to?” Ramos said.

“No, please.”

“You have to.”

“No, please,” Kaia begged. “Give me a second chance.”

Kaia was taken to the county Juvenile Assessment Center, where officials took her fingerprints and tried to take her mugshot. But Kaia was too short to fit into the frame. So officials got a stool, snapped her photo and ultimately released her to her horrified grandmother. Uniformed officials at the center warned Kaia that if she didn’t appear for a scheduled court hearing, she would be arrested, Kirkland said.

“She didn’t know what a court hearing was,” she said.

Experts don’t dispute that there may be cases in which police involvement is necessary. Sometimes young kids come to school with knives or guns.  

But cops and schools need to think about why they’re arresting kids before they do it, said Tracie Keesee, senior vice president of Justice Initiatives at the Center for Policing Equity. Is the goal punishment? Public safety? Retribution?

“What are we trying to solve?” she said.

An internal affairs investigation into Kaia’s arrest by the Orlando Police Department provided Turner’s explanation for arresting the child. 

“It’s extreme,” Turner said of Kaia’s behavior in a call to a sergeant before the arrest. “I don’t want to do this. I have to.”

“You know, you could always file or do something else,” the sergeant suggested.

“Trust me, I don’t want to do this, I have to,” Turner answered.

The investigation gave no explanation as to why Turner felt he had to arrest Kaia, but it was clearly not something he was loath to do. Later that same day, Turner arrested another 6-year-old student at the same school for kicking his teacher. However, police supervisors stopped the arrest before it went through the full process.

Arresting young children does nothing to change their behavior, experts say. Their brains are so undeveloped that most don’t understand the concept of criminal intent.  

At 5 years old, children are just recognizing most letters of the alphabet. At 6, Kaia’s age when she was arrested, children still fear monsters. At 7, they have difficulty with basic spelling. At 8, they are still losing baby teeth.

It may even be unconstitutional to arrest children too young to understand what’s happening to them, said William Lassiter, the deputy secretary for juvenile justice in North Carolina.

“It just makes no sense to involve law enforcement in a case against a 6- or 7-year-old,” Lassiter told USA TODAY. “The fundamental belief of our constitutional system is that if you’re standing trial, you need to understand what your rights are and how to participate in your defense. There’s just no way that a 6- or 7-year-old can do that.”

When children act out, there’s something else going on. Maybe they’re being affected by family problems, medical troubles, disabilities, abuse or violence. In Kaia’s case, her family says, it was her sleep disorder.

The charges against Kaia were dropped, but her story blew up in the media.

Nixon Academy officials did not respond to multiple calls and emails from USA TODAY requesting information about the incident. At the time of the arrest, the school released a statement saying they never wanted to press charges, contrary to Turner’s report. Stoute said the same thing to police internal affairs investigators who scrutinized the case.

“No I did not,” Stoute said, according to police documents. “I did not verbally say, ‘Hey, Reserve Officer Turner, I want to charge this little person with battery.’ No I did not.”

Turner, who could not be reached for comment, was fired for not following protocol. Ramos was cleared of wrongdoing.

But Kaia and her grandmother weren’t finished fighting. Kirkland knew all about the school-to-prison pipeline, a national trend in which students of color are disproportionately arrested and sentenced to prison. It rattled her.

The reasons Black youth are criminalized so young has been vastly studied, and the explanations vary: implicit bias, failure to recognize trauma in Black children, a tendency to view them as older than they are, a failure to identify learning disabilities and mental health problems.

Kirkland knew she couldn’t change everything. But the arrests of kids like Kaia?

An analysis of federal data by USA TODAY showed that of the 5- to 9-year-olds arrested between 2000 and 2019, Black children comprised 43%, even though they make up only 15% of kids that age. That discrepancy among young children is even greater than the rate at which Black teens face police action at high schools.

It has to stop, Kirkland told herself. I have to help.

‘Mommy, what are batteries?’

Ten years before Kaia was arrested, Evelyn Towry, now 21, faced her own criminal charges.

Back then, school was a war zone for Evelyn, who has a form of high-functioning autism called Asperger’s syndrome. While attending elementary school in the late 2000s, the sounds of other children chewing, students shifting in their seats, paper shuffling, fans whirring – all of it assaulted her senses. She loved dogs and cats and cows and liked to dress in animal costumes her mother made for her because she thought animals were treated better than people.

In her kindergarten class at Kootenai Elementary School in Kootenai, Idaho, she screamed and cried. She tore up papers and refused to listen to teachers. She struggled to recognize emotions. She felt bullied by her classmates. 

Before first grade, Evelyn had been suspended numerous times.

Many children with disabilities have similar stories. Some have learning disabilities or emotional problems. Some have poor social skills. Others fail to pick up on cues that a teacher is angry or struggle to relate to their fellow students. Evelyn had so much trouble recognizing emotions that her therapist taped pictures of teddy bears with explicitly named expressions on the child’s shirt to help her learn. Her teachers made her take them off, deeming them distracting, Evelyn said.

Give those types of challenges to under-trained teachers, add in easy access to school resource officers who don’t know each child’s educational plan, mix in frustration, confusion and tension on all sides, and the concoction can be explosive. It happens a lot, said Joe Ryan, a professor of special education at Clemson University.

