Taking School Safety Too Far?

The Ill-Defined Role Police Play in Schools

By Johanna Wald and Lisa Thurau

This past November, a food fight in a Chicago middle school resulted in the arrest of 25 students between the ages of 11 and 15. Parents, youth advocates, and others rightly questioned the decision to criminalize teenage antics that, let’s face it, seemed relatively mild. Plenty of us, after all, can recall hurling food at friends in the school cafeteria at a similar age.

As we write this essay, the final resolution of the Chicago incident is not yet known. But regardless of what that may be, the 25 students involved are likely to carry with them for a very long time the trauma of being handcuffed, taken away in a police van, and forced to sit in a jail cell for several hours.

Our research suggests that, while this incident may be noteworthy because of the large number of students involved, it is by no means an isolated event. Rather, it reveals broader and more systemic problems about policing in schools that should be of concern to parents, communities, school boards, and state legislatures across the country. It highlights the ambiguous and frequently ill-defined role that police play in schools, the unclear lines of authority that often exist between school officials and police placed there, and the highly subjective way in which decisions are made about when and under what circumstances a student’s conduct becomes criminal. All of these issues have taken on greater urgency since school police, currently numbering about 17,000, have permanently moved into public schools...