Myth 1: Schools are more violent places now than ever. They require more security than ever

The National Center for Education Statistics collects biannual national data on school violence. They have found that the total victimization rate of students aged 12-18 at school decreased from 181 victimizations per 1000 students in 1992 to 33 victimizations per 1000 students in 2018. There is a similar massive decline in students reporting the availability of illegal drugs. This mirrors the national drop in crime since the early 1990s. Schools are safer than ever.

Myth 2: Police in schools prevent crime

The drop in school crime recorded in the surveys above is a nationwide trend. Experimental data gives a more worrying picture: School police may create crimes where before educators may have just labeled student conflict as age-appropriate behavior. In new research in the Journal of Criminology and Public Policy, Gottfredson et al studied 33 California schools that increased their SRO staffing levels and compared them with 72 demographically similar schools that did not.  Increased SRO staffing resulted in significant increases in student arrests and expulsions, an effect that could not just be due to new eyes noticing old problems because it persisted for 20 months. Finally, in the most recent iteration of the NCES survey reported above, principals said that the top impediments to preventing crime in school were inadequate funds, alternative placements or programs for disruptive students, and restrictive policies for disciplining special education students. Security did not make the list. School police do not prevent school crime, they turn disciplinary issues into policing issues and increase rates of exclusionary disciplinary within schools.

Myth 3: SROs prevent school shootings

The major reason offered by security staff locally and nationally for school police is that they prevent school shootings. School shootings terrify us all. They must end. Unfortunately, there is no evidence at all in the literature that school police prevent school shootings specifically, or increase student perceptions of safety generally. In fact, new research in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows that not only do SROs not prevent shootings but that the rate of death from school shootings is three times greater in schools with armed police compared to schools without; the mechanism is unclear, but because most school shooters are suicidal, it may be that the police presence is either evidence of a lack of mental health resources or an incentive for potential shooters to pursue suicide by cop. History bears this out.  Columbine is the touchstone for these discussions but school police were present there and could not stop the harm. School police notoriously ran from the school during the Parkland shooting. And federal law is quite clear that police do not have a constitutional duty to protect people who are not in their custody.

Locally, school security frequently trumpet the case of Great Mills, MD as a success story: The SRO shot Austin Rollins after he had killed Jaelyn Wiley and another student. But later analysis revealed that the Rollins was already shooting himself in the head when the SRO’s bullet struck his hand. He had accomplished his goal. The police stopped nothing. Rollins had been seen throughout school pushing and threatening Wiley, his ex-girlfriend, for weeks prior. If the school had noticed these signs and acted on the complaints Wiley made to her coach, this may have been prevented; but instead, like most schools, they use a one-size fits all discipline model without any counseling interventions that would stop the abuse. Wiley’s parents are suing the school.

School security’s repeated failures are not personal ones: These men and women are not cowards or idiots. They simply do not have the tools for the job. We cannot train school police to be both Robocop, capable of stopping a military-style threat that unfolds in seconds, and Officer Friendly, mentor and friend to kids. That person does not exist.

Now to turn to local data specifically.

Myth 4: School police and school security focus on dangerous threats to students and teachers

61% of school arrests in PGCPS in 2018-19 were for fighting without weapons, assaults on other students without weapons, or disruptions. School arrests are primarily focused on conflicts between unarmed students. These arrests disproportionately penalize Black students, who make up 55% of the student body but 87% of total arrests and 92% of arrests for fighting specifically. Arrest data indicate school police and security see unarmed Black students as the primary threat they must confront. This aligns with research across the country, which shows that police in majority-white schools see threats as coming from outside the school, but that police in majority-Black schools see students themselves as the primary threat.

Myth 5: Better training will address any issues with school police and security

It is tempting to believe that a different kind of police or security officer with different kinds of training will bear different results. But these trainings and reforms have been ongoing as long as we’ve had school police, and school police and security regularly violate the regulations they are already supposed to follow. For example, despite a guarantee in the Memoranda of Understanding that SROs are to leave student discipline to principals and staff, and a guarantee in the PGCPS Student Rights and Responsibilities Handbook that school disruptions are not arrestable offenses, 16 students were arrested for disruption in 2018-19 anyway. Because SROs come from PGPD, we should also be concerned by Michael Graham’s expert report on PGPD, which led to Chief Stawinski’s retirement, that shows white officers walking out of required implicit bias trainings. More training cannot resolve the problem of police and security who want to arrest their way out of disciplinary issues, who refuse training, or who break the rules they are trained to follow.

Myth 6: PGCPS plans full and immediate removal of security officers and SROs

There are competing recommendations for school safety from the County Task Force, the County Executive, the PGCPS CEO, and the School Board. The latter two are most relevant to school policy. None of the four recommend removing all security officers and all SROs immediately. CEO recommendations build from the Task Force but promise only “a reduction in security personnel with arrest powers” in FY22 and no change in SRO staffing.