“It’s very depressing when this happens again and again and again,” Ryan said.

An analysis of federal data last year by the nonprofit Center for Public Integrity, in partnership with USA TODAY, showed that the rate at which students with disabilities were referred to law enforcement was disproportionately high in every state.

Evelyn’s teachers tried to work with her, according to a lawsuit her family later settled with the school district. They gave her snacks. They worked with her one-on-one at times and played soft guitar music. Good behavior earned her free time or popcorn.

On Jan. 9, 2009, Evelyn arrived at school excited about a class party. Even though she wasn’t supposed to wear it to school, Evelyn, then 8 and in third grade, arrived in a cow hoodie her mother had decorated with black spots, ears, a tail and a peach glove for the udders. The school had previously banned Evelyn from wearing animal outfits, saying they were too distracting.

The day of the party, Evelyn’s teacher told her she couldn’t partake in the festivities unless she tucked in the tail and ears of her hoodie, according to court documents. Evelyn says she complied, but her teacher still refused to let her go to the party. Evelyn eventually bolted and ran toward the portable classroom where the celebration was underway. Her teacher called staffers and told them to stop Evelyn at the door.

Soon Evelyn was screaming, crying and clinging to a nearby railing. Two teacher’s aides pried her hands loose and carried the 54-pound child back to class. 

“Anytime you go hands-on with children with autism or on the spectrum, it’s going to escalate quickly,” said Lauren Gardner, administrative director of the autism program at Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in Florida. “We have to be able to take a step back, take a deep breath and say, ‘What is the real issue now?’ and, ‘What are we willing to go to battle over?’”

Evelyn was forced into a chair by staffers. She kicked, yelled, spit and hit. She pinched her teacher’s breast, hard. On it went, until the principal called the police.

Evelyn was in fight-or-flight mode, the clinic director of a children’s mental health center told the court during the Towry family’s lawsuit. Asperger’s children believe that these kinds of scenarios are life-and-death situations.

“When this child left the room, she was carried back by two teachers, and it was already too late,” he wrote in his report.

After about 30 minutes, Evelyn began to calm down. 

It didn’t matter. In the police report, the sheriff’s deputy wrote that Evelyn’s teacher and principal “wanted to have charges pressed because they were not getting their point across to Evelyn or Evelyn’s parents.”

Policies on calling police vary from school to school or even child to child. Some teachers feel arresting children is the wrong call. But other educators, be it due to frustration, safety concerns or an easy access to law enforcement in schools, call on cops to intervene.

In Layton, Utah, a principal called police to report that a group of second-graders had stolen items including $25 in change, a Rubik’s cube, a stapler and crayons.

In Boise, Idaho, a principal demanded police file charges against an elementary school child who broke a school window with a rock.

In Memphis, Tennessee, an elementary school boy was charged with simple assault for scratching another child on the nose.

The deputies told Evelyn she was being arrested because of the batteries that had occurred. As they led her to a patrol car with handcuffs locked around her wrists, Evelyn saw her mother in the parking lot.

“Mommy, mommy,” she cried through sudden tears. “What are batteries? What are batteries?”

The charges were quickly dropped. Evelyn transferred to another school and improved, she said, because the teachers better understood how to work with her. 

And, according to court documents in the Towry lawsuit, at least one teacher at Kootenai Elementary was happy to see Evelyn go. On her Jan. 9, 2009 planner, the teacher wrote “handcuffs — Last Day ET. Phew!” The entry was followed by a smiley face symbol.

More than a decade later, Evelyn doesn’t think her arrest caused post traumatic stress disorder or lasting mental health problems. 

Today, she works part-time bussing tables at a restaurant. She supplements that with Social Security, rents her own apartment, has a boyfriend, maintains a close relationship with her mother and dotes on her 13-year-old cat, Hazel. She hopes someday to do voice-over work for animated television and film.

While upsetting, not every arrest of a child is clinically traumatizing, said Steven Marans, co-director of the Yale Center for Traumatic Stress and Recovery. So much depends on the child’s life experiences before the incident, the way the arrest is conducted and the support they receive afterward.

Evelyn is still angry about what happened. She hated police officers for a long time and, while that fury has faded, she still panics when she sees them.

“Just because someone has a disability doesn’t mean they don’t have the ability to understand things,” she said. 

Evelyn is appalled that schools are still arresting young school children. Since her arrest 13 years ago, USA TODAY documented 1,061 arrests of children ages 5 to 9 at elementary schools across the country, and, again, that number is surely an undercount.

“I feel quite alarmed and disgusted by how kids are being arrested,” Evelyn said. “It doesn’t matter what they do, they are children.”

‘Right-wrong family’ pushes back

Brandon Pryor paced in front of Florida Pitt Waller school in Denver, angry, anxious and blasting out his disbelief on Facebook Live.

It was April 19, 2019. A school staffer had called Pryor to say his 7-year-old son, Malachi, had been handcuffed after “an altercation” with another second-grader. But when Pryor arrived, the school wouldn’t let him see his son. At least four police officers stood behind the purple front door to make sure Pryor didn’t get in.

And Pryor was seething.

