The Extension of School Policing in an Era of Black Lives Matter, School Shootings, and Rising Inequality

• In Event: How Policy Failures Fuel the School-to-Prison Pipeline

Abstract

School Resource Officer (SRO) programs that place police officers in public schools serve a well-documented role in the web of interwoven punitive threads that shape marginalized students’ lives and connect schools and prisons, also known as the “school to jail nexus” (Meiners 2007; Meiners and Winn 2010). Despite evidence and greater awareness that school police officers harm low-income students of color and their well-documented role in the school to jail nexus (James and McCallion 2013; Javdani 2019; Nance 2016), public schools continue to adopt and invest in policing. This study examines how and why a U.S. city known nationally for its political progressivism continuously reaffirmed its decision to maintain and expand the School Resource Officers (SRO) program in its high schools.

We use a racial capitalism framework which situates racism and capitalism as deeply interdependent systems of organizing bodies where racism plays an important role in sustaining liberal-capitalist systems (Robinson 2000; Spence 2012). We draw on theories of racial formation and racial projects to help explain the shifting and contested discourses and forms that racial capitalism has taken over time.

Data are drawn from a qualitative case study of policymaking and community advocacy in one midwestern city. Findings are based on three years (2015-2018) of ethnographic data, including: field notes of school board, SRO committee, and community meetings; 33 semi-structured interviews with advocates (e.g., youth activists of color, a conservative commentator), members of an SRO committee, and school board members; and documents (e.g., reports, news coverage). We examined the discourses invoked in the SRO debate, their underlying ideological implications, and the contexts shaping these positions through analytic memoing, systematically coded data, and data displays.

We show how a constellation of discourses, policies, groups and practices related to racial capitalism intersect to expand the school to jail nexus in this city, including: racialized poverty and trauma, declining and inadequate education funding, and policy responses to school shootings.

Two primary discourses emerged to make sense of how minoritized students’ experiences of trauma, “disruptive” student behavior, racially disproportionate school discipline data, and SROs should be understood: (a) a race radical discourse, which argued that SROs enacted harm and racism against low-income students of color, especially Black students, and should be removed from schools that was largely disregarded by committee members charged with making recommendations about the SRO program and (b) a neoliberal therapeutic discourse, which argued that individual SROs benefitted low-income students of color by providing care and challenging school racism to justify the extension of the SRO program in the district that dominated the committee’s decision-making process. We argue that through the latter discourse SROs became seen as an easy fix to racial capitalism in the school district and city.

In examining the politics of SROs in one school district, our study contributes to a better understanding of the local negotiation and extension of the school to jail nexus, and the role of a neoliberal therapeutic discourse therein, particularly in more progressive places. It points to ways forward and related political challenges.

Authors

• Erica Owyang Turner, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Abigail J Beneke, University of Wisconsin - Madison