Board Member Raheela Ahmed’s Protect Our Students Resolution also builds from the Task Force and asks to end MOUs with PGPD and local police departments not immediately but by “creating a plan for the removal of SROs from schools by the start of the 2021-22 school year in consultation with community stakeholders.” Nor does Ahmed’s plan immediately kick all security guards out of PGCPS with no plan for their replacement. Rather, it prohibits arrest of students in school (but allows arrest of non-student parties), proposes discontinuing vacant positions, and asks PGCPS that “By July 1, 2021, work with labor partners and advocates to restructure the role of safety and security services personnel to be mentors/peacekeepers/school climate specialists; revise job descriptions, job titles, hiring procedures to include student/teacher/community presence; implement training; increase collaboration with special education and mental health staff; and integrate into SST/SIT.”

All things considered, Ahmed’s plan should result in a net gain of good union jobs in PGCPS by reducing but not eliminating the security guard role and expanding the presence of mentors, peacekeepers, and school climate specialists. Similar plans have been implemented across the country to great success. We should trust our policymakers and educators to hammer out proposals that keep our kids safe, on the timelines they’ve proposed.

Myth 7: Maryland's Safe to Learn Act (2018) requires police in schools

The Safe to Learn Act is a massive state bill passed in 2018 requiring certain safety measures of local schools and providing some resources to pursue them. The bill does not require that SROs be placed in every school, only that schools develop safety plans and provide evidence of adequate law enforcement coverage in the event of an emergency. Most schools in Prince George’s, like most schools in the state, develop these plans and provide this evidence without ever deploying SROs in their hallways. For example, all elementary schools in the county and most middle schools lack police presence but are approved to operate under Safe to Learn.

Myth 8: PGCPS Stakeholders overwhelmingly approve of current school policing and security policy

For the September 17, 2020 debate on SROs 105 parties submitted testimony to the Board. Testimony was in favor of the removal of SROs by a 2-1 margin. It included extensive research, and the voices of important community stakeholders: Parents, students, PGCEA, the NAACP, and the Office of the Public Defender. Then-Chair Alvin Thornton noted it was the most testimony they had ever received on any issue.

Since then, the PGCPS CEO and others in favor of school policing have trumpeted a “survey” administered to stakeholders that purports to identify strong support. I will be honest: If one of my graduate students to submit this in a research methods class, they would fail. Were I to submit this to an institutional review board or the NSF for approval, my project would be rejected. There were five main issues with this survey:

1. The survey contained no context on underlying disciplinary or justice issues which are prompting a reconsideration of school police locally and nationally. Because no problem is presented to solve, participants will be under the impression that anyone seeking to remove SROs is seeking to disrupt a state of affairs that is mutually agreeable to all involved. This is false. The NAACP has said that this systemic over-policing of Black and disabled students in PGCPS violates federal civil rights law. A valid survey would present this information in a vignette and ask participants to choose from a series of different responses.
2. The survey contained leading questions that bias responses. Participants could only agree or disagree with positive assessments of SROs, and could not themselves choose from a neutral range of options on a Likert scale. Even SurveyMonkey, the consumer software used to administer the survey, advises against ‘double-barreled’ questions which link the item to two values at once (e.g., “SAFE and POSITIVE”) because participants are then unable to de-link the two items in their minds. A valid survey would ask participants to rate the item on multiple scales (e.g., from ’safe’ to ‘unsafe’ and ‘positive to negative’. 
3.  The survey was administered to vulnerable subjects who may feel pressured to respond in a certain way. Teachers were surveyed by their employer, during a pandemic, with record unemployment. They may not have felt comfortable disagreeing with present policy. A valid survey would use third party administration and would de-link participants from employee credentials. 
4. The survey was not designed to represent the PGCPS population. It was not provided in Spanish, excluding a wide swathe of stakeholders. It was not geographically bounded, meaning anyone, anywhere could take it. In presenting results, no effort was made to ascertain whether or not participants were representative of PGCPS students, teachers, and parents.
5. Finally the survey presented no alternatives for school safety besides school police. This is in direct contradiction of the County Task Force, and best practices proposed by the NEA, WestEd, the NAACP, etc. This is like giving someone a menu featuring only hamburgers and asking whether they’d prefer hamburgers or nothing for dinner.

In short, the survey was not designed to accurately gather representative opinion data, but to solicit opinions that would support the CEO’s actions—no matter where they came from.

I hope that our deconstruction of these myths will advance reasonable debate. The facts are clear and the need is urgent: Our kids need police-free schools, full of the resources that will help them flourish. To see what this looks like, check out our Resources page and our Budget For Care.