“This is egregious,” he said on the Facebook video, which has been viewed 30,000 times. “This is completely unacceptable, and I am pissed off right now.” 

Pryor knew he had to stay calm. The Black, 6-foot, 2-inch former linebacker for the Oklahoma Sooners knew losing his cool in front of the cops could land him behind bars — or worse. So he didn’t shout. He firmly spoke his piece into the camera.

“I’m trying to keep it together guys, because I’m no good to anybody locked up and in jail,” he said.

He also accused the school of discriminating against young children of color.

“You all are criminalizing our children inside these schools and then you want to lock me out,” he said. “Bring me my damn son!” 

Eventually, Malachi’s parents learned the whole story. 

Malachi was in art class, drawing Sonic the Hedgehog when, as Malachi remembers it, another kid came over and said his drawings “sucked.” 

The boys started shoving, and their teacher called security. Malachi’s parents, who reviewed surveillance footage of the incident, said their son was led outside the classroom. When he resisted by sitting down, he was restrained by the security officer, dragged down the hallway in front of other students and eventually handcuffed.

Malachi, scared and confused, prayed to God for help.

“Please let me out.” 

No charges were filed. The Pryors grabbed Malachi and his younger brother, drove away from the school and went to Uno Pizzeria. Anything to ease the misery of that day.

The incident drew fierce outcry in the community because Malachi’s parents were Brandon and Samantha Pryor, co-founders of Warriors For High Quality Schools, a community organization demanding racial justice within the Denver public schools system. 

The Denver school board unanimously passed a resolution to eliminate the use of handcuffs with elementary school students in most cases and reduce the use of handcuffs with middle and high school students.

The school district agreed to a confidential settlement with the family before a lawsuit was even filed.

School resource officers and private security companies have come under fire for years, with advocates insisting that they are heavy-handed, don’t always know how to handle children and give overburdened teachers an easy way to deal with discipline. Then those discipline problems can become criminal problems.

Adding police to the equation doesn’t work because many have no idea how to deal with kids and are doing what they were trained to do — arrest people, said Leona Lee with the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

“You bring in the police and security elements and demand absolute obedience,” she said. “The only way for them to deal with problems is to arrest people. No negotiating.”

Meanwhile, many children of color feel unsafe around police because they’ve seen friends or relatives targeted by law enforcement. They’re also well aware of the police killings of Black people like George Floyd, Tamir Rice or Philando Castile, said Andrew Hairston with Texas Appleseed, a criminal justice nonprofit.

Still, many teachers support cops in schools. A June 2020 Education Week survey showed that just 23% of educators supported removing armed officers from campuses. And they point to school resource officers like Pamela Revels to show how effective they can be.

Revels — who is on the board of the directors of the National Association of School Resource Officers — has been a school resource officer for all school ages in Lee County, Alabama, for 17 years. When a child acts out, she lowers her voice, lets the child know they’re safe and tries to get to the root of the problem, she said. 

In one case, a boy was frustrated because he was frequently late for class. Revels stepped in and discovered the child was too short to see the combination on his top locker. That day, Revels helped him move all his stuff into a bottom locker.

“Not another tardy, not another problem,” she said.

USA TODAY’s analysis goes much further than a 2007 FBI report scrutinizing the arrests of America’s youngest students. The newspaper’s analysis brings available numbers up to date and provides more detail.  It shows that small children arrested at schools are disproportionately male. Nearly two-thirds of the arrests were for assault, and most of the victims in those cases were adult females, presumably teachers and other school staffers.

Meanwhile, Black children were arrested at far higher rates than their numbers in the general population.  

Many blame the arrests of small children on the proliferation of cops in schools. There are more than 50,000 full and part-time school resource officers in schools around the country, according to 2015-2016 data from the National Center for Education Statistics. And schools with police reported 3.5 times more arrests than schools without them, according to a 2019 report from the American Civil Liberties Union. 

At the same time, millions of students attend schools without counselors, nurses, social workers or psychologists. 

But Revels has had extensive training on working with children, while many school resource officers do not. Thirty-eight states and territories either require school officers to have specialized training, encourage it or have policies not compelled by law, according to 2019 numbers compiled by the National Association of State Boards of Education. The remaining states don’t address it.

Staci Adams, a fourth-grade math teacher at Smothers Elementary School in Washington, D.C., adamantly opposes child arrests but supports police in schools. She’s been through a lot over the years. She went to the hospital once for a shoulder injury after blocking a desktop a child threw at other students. A second-grader who tried to strangle a principal with a lanyard is still in her school two years later.

Neither of those children was arrested.

Adams trains other teachers how to handle challenging behavior, and she can deal with most situations herself. But she is not allowed to break up fights. She can’t restrain children. For a long time, she worried that a child might escape her classroom, run down the nearby stairs and race outside.

In December, it happened. That day, a child attacked Adams and destroyed a radio, then sprinted out of the classroom, down the stairs and through a door leading outside. Then he ran into traffic. 

The school security officers chased him down, kept traffic at bay and were eventually able to get him back into school. 

“They were able to keep the boy from getting hurt in oncoming traffic,” Adams said. “They were able to keep him from harming me or any other students.”

