Generative Safety: Youth Resistance to Police-Centered Safety Perpetuated by the Chicago Board of Education

• In Event: Conviviality, Coloniality, and the Making of the Other

Abstract

Purpose
During the summer of 2020, Chicago Public School (CPS) students led rallies and teach-ins, to demand police-free schools. In response to students, two Chicago Board of Education (BOE) members introduced a resolution to end the School Resource Officer (SRO) program, which stations armed police officers in CPS. Despite pressure, the resolution failed in a 4-3 vote in June 2020 and again in August 2020, when the BOE voted to approve a $12 million contract with the CPD and delegated the decision to retain or remove SROs to individual schools. This paper uses a Cultural Political Economy (CPE) framework (Jessop & Sum, 2013) and an abolitionist lens to examine how the BOE reinforced an understanding of safety that relies on police. Simultaneously, we consider how young people collectively enact “generative safety” which rejects police-centered safety and instead embraces the needs, voices, and experiences of students.
Conceptual Framework
CPE provides a framework for understanding structural and discursive mechanisms that select, reinforce, and reproduce dominant orders (Jessop & Sum, 2013), while an abolitionist lens clarifies the connection between the prison industrial complex and dominant safety narratives. We use CPE to analyze conviviality as a discursive mechanism leveraged by the BOE to obscure structural state violence young people face and to undermine their demands for police free schools. Following CPS youth organizers and Rodríguez (2019), we adopt an understanding of abolition as a political vision that is a rejection of institutional violence and a “radically imaginative, generative, and socially productive communal (and community-building) practice” (p. 1576). Honoring the labor and vision of Black and Latine youth organizers, we center abolition in our work “not as a utopian dream but a necessity” (Meiners, 2011, p. 550).
Methods and Data
We use summative content analysis (Ravitch & Carl, 2015; Hsieh & Shannon, 2005) to analyze discourses emerging in video recordings from the June 24 and August 26, 2020 BOE meetings where the resolution for police free schools was debated and Twitter images, videos, and text shared by youth-led coalitions between June 01, 2020 and September 01, 2020. The two authors completed iterative waves of inductive and deductive coding and identified four major themes.
Findings and Significance
The first two themes, police-centered safety and generative safety, emerged from the distinct conceptualizations of safety that appeared across BOE meetings and youth actions. The last two, reinforcement and resistance, described institutional rules and student strategies used to enable and constrain participation. The BOE’s convivial attempt to align their carceral understanding of “safety” with those of students, despite being fundamentally incompatible, has broad implications for understanding who and what our education systems are built for. Student organizing for the termination of the SRO program is not only a call for police-free schools, but an urgent call to build. Safety for students equates to meaningful presence of non-carceral resources, community, and support.

Authors

• Vanessa Dominguez
  Presenting Author

• Caitlin Donnelley-Power, Loyola University Chicago
  Non-Presenting Author