Opinion

How to really create safe California schools

Image by Simone Hogan

OPINION – Legislation introduced this session in the California Assembly (AB 3038) would require all K-12 schools to have an armed police officer stationed on campus. Instead of being a meaningful step toward school safety, this is the latest example of a simplistic, inadequate, and politically expedient solution being offered based on the powerful myth that “good guys with guns” prevent acts of extreme violence.

Lawmakers behind this bill rightly point out that more needs to be done to address the 96 school shootings that have occurred in California between 2018 and 2023. Researchers have studied the impact of armed officers on school shootings nationwide and repeatedly shown that the presence of officers does not necessarily prevent or interrupt an active shooter—a fact made all too clear in Uvalde, Highland Park, and even Columbine.

School shootings are unfortunately not the only incidents of violence on campus. Tragically, in 2021, a Long Beach school safety officer shot and killed 18-year-old Manuela Rodriguez in a parking lot near Millikan High School. Instead of relying on professionals who are trained to address crime and obtain compliance to solve incidents of misbehavior and prevent serious violence, California should look to examples of creating meaningful school safety in its own backyard and across the country. Just last month, the Chicago Board of Education voted to remove police officers from schools, following the footsteps of Oakland and many other jurisdictions looking seriously at what creates safety on campus.

What does work to prevent extreme violence in schools? A recent in-depth study of averted potential mass shootings at schools concluded rather than law enforcement-based solutions, what made a difference was students reporting problematic behavior—and feeling like they are able to do so. A welcoming, supportive, and inclusive school climate has been shown to help not only detect problematic behavior, but prevent violence from ever occurring. Students who are disproportionately affected by police violence in and outside of schools are less likely to have the positive school climate that fosters their safety: a survey of California students found that 19% of Black students reported low school connectedness, compared to 8% of White students.

Early evidence from places that ended school-based policing programs is promising.

Because police rarely need to respond to serious incidents of violence, they instead routinely get involved in routine student conduct issues that should be addressed by school administrators, teachers, counselors, mental health professionals, or other staff that are inadequately funded. A 2019 report showed that 96% of California’s students were in schools where counselor caseloads did not meet professional recommendations, and the state has the third highest counselor caseload in the country.

School police often fill the gap created by the failure to build systems of care. Another recent report reveals  that California schools with an assigned law enforcement officer had higher rates of arrest and referrals to law enforcement. In Sacramento City USD, 75% of arrests were of Black students, even though just 16% of students enrolled are Black. Disproportionate discipline and arrests on campus is driven by police presence: just 14% of Sacramento School Police District service calls were for anything that could be considered as warranting a police response; the rest were for “non-criminal conduct” and “other service calls.”

Early evidence from places that ended school-based policing programs is promising. After years of advocacy—including data analysis showing that 72% of requests from schools that the Oakland police responded to were for “non-criminal conduct” or “other services” —the Oakland school board passed a unanimous resolution in 2020 to eliminate the Oakland School Police Department. The district instead established a culture and climate department to retrain unsworn school security officers in restorative justice practices, and created systems to respond to student mental health crises with social workers or psychologists. From August 2021 through April 2022 OUSD schools made 93% fewer calls to the police than in the same time frame in 2019–2020.

Children in California—especially Black and Latine children—deserve leaders who build on this progress with more investments in solutions that work.

Scarlet Neath is the Policy Director at the Center for Policing Equity and a primary author of a groundbreaking CPE report on redesign public safety in K-12 schools.

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