Students Of Color Don’t Want Police Officers “Securing” Their Schools

After a school shooting, the debate around schools being secured by the police always takes off. Parents and kids are supposed to feel more secure with the cops making rounds in the school area or checking students’ backpacks. Truth is, students of color won’t feel safer with cops around. 

Schools all around the country are boosting security measures and increasing the presence of law enforcement to reassure students and parents after Uvalde’s Shooting. 

Turns out, in 20 years of police enforcement in schools, officers haven’t stopped a single mass shooting but have arrested almost one million students, mostly black and Latino and for nothing more than childhood misbehavior, according to Harvard Civil Rights. 

Malika Mobley, a senior at the Raleigh Campus in North Carolina and co-president of the Wake County Black Student coalition told 5NBC Dallas that they’ve been working since 2020 to eliminate police officers in school areas. 

 “If you really think about why police don’t make us safer, you can draw connections to all types of tragedies that impact the most marginalized among us.” A few years later Malika was on her way home when she bumped into two police officers that dragged a crying classmate into the patrol. 

According to Harvard Civil Rights  Black and Latino students are twice as likely not to graduate high school as white students, and they are most likely to be slapped with a criminal record that follows them for the rest of their lives. 

The Wake County Black Student Coalition has protested against these measures. They claim that when cops are placed in schools, they are pushing the kids into a legal system. Police brutality has been experienced inside the classrooms and across the hallways and according to this coalition, it’s not the solution to preventing school shootings.