When the police were called, they offered Adams the chance to press charges. She refused, knowing that putting a little Black boy into the criminal justice system would hurt more than help. Instead, Adams and the family came up with a plan to control the child’s behavior.

The boy later returned to school with a tearful apology, a card, a CD player and a promise to never act out again.

“Heal, learn and move on,” Adams said of her philosophy.

Malachi’s mother, a lawyer who worked on the handcuffs policy with the district, said the incident traumatized the whole family. In the months that followed, she watched Malachi start to believe he was a bad kid. Good kids, he thought, didn’t get handcuffed. 

It took therapy and numerous conversations with Malachi for the truth to sink in: You’re not bad. They should not have done that to you.

Brandon Pryor, who had already been a thorn in the side of the district with his activism, took his passion to the next level. He, Samantha and their friend, Gabe Lindsay, designed a district school founded on the values of Historically Black Colleges and Universities: The Robert F. Smith STEAM Academy. The vision is to empower, educate and inspire children of color instead of making them vulnerable to discrimination and arrest.

The Pryors’ advocacy is among many efforts underway to do away with the arrests or criminalization of young children. 

In 2020, Virginia became the first state to prohibit police from charging students with disorderly conduct at school or school-sponsored events.

Some school districts, including Oakland and Los Angeles, have eliminated or reduced the use of law enforcement in schools. Milwaukee canceled its contract with the city police, but continues to call in officers to handle problems.  

Specialists are teaching school resource officers how to recognize disabilities in children, how to read their behaviors and how to de-escalate outbursts.

“We were the right-wrong family who this happened to,” Samantha Pryor told USA TODAY. “It was terrible, but our child is strong and supported by two parents who know how to advocate for him. Some people just have to accept what the system does to them because they don’t have the resources to fight back.” 

‘They move on. We can’t’

Kaia’s family refused to just accept what had happened.

Kaia’s mother, Jaime, moved from the Bahamas to Orlando shortly after the arrest to help care for Kaia. Her aunt, uncle and grandfather also help out. Kirkland, who raised Kaia for years before Jaime arrived in the United States, works at a bank to support the family.

After Kaia’s arrest, her grandmother became the public face of a movement to stop child arrests in Florida. She spoke to the media, to colleges and state legislators. She talked to other parents in similar situations. She filed a lawsuit against the school, which is ongoing.

In the meantime, the family is struggling.

They’re burning through Kirkland’s retirement savings. They have six open lines of credit and loans and set up a GoFundMe account. They’ve dealt with depression. They go to family therapy to deal with the constant stress of fighting to keep Kaia safe. Kirkland has been in the hospital multiple times, her medical problems agitated by stressors she can’t escape.

“Nobody thinks about how people’s lives have to go on after this,” Kirkland said. “They say, ‘Oh that’s terrible,’ and they go on with their lives. Everybody sweeps you under the rug, and they move on. We can’t.”

Kaia still gets violent when she’s angry and runs away when afraid. She sees a therapist and a psychiatrist. She takes medications to help her with her anxiety, phobias and PTSD. She is still terrified of police.

She has attended three different schools since her arrest. She first went to a private school, but that proved too expensive. Kaia started at a new public school in August 2021 but quickly withdrew after Kirkland said a police officer was summoned when the child threw a tantrum. Kaia was restrained, taken to a hospital for a psychiatric evaluation and let go that day, Kirkland said.

Now Kaia attends a public school in Orlando that specializes in children with mental, physical and developmental challenges. 

Less than a week after starting there, Kaia felt so overwhelmed by her schoolwork that she ran out of the school screaming for her mother and grandmother. A half-dozen staffers gave chase but knew not to touch her. They just made sure she couldn’t get off campus while the school called Kirkland.

As soon as Kaia saw her grandmother, she dropped to the hot asphalt exhausted, heaving and panting in the sun. “She was still screaming and crying and yelling, ‘No, no, no,’” Kirkland said. 

Welcome to Kaia’s amygdala — the part of the brain that regulates emotions. When a person feels threatened, the amygdala triggers an involuntary fight, flight or freeze response. Then, when that danger disappears, the brain regulates and the amygdala gets back to the business of controlling routine feelings. 

But Kaia — like others who have experienced PTSD — is different. Her trauma has become stuck in the amygdala, creating emotional explosions. When something upsets her, her fight, flight or freeze response kicks in. 

When she sees a cop, she hides, cries and shakes. If she feels attacked by a teacher, she’ll throw things or scream. When she broke her grandmother’s phone, she ran into a thunderstorm and raced through the streets, trying to find her aunt and buy a new phone.

This is what Kaia lives with two years after she was arrested at age 6. Her brain has physically changed, said her therapist, Nancy Langford.

“Arresting a child has the potential to create lasting, traumatizing stress,” Langford said. “The confusion of a young child being arrested may result in a lack of trust in people children are supposed to trust, such as teachers, police officers, even adults in general.” 

At her new school, Kaia gets the specialized attention she needs.

“They are working wonders,” Kirkland said. “For the first time in two years, Kaia is excited to go to school.”

Another triumph came last year when Kaia’s family successfully pushed Florida lawmakers to pass the Kaia Rolle Act. It prohibits the arrest of any child under the age of 7 for anything other than a forcible felony. That’s still far too young, Kirkland said. She won’t be satisfied until legislators raise that age, preferably to 12.

