Policing in British and American Schools: Tracing the Educational Legacies of Empire

• In Event: Recovering the Third World Studies Project: Towards New Visions of Anti-Imperial Pedagogies & Global Solidarities

Abstract

Contemporary analyses of policing—its techniques, technologies, and trained agents—too often ignore its imperial origins in schools. Across the Third World, public schools functioned as central sites for enacting and even perfecting policing practices used in public life. In this vein, this paper asserts that policing in schools in Britain, the United States and around the world represents the longstanding educational legacies of empire—a perspective long unexplored and undertheorized in global, transnational and decolonial studies of education policy and practice (Go, 2020).

Although policing in schools has become an increasingly pressing educational and political challenge in the United States, Britain, the Caribbean, East Africa, and other parts of the world over the past three decades, we know surprisingly little from comparative and international perspectives about how policing in schools, as a political expression of empire, influences the day-to-day educational experiences of Black youth who are disproportionately affected by policing in public schools and public life (Henshall 2018; Joseph-Salisbury 2021; Kupchik 2016; Rios, 2011; Morris, 2015). Informed by a two-and-a-half-year-long comparative ethnography, this study fills the aforementioned empirical gap by exploring how Black youth in London and New York City experience school-based policing, the strategies of which emerged as techniques of imperial surveillance and governance in the Third World. In so doing, this paper traces the colonial ‘boomerang effect’ and imperial entanglements of policing from the colonial Third World to the metropole—from the Caribbean and West Africa to Britain and the United States, specifically London and New York, global cities with rising numbers of African and Caribbean immigrants and their progeny.

Drawing on archival analysis of over 100 primary source documents, 209 one-on-one and focus group interviews with Black African, Black Caribbean, and African American youth, teachers, school leaders and school resource officers, along with two-and-a-half years of ethnographic observations in two progressive public schools, this paper advances two key objectives. First, it assesses the discursive development of narratives on policing in British and American schools from 1960-2020, and their colonial roots in the Third World. Second, it explores Black youth’s sense-making of routine in-school policing commonly proposed as a solution to school insecurity and students’ safety concerns. Taken together, this paper underscores policing in and around schools as a political phenomenon of state control with oft-overlooked imperial origins, deep-seated colonial roots and ongoing political-economic developments that are relevant not only to Britain and the United States, but also to the Third World. Critically, this paper points out that Third World solidarities, as a political praxis of the Third World Studies Project within and across nation states, are necessary for advancing abolition in schools and societies around the world.

Author

• Derron Wallace, Brandeis University