Violence-plagued schools hit reverse on post-George Floyd decisions to kick police off campuses

Political leaders who raced to kick police officers out of schools after the death of George Floyd three years ago are quietly bringing them back because of growing concerns about brawls, drugs and weapons on campuses.

Nearly three dozen school districts in the U.S. removed police officers from schools within a year after Floyd’s death in May 2020. Some of the nation’s largest school systems, including the Los Angeles Unified School District and Chicago Public Schools, slashed funding for police programs by as much as half.

Motivating many of the decisions was a perceived racial bias in campus police enforcement.

The American Civil Liberties Union cited 2017 data showing that non-White students had disproportionate interactions with in-school police and were more likely than their White counterparts to face legal troubles on school grounds. The activism unleashed after Floyd’s death prompted school systems in Oakland, California, Columbus, Ohio, and elsewhere to remove school resource officers, the formal name for the campus cops.

“The country was reeling from the George Floyd killing,” Jacque Patterson, an at-large member of the District of Columbia State Board of Education, told The Washington Times. “There’s a trigger there for many people who live in communities that are underserved or marginalized, and so that trickled into the schools itself.”

The void of campus police has been filled by disorder and violence. Without law enforcement, many districts have found wild fights, rampant drug use and an alarming number of guns and knives on school grounds.

School districts across the country that slashed campus police budgets have restored those funds for the upcoming school year.

“We were seeing a spike in the number of weapons coming into school, and we needed to take a proactive approach to addressing that,” Scott Baldermann, a member of the Denver Public Schools Board of Education, told The Times.

The impetus for Denver’s policy change was a March shooting at East High School.

Police said 17-year-old student Austin Lyle shot two administrators while being patted down for weapons. According to local reports, the teen agreed to the search because of past behavioral issues but fled the area and later killed himself.

Mr. Baldermann, who was part of the board’s unanimous vote to remove police from schools in 2020, led the charge in June to bring back a hybrid fashion of law enforcement.

The Denver school board has allowed the system’s superintendent to determine whether a police officer needs to be stationed at a given school. Under the board’s updated structure, elected officials craft policy limits but don’t micromanage day-to-day operations.

Denver’s reversal is similar to the about-face in the District of Columbia and neighboring school districts.

Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland voted to remove police from schools beginning in the 2021 school year. After a student shot a 15-year-old at Magruder High School in January 2022, the school board didn’t waste time revising the district’s relationship with police.

The Montgomery County school system’s new Community Engagement Officer program operates much like Denver’s. Police are dispatched from a central location as needed.

Alexandria City Public Schools in the Virginia suburbs made it only a few months into its officerless academic year before school administrators pleaded for police to return.

The school board and city council voted to remove cops from schools before the 2021-2022 academic year. Several incidents during the first two months of class, including the arrests of two students accused of bringing a knife and a gun to campus, influenced a reinstatement of resource officers.

Public schools in the District of Columbia are gradually winding down police presence. All resource officers are scheduled to be phased out of D.C. schools by 2025, regardless of a report from the D.C. Council Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety. The report said officers recovered 77 knives, 15 tasers and five guns at schools during the 2021-2022 school year.

Mayor Muriel Bowser has pushed for a restoration of funding for the school resource officer program in the past two budget cycles. Some school leaders say the D.C. Council’s refusal stems from ideological rather than practical reasons.

“It’s all about politics. I’m not going to lie to you,” Mr. Patterson told The Times. “I think a lot of times we try to act like politics don’t play a part in the decision-making of actual politicians.”

Mr. Patterson said council members are trying to navigate constituent groups adamantly opposed to police in schools. The State Board of Education member, who also serves as an executive for the KIPP DC college preparatory public schools, said local lawmakers are “making sure that we appear responsive to the entities that don’t want our SROs and not just arbitrarily reverse course.”

Still, he said, families living in areas most affected by the city’s crime issues were far more supportive of keeping cops in schools than those who live in safer areas.

Nationwide, parents are broadly in favor of school police programs, according to one trade association.

“Some of the feedback we were seeing on community surveys were parents, in large numbers, were saying they want the SROs,” Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, told The Times. “But some of the school boards, apparently, were so caught up in the activism, maybe they ignored that.”

Mr. Baldermann, the Denver school board member, said the community response to bringing police back to campus was “overwhelmingly supportive.”

He said police made fewer arrests and issued fewer tickets during the final two months of the past school year than in the 2019-2020 school year. Officers returned to campus after the East High School shooting.

Mr. Baldermann said the numbers of arrests and tickets before Floyd’s death were higher partly because school administrators asked school resource officers to handle incidents that others should have addressed.

Madison Metropolitan School District in Wisconsin removed school resource officers from their hallways in June 2020.

The state’s second-largest school system wanted to focus more on restorative justice by having practitioners build relationships with troublesome students and get to the root of their behavioral issues instead of trying to discipline them.

Eugenia Highland Granados, who works for the YWCA Madison, a nonprofit with restorative justice workers in three Madison middle schools, said keeping cops in schools creates a culture that “perpetuates punishment and fear and racism … all these systems of oppression.”

“There’s tons of research that shows how having a police officer in school disproportionately impacts students of color and the criminalization, arrests and violence toward the students of color,” Ms. Highland told The Times. “It’s key in the school-to-prison pipeline.”

A January survey on safety in Madison public schools found that some students, parents and teachers were concerned about fighting and drug use. Some respondents said students brought weapons onto campus with little or no consequences.

Ms. Highland said it’s hard to determine whether these sentiments are linked to shortcomings of restorative justice practices. To her, the hiring of only one justice worker per school isn’t enough to produce the change needed for a positive culture.