Cops on Campus: Patterns of Police Presence in American Schools

• In Event: 2465 - Exploring the Carceral Continuum

Abstract

Despite a national discussion of race and policing, little academic research has examined the proliferation of police within the public education system. This paper utilizes multilevel modeling to examine how the presence of law enforcement in U.S. public schools is related to their demographic composition using the 2013-2014 Civil Rights Data Collection. Racial threat theory predicts that schools serving higher proportions of non-white students will have greater levels of social control and thus increased police presence. Findings suggest that the racial composition of a school district is significantly related to the probability that district uses police, above and beyond socio-economic and crime-related factors. In general, districts with more racial minority students are more likely to use police. However, this relationship varies by the level of within-district segregation; the between-district association between racial composition and police presence is weaker in the most racially segregated districts. Together, these results offer support for the racial threat hypothesis in explaining where police are used in schools, but suggest that this threat may operate differently for black and Hispanic students. Lastly, the results highlight a large amount of unexplained variation in the propensity for schools to use police in different states, which further work should examine.

Author

• Rebecca Gleit, Stanford University