Kaia knows about the law in her name and said she’s happy because her friends can’t get arrested.

“Everybody’s important, not just one person,” she said. The words were delivered without a smile or inflection, sounding more like a spokesperson accustomed to cameras and sound bites than a child.

Yet now and then signs of the old Kaia unexpectedly emerge.

One day while watching YouTube videos in the family room, Kaia overheard her grandmother and mother talking about her in the kitchen.

The old Kaia was a burst of sunshine. She owned the room, no matter where she went. Just look at these pictures of her. Look at that smile. Wasn’t she beautiful? Oh, there’s her with her keyboard. She sang and made up songs all the time, all the time.

Kaia poked her head around the corner. Slowly, she padded over to the kitchen bar and stared at the photos on her grandmother’s phone. Her mood visibly brightened while she commented on the changing images.

“Look at me with my long hair,” she said, clinging to her mom. Kaia has her own Facebook page, filled with scores of pictures of herself as an infant, a toddler and a schoolgirl. She seems especially fascinated with photos taken before her arrest.

“It’s like, I think she wants to return to that girl,” Kirkland said, “but she doesn’t know how.”  

Kaitlyn Radde and Emma Uber contributed to this report.

The post ‘She looks like a baby’: Why do kids as young as 5 or 6 still get arrested at schools? appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

The Milwaukee Public Schools canceled its contract with the city police department in June 2020, but the policy change has not stopped staff from summoning officers to schools.

In the first two months of the current school year, administrators at Milwaukee high schools called police more than 200 times, ABC affiliate station WISN reported. Some city leaders have suggested the district reconsider and bring officers back to patrol campuses.

It’s part of a trend where districts that dumped school police after George Floyd’s murder in 2020 are reversing or re-examining those decisions or adding security measures that mirror police presence.

In Pomona, California, a shooting near a school prompted the district to bring back school resource officers about four months after defunding them. In Denver, the school system beefed up its security staff with armed officers who can ticket students for minor infractions. In Des Moines, Iowa, parents are urging school board members to bring back police despite evidence that Black students are disproportionately arrested in schools.

When deciding to end its contract with the city police, Milwaukee, like other school districts across the nation, tried to balance two truths: Racial bias in school policing can have severe consequences for students. But there are times when police are needed on school campuses.

Black, Latino and Native American students in the Milwaukee schools are disproportionately referred to law enforcement, making up 94% of referrals. Those student groups comprise less than 80% of the overall student population. School-based law enforcement referrals may lead to arrests and criminal charges or citations that can require students to appear in court.

Leaders Igniting Transformation, a nonprofit focused on organizing Milwaukee-area high school and college students across Wisconsin to advocate for racial, gender and economic justice, pushed to get officers out of schools well before the school district canceled its contracts. The district still employs uniformed security staff.

“When you put police in schools, it’s only going to lead to more arrests,” said Jasmine Roberson, a Leaders Igniting Transformation organizer who works with youth in Milwaukee. “You go looking for something, and you’re going to find it — more arrests, more tickets, more police interactions.”

The Milwaukee Public Schools did not respond to requests for comment.

A nationwide Center for Public Integrity investigation on school policing revealed that public schools in Wisconsin refer students to law enforcement at twice the national rate.

Our reporting partners at Madison365 and Wisconsin Watch wrote about how schools there were more likely to refer Native students to law enforcement than any other state. And the referral rate for Black students was the fifth-highest in the nation.

Roberson and Leaders Igniting Transformation student members Kamyia Johnson, Nehavey Northern and Susej Paura-Martinez discussed the debate around school policing in an interview with Public Integrity.

*This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Should the Milwaukee Public Schools reconsider its decision to remove school resource officers from campuses?

Susej Paura-Martinez: 

Instead of spending money on police officers, we should hire more tutors, anger management therapists, people that will help kids not be angry. Police officers make the kids angry. So I feel we should hire more people that will help us, not police officers.

Nehavey Northern: 

We’re students. We should be viewed as that, instead of having the police come in with their guns and everything. That’s very scary. We’re teenagers, and we shouldn’t be treated this way. What really are the benefits of having police inside children’s schools? I can’t think of any, but I do have trouble thinking of an alternative to it.

Kamyia Johnson: 

Coming fresh out of middle school into high school, I see all these [police] officers and safety [officers]. If we treat the students as criminals, then that’s how they’re going to behave. We shouldn’t treat the students like they’re criminals. We should treat them like they’re students.

Q: What can the district do to ensure student safety?

Nehavey Northern: 

I feel students deserve, really deserve to feel safe and not feel they’re being harmed. Me, I go to school thinking I’m going to be so safe. If I see a police officer, I just feel like, “Dang, I thought I was in a safe environment.”

Susej Paura-Martinez: 

Police bring fear into the children, the Black children in our school buildings. There should be more tutors, not police officers. I feel we shouldn’t invest our money, millions of dollars into police officers when they’re not even going to do [anything] but make it worse.

Kamyia Johnson: 

I should be able to walk, go to the bathroom, and not get questioned. There’s this man who walks through our hallways, yelling, saying, “Oh, well, if you’re in the hallway, you’re going to get suspended.” And it’s kind of like, “I did not leave middle school for this.”

