Making the case for keeping cops out of Chicago’s schools

Now’s the time for Chicago to get bold and remove police officers from the public schools.

Now’s the time to listen to the tens of thousands of demonstrators, many of them students, who have flooded our city’s streets and parks in the wake of the police killing in Minneapolis of George Floyd.

Among their most sharply focused demands is that police officers no longer be assigned to schools, a position this editorial board has argued before, only to get nowhere with it.

Schools are for education. No child walking through the door should get the unsettling feeling that they’re under the distrustful eye of law enforcement, no matter how friendly Officer Friendly may be.

Studies have concluded that when police officers are stationed in schools, the normal problems of kids misbehaving, which might otherwise result in a counselor or social worker being called in, often get redefined as quasi-criminal matters that call for the cops. The impact of this — on a child’s self-image, future in school and future in life — has proven to have a disproportionate impact on students of color.

A 2018 University of California at Los Angeles study found that putting police into Texas schools led to a decline in graduation and college enrollment rates.

We’re reminded of what a former CPS teacher once told us: “If you go to a school with a metal detector, armed cop and no science lab, what message does that send to kids?”

In Minneapolis, where Floyd died on May 25 when a police officer knelt on his neck, the school board last week voted unanimously to terminate the district’s contract with police. In Portland, Oregon, last week, Mayor Ted Wheeler and Schools Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero made the same decision.

“What we are hearing loudly and clearly from the community is that they do not want this direct, physical, ongoing presence in the schools,” Wheeler told Oregon Public Broadcasting.

Here in Chicago, almost 24,000 people have signed an online petition asking to have police removed from schools, via the student-organized #PoliceFreeSchools campaign. It’s the latest in a long campaign waged by activists — and the Chicago Teachers Union — to no avail so far.

For years, critics have complained about overaggressive, unprofessional policing in Chicago’s schools — and about a complete lack of social workers, counselors and other adults who are properly trained to calm and work with unruly teenagers. For years, critics have said, the kind of disruptive behavior by a student that might lead to a call to a school psychologist on, say, the North Shore has led to handcuffs and arrests in Chicago.

Witness an ugly scene back in January 2019 at Marshall High School in Chicago, when a surveillance video showed that a 16-year-old girl had been tased and dragged down a flight of stairs by two adult cops.

Last week, Mayor Lori Lightfoot said “no” to removing police from schools. Her decision came a day after hundreds of students and supporters rallied in favor of using the $33 million that now pays for school police on more counselors, social workers and other staff.

The mayor and CPS say they are committed to a “dialogue” with school communities as to what the role of the police should be. We’d like to think that means there’s a chance for movement on the issue.

To be clear, we are not naive. Some of Chicago’s schools are in tough neighborhoods where violent crime is an everyday problem. And that, no doubt, played a role in why many local school councils opted last year to keep officers in their schools when given the chance to vote on the issue.

Councils should have the chance to vote again on the matter — some members have said last year’s vote was too rushed — and be given clear alternatives, such as additional security guards, if they opt against police being stationed inside their schools.

Principals, too, must retain the authority to call police to their schools in an emergency, such as when a student tries to bring a firearm to school grounds. Metal detectors, should schools opt to keep them, are also warranted in some communities.

Cops belong on the street, close by, but not in our schools.

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