Police in schools have outsize effect on Black children, report says

By Maya Brown, NBC News

The presence of police in schools actively jeopardizes the safety of Black students compared to their counterparts of other races, according to a report published this month. 

Black students were subjected to more than 80% of the incidents of police violence accounted for in the survey, which analyzed more than 285 incidents over a decade. At least 60% of police assaults on students resulted in serious injury to the students, including broken bones, concussions and hospitalizations. The report also cited 24 cases of sexual assault on students and five student deaths as a result of police force in schools. It was published by the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization, and the Alliance for Educational Justice, a coalition of groups working toward equity in public schools.

“It’s not just the fact that school policing is ineffective and a major waste of public funds. It is also harmful to the physical and emotional safety and health of students of color throughout the United States,” said Tyler Whittenberg, the deputy director at the Advancement Project. 

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The report is named “#AssaultAtSpringValley, after a 16-year-old Black girl attending Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina, was placed in a headlock and flipped over in her desk, then dragged and thrown across her classroom by a school police officer in 2015. It was in response to allegations that she was being disruptive and refusing to give up her phone and leave the classroom.

The school district fired the officer; two years later, a Justice Department investigation determined there was insufficient evidence to pursue federal charges.

Read about the other consequences of police in schools.

These attitudes lead to girls being punished for science experiments gone wrong, but at least one school district successfully replaced police with mental health services.

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