Q: What is the security presence at your school? Do you see police on campus?

Kamyia Johnson: 

I have lots of safety [officers] in my school. Every time you turn a corner, there is one right there, and sometimes it can be overwhelming.

Susej Paura-Martinez: 

I never attended school with police in it, but recently there were a couple of police officers in my school because of [an incident]. I felt it was too much. It was more that Black kids were scared and not protected.

Jasmine Roberson: 

Kamyia is from a school that has a metal detector at the front door, all of the doors. When I’m in their school, I see a new safety officer every 10 seconds. She’s in a school that is really heavily policed outside of actually having police specifically. She’s a freshman. She’s not used to that. So, she’s coming from a place of, “I already feel policed with just safety [officers] and they’re unarmed. Why would I feel any safer when people are armed and they can arrest me in the school?”

Corey Mitchell is a senior reporter at the Center for Public Integrity. He can be reached at cmitchell@publicintegrity.org. Follow him on Twitter at @C_C_Mitchell.

The post A school district defunded police. But it keeps calling them back in. appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

In June 2020, amid protests over the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, school districts across the nation began to reexamine their relationships with law enforcement agencies.

Denver was among the districts that ended contracts with police and pulled school resource officers off its campuses.

Padres & Jôvenes Unidos, a Denver-based Latino advocacy group, saw the move as a significant step in a decade-long campaign for police-free schools. The resolution the district approved in 2020 stated that the school system would not replace school resource officers with the “consistent presence of security armed with guns.”

But in the time since, the district has replaced the school resource officers with safety patrol officers, armed and uniformed security staff. While the safety patrol officers are not sworn law enforcement officers and are not stationed in schools, they do have authority to ticket students for certain offenses.

“It’s been honestly quite a slap in the face to our community,” said Tzigane Martin, communications coordinator for Padres & Jôvenes Unidos. “We’re trying to hold [the Denver schools] accountable to actually implement the resolution.”

The Denver Public Schools did not respond to a request for comment.

A Center for Public Integrity investigation of school policing nationwide showed that Colorado was among 21 states where schools referred Latino students to law enforcement at rates higher than the national average.

Federal data shows that Latino students in Denver are more than twice as likely to be referred to law enforcement as white students. The referral rates there are even higher for Black and Native American students and children with disabilities. Those referrals can lead to arrests, criminal charges or citations that can require students to appear in court.

Padres & Jôvenes Unidos student members Tori Cordova, 17, and Evelyn Gonzalez, 15, discussed in an interview with Public Integrity why they have campaigned for police-free schools and talked about their experiences with school resource officers.

*This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: What role do you think that police and law enforcement should play in K-12 schools?

Tori Cordova:

I don’t think we should have cops in schools. From my personal experience and what I’ve seen, cops target mostly BIPOC youths and LGBT youths. They’re not trained to de-escalate situations. To explain it to someone who’s not in my shoes, we’re targeted because of who we are, our identities and something that we can’t control. We’re targeted for it.

Evelyn Gonzalez:

Cops or security guards should only be called if there was a shooting. I feel like they haven’t made anyone feel safe. They only are trained to ticket people. I do believe that counselors are the best and only way that would prevent violence, especially because we would have somebody to talk to and we wouldn’t have to turn to bad habits. Having counselors and more trusted adults in the building would make teenagers feel heard. 

Q: Why have you advocated for police-free schools? How has your experience influenced that decision?

Tori Cordova: 

At my old school, we had cops there, and they were armed and they could ticket us. And a lot of us, we were criminalized for doing basic things like walking the halls when we needed to take a break. We weren’t able to walk around if we needed to calm down. But at my new school, we don’t have cops in schools and we’re allowed to go take a lap around the school if we need to just calm down. We have teachers that are trained to de-escalate situations and make sure that we’re OK. And if there’s a threat in the area, there’ll be a cop that’ll come to check in on us. But my principal keeps them in the office so we don’t have to interact because that’s how students feel most safe and how I feel most safe.

Evelyn Gonzalez:

I go to a high school in a predominantly Latinx community. We have more than one security officer at our school. We have three. I don’t feel comfortable because it makes it difficult for us to focus on our high school experience and our performance because we’re more focused on how we should react around them because we don’t want to be criminalized or targeted.

Q: The Denver Public Schools terminated its contract with the Denver Police Department in June 2020. In the time since, the district has granted its armed patrol officers authority to ticket students. Do you think the change has improved the situation for students?

Evelyn Gonzalez:

It’s not making much difference. It’s the same people, just different names.

Tori Cordova:

It’s pretty problematic. We wanted to get the cops out, which students thought were dangerous, and put more counselors and mental health support in schools, and they didn’t do that. They kept the cops and slapped [new labels] on them.

The post Students wanted police out of schools. The replacements have guns. appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

Virginia Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin’s promise to add more police officers in schools could have unintended consequences for the state’s children. 

New research from the Annenberg Institute at Brown University found that school resource officers can reduce some forms of violence, such as fights and physical assaults. 

But those benefits come with tradeoffs: increased absenteeism, especially for students with disabilities, and more suspensions, expulsions, police referrals and arrests that disproportionately affect Black students, the researchers determined. 

