Obama Administration Makes Push To Limit Police In Schools

Secretary of Education John King isn’t a fan of police officers in schools because they promote the “pipeline to prison.”

Obama Administration Makes Push To Limit Police In Schools

Both the Department of Education and Department of Justice sent letters to states and schools on Thursday, pushing to limit the role of police in schools.

School resource officers are fully-commissioned police officers who are assigned to work in schools. It’s believed that there are currently over 16,000 school resource officers in the U.S. The officers who work in these specialty positions are responsible for protecting the students of the school from violence, enforcing laws, and assisting in mentoring and educating the children. The role that these officers play in community policing cannot be overstated. Despite promoting the Obama administration’s goal of community policing, the administration thinks that they contribute to the “school to prison pipeline” by enforcing laws against students.

The White House would like school administrators to be responsible for disciplining children involved in criminal acts, rather than getting the police involved.

Secretary of Education John King said, “We must ensure that school discipline is being handled by trained educators, not by law enforcement officers. Some schools are simply turning misbehaving students over to SROs. This can set students on a path to dropping out or even to prison.”

The administration also sent letters to colleges and universities to implement their recommendations, as if their police departments weren’t already hamstrung enough.

“We need local communities to step up,” said King. “We need them to ensure that SROs are playing constructive roles in school buildings and not contributing to the school to prison pipeline.”

Ronald Davis, the director of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services at the Justice Department said,“If you take the SROs out of the school, you’re not taking the police out of the school because they still have to respond to the calls. And he or she is going to be more likely to enforce the law in a very generic and siloed way. You don’t want a police officer showing up and putting handcuffs on a kid because it’s battery, or at least it sounds that way.”

That’s right, the Director of Community Oriented Policing Services appears to be saying that eliminating law enforcement’s most prominent community policing resource isn’t a bad idea, because officers will still be able to respond to calls from working patrol.

Of course, we can’t have our police officers handcuffing the violent students and drug dealers in high schools. We wouldn’t want any precious snowflake’s wrists to get bruised.