June 6, 2017
Joint Committee on Education
Sen. Sonia Chang-Diaz, Senate Chair
Rep. Alison Hanlon Peisch, House Chair
Sen. Patricia D. Jehlen & Rep. Chris Walsh, Vice Chairs
My name is Taylor Campbell, and I live in Quincy, MA. I ask you to OPPOSE H. 227, ‘An Act creating a school resource officer grant program and fund’.
H. 227 establishes a fund to pay police officers to do law enforcement at our public schools, to ‘help ensure safety, to prevent truancy and violence in schools, and to enforce school board rules and codes of student conduct’. I ask you to oppose this, and other bills to put police in schools, because it is counterproductive for its specific goals, and harmful to society at large.
I grew up in an affluent suburb, at schools where the only police presence I recall was DARE officers telling us not to use drugs. (That didn't stop anyone from using them anyway — but that's a separate issue.) Police presence in schools occurs mainly in poor and minority neighbourhoods, and is presumably a response to a perceived greater incidence of crime.
Whether there actually is a greater incidence of crime is hard to say. If you measure ‘crime’ by arrests or convictions, you won't count any where the police are not involved. If you use prior crime measurements to decide where to police, you create a self-perpetuating feedback loop that is hard to break — especially if it is in poor minority neighbourhoods where people may be by necessity concerned more with their next paycheque than with civic policy analysis[1].
Yesterday at a hearing of the Judiciary Committee, dozens of members of the public, young and old, testified about their horrific experiences of being funneled as children through the school-to-prison pipeline, and about the difficulty they still have years or decades later in finding housing and employment because of the permanent effect criminalization as a teen has on their lives. One person was forever marred by a felony conviction of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon — for kicking another student while wearing a shoe.
Schools are where our children are socialized, where they make mistakes, and where they learn from mistakes. Putting police into schools doesn't help children to learn from mistakes — it manifests a system of authoritarian surveillance and coercion. It would be a travesty if the only schools where students were permitted to make mistakes were affluent schools like mine.
It is well-established in medicine — in psychiatry, in child development, etc. — that children subject to abuse and neglect are more likely to have developmental problems, exhibit PTSD, develop mental illnesses, abuse substances, and so on[2], and that the damage persists across multiple generations. Putting police in schools only addresses the symptoms, not the root causes, of this — and it exacerbates the problem by imposing on families the prohibitive costs of the criminal justice system, which disproportionately hurt the poor. We need to address, not exacerbate, these root causes by supporting, not wrecking, families and social circles.
If you want to fund grants for a specific purpose to reduce truancy in schools, consider funding showers and laundry machines like several other counties around the country have done[3][4][5][6]. One of the basic stigmas of poverty is lack of hygiene, which discourages participation and socialization at school, and the evidence suggests that easy steps to address it go a long way. That is one of many possible opportunities for positive social programs. Don't use state funds to criminialize children for their families' socioeconomic status — use state funds to help them instead.