Furthermore, researchers found no indication that police presence in schools prevent school shootings or gun-related incidents.

The authors stated that their work provides “compelling evidence that stationing police in schools could put at risk other efforts to improve equity in K-12 education.”

Schools in Virginia already refer students to law enforcement at three times the national average, the highest rate in the country, a recent Center for Public Integrity analysis of U.S. Department Education data showed.

The federal government’s definition of “referrals to law enforcement” includes all contact students have with officers that could negatively affect students, including arrests, citations, tickets and court referrals. Those students are more likely to be pushed into the juvenile justice system.

According to the state’s most recent school safety survey, more than 90% of high schools and middle schools have assigned officers or school security guards. Less than half of elementary schools do.

During a mid-October rally, Youngkin, a Republican, said that to keep students safe, he’d pressure districts to have an officer in every school or risk losing millions in state funding. 

There is no evidence that crime is rising in schools, but Youngkin tapped into public concern about sexual assault cases in two Loudoun County, Virginia, high schools. Youngkin blamed the assaults on failed Democratic leadership.

In 2020, Virginia passed bipartisan legislation designed to reduce the number of students referrals to law enforcement for minor offenses. It was among the school safety and equity-focused criminal justice and education policies that Youngkin and other Republican candidates targeted for scrutiny.

“The goal was to stoke fear and anxiety among parents and to speak to a certain base,” said state Sen. Jennifer McClellan, a Democrat who sponsored the bill.

Youngkin’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment on his plans.

According to the state’s most recent school safety survey, more than 90% of high schools and middle schools already have assigned officers or school security guards. Less than half of elementary schools do.

“We have been pushing for less police presence, less reliance on police to handle the situations that occur in schools,” said Valerie Slater, executive director of RISE for Youth, a Richmond-based advocacy group. “Everyone doesn’t believe that crime is at an all-time high and we’re all afraid and the only way to keep our kids safe is to add more police. That’s just not true.”

After a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd in 2020, school systems across the state and nation re-examined their relationships with law enforcement. Some districts, mostly in Democrat-led big cities and college towns such as Charlottesville, Virginia, canceled their contracts for police services, opting to spend the money on mental health and other student support services. But at least one city has already reversed course and reinstated officers.

In heavily Democratic Alexandria, Virginia, the city council voted last month to temporarily bring police back to the schools, less than six months after pulling armed officers off campuses. Parents and the district superintendent pleaded for the return of officers after several fights and an incident in which a student took a loaded handgun to school.

McClellan said that local school boards and superintendents, not the governor, should decide whether schools need more police.

“Our legislation was intended to address the overcriminalization of children. There were too many children being pushed on the school-to-prison pipeline,” McClellan said. “We’ve come very far in addressing that and we don’t want to take steps back.”

The post Addressing school safety fears could have unintended consequences appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

Public Integrity’s recent report, “When schools call police on kids,” showed that nearly 230,000 students were referred to law enforcement across the country during the 2017-18 school year and more than 50,000 were arrested. 

But our reporting also revealed something else: the numbers likely were far worse.  Some of the nation’s largest school districts had either underreported or failed to report interactions between police and students, which can result in arrests, criminal charges or citations that require them to appear in court. 

The federal data we used for our investigation, the Civil Rights Data Collection from the U.S. Department of Education, showed that the Pittsburgh School District, the second largest in Pennsylvania, had no students arrested on campus.

But data from the Pennsylvania Department of Education showed 86 arrests that school year. The district blamed the difference on a data entry error, yet the number remains uncorrected on the CRDC website.

Pittsburgh isn’t alone.

New York City, the nation’s largest school district, also reported zero arrests. Yet New York City Police Department records show that officers arrested nearly 1,200 students on campuses between July 2017 and June 2018.

The numbers are fuzzy in other districts too but one thing is clear: the CRDC data does not paint a complete picture of how often law enforcement officers are questioning and arresting students on school grounds.

Three other school districts, including Chicago, among the 10 largest in the nation reported that law enforcement officers arrested zero students during the 2017-18 school year.

Reporters, researchers and advocates have for years known that the federal data contains errors on everything from student referrals to law enforcement to the number of children eligible for disability rights protection. Such errors, they say, undermine the very purpose of the data collection effort: to ensure the civil rights of all children in the United States are protected in schools.

Districts are required by law to enter their own figures into the database. With tens of thousands of districts, some errors are inevitable. But the Department of Education does not require districts to provide a contact so it is difficult to track who entered the data to check inaccuracies. 

Nevertheless, the data is the only detailed information on discipline that covers nearly all public schools. Experts say errors in the data can mask the true extent of the disciplinary disparities we found when reporting our story.

“That’s a huge problem. The failure to report what’s going on makes these kids who are getting arrested [and] referred to police less visible,” said Daniel Losen, director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies, an initiative of the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles. 

We sent a detailed list of questions to the Office for Civil Rights, but they declined to answer  questions or make someone available for an interview.

Public Integrity partnered with newsrooms across the country to explore disparities in school policing. Some of the partner organizations also found undercounts of arrests and law enforcement interactions in schools.

WFAE-FM in North Carolina found that school districts did not accurately report how often they referred students to law enforcement.

The New Bedford, Massachusetts, school district has inaccurately reported zero student arrests to the federal government since 2009. After stories by the New Bedford Light exposed the problem, the Office for Civil Rights said it would  review the district’s data submissions.

But beyond urging school districts to comply with the law, the federal government has limited options at its disposal to enforce accurate reporting of arrest and law enforcement referral data, Losen said. “There’s no accountability.”

The federal government could withhold federal funding for districts that refuse to report timely and accurate numbers, Losen said. But he couldn’t recall an instance where that has happened. That may be because a penalty like that would harm the very students the office for civil rights was established to protect.

“For some violations, like not reporting your data, the agency is left with the enforcement option of the atom bomb or nothing.” Losen said. “Once a district realizes they’re not going to get held accountable, then there’s no sort of more reasonable deterrent.”

Having low arrest and law enforcement referral numbers can help districts avoid public scrutiny and the threat of having their schools labeled as dangerous.

After analyzing the 2015-16 federal data, Losen determined that 60% of all large school districts reported zero arrests. Nearly a third reported no arrests or law enforcement referrals.

Losen also used the data to explore disparities in student arrest rates for Black and white students. And he found that Pittsburgh was among the districts with the highest arrest rate for Black students.

During that academic year, 10% of all Black secondary school students in the district were arrested. But less than 2% of white students were arrested. All told, the district had more than 900 school-related arrests that year, according to Losen’s analysis of CRDC data.

Then, two years later, zero.

“You would think there would be some sort of accountability, which there doesn’t seem to be at either the state or the federal level,” said Ghadah Makoshi, a community advocate with the ACLU of Pennsylvania whose work focuses on school police reform. “And, honestly, it should not be this difficult to find accurate, reliable data on student arrests.”

The post Underreporting undermines accountability about police and schools appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

Five major headlines in the news recently offer significant insight into America’s crisis in police accountability: 

1. Black kids arrested for a crime that doesn’t exist

Earlier this fall, the Center for Public Integrity and a coalition of other journalism organizations including USA TODAY Network published “Criminalizing Kids,” a nationwide look at the disproportionate harm that police presence in schools has on Black and disabled kids in particular.

It led the American Civil Liberties Union to renew a push for reform that calls for diverting money from uniformed cops patrolling middle school hallways, to hiring more mental health professionals and trauma-informed staff.

Last week, an investigation by ProPublica and Nashville Public Radio provided a spectacularly horrific example of the harm, racism and puzzling prioritization of law enforcement resources wrapped up in the school policing conversation. They told the story of police in Tennessee arresting a group of Black elementary school girls, placing an 8-year-old in handcuffs. Their crime? Failing to intervene when two 5- and 6-year-old boys were involved in a minor playground scuffle that was caught on video. 

2. Police killed Black Americans twice as often as we were told

A landmark study by researchers at the University of Washington found that in 55% of cases in which someone died while interacting with police, the cause of death was mislabeled. Homicides at the hands of officers were mislabeled thousands of times over the past four decades.  

“The findings reflect both the contentious role of medical examiners and coroners in obscuring the real extent of police violence,” the New York Times reported, “and the lack of centralized national data …”

“Researchers estimated that over the time period they studied, which roughly tracks the era of the war on drugs and the rise of mass incarceration, nearly 31,000 Americans were killed by the police, with more than 17,000 of them going unaccounted for in the official statistics. The study also documented a stark racial gap: Black Americans were 3.5 times as likely to be killed by the police as white Americans were.”

3. A nationwide lobbying effort kills police accountability push

Nationwide outrage over the police murder of George Floyd last year led to widespread calls for reform of qualified immunity, “a legal doctrine that makes it virtually impossible to sue police officers for violating a person’s civil rights.”

But the Washington Post reports this week that police unions have been extremely effective in blocking attempts at reform. At least 35 bills targeting qualified immunity in state legislatures have failed in the past 18 months.

As Public Integrity’s Rui Kaneya has reported, the issue could be tackled by the U.S. Supreme Court at some point.

4. Violence against Black Lives Matter protesters admitted on video

A video has emerged of a Boston police officer bragging about intentionally driving his police cruiser into Black Lives Matter protesters during demonstrations last year after George Floyd’s murder.

Clifton McHale, who is a supervisor, received a suspension of 10 days, but was allowed back on the job after only serving eight, WBUR reports, with the condition that he “stays out of trouble” for six months. 

5. Discrimination, retirements lead to fewer Black officers

Across the country, the trend is the same: Police departments have fewer Black police officers. The number in New York City has dropped by 14%. It’s down 19% in Philadelphia, down 12% in Chicago and down 24% in Los Angeles. 

A new report in The Atlantic blames a wave of retirements of Black officers hired decades ago in a diversity push as well as lagging recruitment of younger Black candidates. It also cites a high attrition rate among Black recruits who come to the conclusion that they’re being hired in a tokenism move to provide PR cover while departments show no intention of addressing deep-seated issues with racist policing.
An investigation by the Seattle Times points to another obstacle to police force diversity: a hiring process and exam system that disproportionately rejects candidates of color.

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The post Five new signs of a crisis in police accountability appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.