School Police: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

we're actually going to start with our main story tonight which concerns what happened in uvalde texas 12 days ago when an 18 year old armed with two ar-15s killed 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school and look we all know what the key problem is here it's guns it's because we let basically whoever wants to buy a gun in this country have one which has led to tragic consequences the vast majority of mass shooters including the shooters at uvalde and parkland obtained the weapons they used through legal purchases so we know what the answer to this problem is too it's gun control it's meaningful effective gun laws but that hasn't stopped some from desperately pitching absolutely anything other than that as a solution the only solution is christ jesus and being able to get some type of spirituality and prayer back into our schools man traps a series of interlocking doors at the school entrance that are triggered by a tripwire i would like to see this a national push toward instead of parents buying their kids all these tools and toys and games invest in the classroom to make it safer i mean they have blankets that you can put up on the wall that are colorful and beautiful but they're ballistic blankets what are you talking about use a blanket is not a strategy for stopping deaths during a school shooting it's barely a strategy for a bird got in the house and while those ideas are clearly ridiculous hardening our schools often comes up as an alternative to gun control and at the nra convention that inexplicably still took place in texas just three days after the shooting there wayne lapierre picked the exact same solution that he did after sandy hook and after parkland we also need to fully fund our nation's police departments and school security resource officer programs exactly put police or school resource officers or sros as they're sometimes called into schools and i guess it's not that surprising that the solution from the ceo of the nra is more people with guns it'd be like hearing the garbage dump is overflowing so we need more piles of garbage from the head of the national raccoon association i mean what else do you really expect him to say but the idea of adding police to schools does seem to come up in the wake of every big school shooting and crucially it's then the thing that we always do in fact in the six years after the columbine massacre in 1999 the federal government awarded over 750 million dollars resulting in the hiring of over 6 500 sros and since then it has exploded to the point that the most recent data available shows 58 of american schools report having a sworn law enforcement officer on campus at least once a week and this has happened even as vital resources for students have been starved a recent report found 14 million students go to a school with police but without a counsellor nurse psychologist or social worker that is 14 million kids who are in closer proximity to a pair of handcuffs than they are to a medical or mental health professional and to hear some cops tell it there is upside to their presence that goes far beyond school safety that they're also there to build trust in police from an early age do you think every school should have a police officer at it unfortunately yes it's it's sad and if you think of it morbidly but if you think of it building relationships for our future why not it wouldn't hurt wouldn't hurt are you absolutely sure about that because little secret if we are showing you something on this show it could absolutely hurt there has never been a moment where we've shown you a clip where a cop goes wouldn't hurt and we've said you're right officer big man it wasn't anyway that's our show have a great weekend so so given that once again in the wake of yet another school shooting we've seen poised to throw more cops into our schools we thought tonight it'd be worth talking about school police whether they are the answer to this particular problem the answer to any problems or whether they're actually a pretty big problem themselves and let's start by acknowledging that this idea isn't just coming from the nra it's coming from parents too like this man who back in february showed up at a county council meeting alex turner tells us he is all in favor of the idea of adding sros for the simple fact that they've got a force multiplier in the school where they could stop some imminent threat to our children turner has two young children and his wife works at a school district in the county what scares me the most is is the thought of her having to use a backpack to defend herself from someone with a gun our children are are the most important thing to our future their future taxpayers their future citizens that are going to invest in our community okay obviously that guy calling children future taxpayers is a little bit weird although who among us has not walked into our sleeping child's room become overtaken by the serenity on their face and thought to ourselves wow what a miracle i wonder if she'll grow up to file with a w-2 or a 1099. parenthood truly is a joyous mystery but i do get what he's trying to say there the thought of someone coming into a school and hurting your child is incredibly scary i don't think that all people who believe that police officers make schools safer have bad intentions or are arguing in bad faith but i do believe that they are wrong because for the record the answer to the question do policing schools deter school shootings is basically no experts who've studied this have found that school shooters were not deterred due to the presence of metal detectors locked doors security cameras or school resource offices and if you think well okay but what about when a shooting's actually happening they could stop them then right don't be so sure famously both uvalde and parkland had school police officers and things still went the way that they did instances of school police stopping shootings are actually incredibly rare there was one example four years ago but when the washington post looked into it after that they could only find one other case in the preceding 19 years where a resource officer gunned down an active shooter it's actually much easier to find stories of shooting stopped by faculty and school counselors but rather than arguing anecdotes by anecdote it might be helpful to look at the larger data because on the whole an analysis of 179 shootings on school grounds which is a brutal thing to say out loud on its own found no evidence that the presence of school resource officers lessened the severity of school shootings if anything they can actually make it worse as this researcher explains so when we've looked at this um and looked at school shootings and attempted school shootings what's remarkable is that when you have armed officers on the scene you actually see more casualties often because that perpetrator is suicidal they're familiar with that school they know that officer is there and so they come in heavily armed right and if school cops can make shootings worse why then are we still pitching them as a solution if off discover that their mosquito repellent attracted mosquitoes they'd stop selling it or at the very least rebrand it as a cologne for lonely mosquito bachelors the point is the evidence for cops in schools deterring school shootings just is not there and the evidence for the damage they can do is significant so for the rest of this piece let's actually put shootings aside and consider the very real impact that school police can have on kids every day that they are there the national association of school resource officers essentially the trade group for these officers will argue that they serve many functions in schools way beyond security they even developed a triad concept of school policing that suggests an sro should simultaneously be a teacher informal counsellor and law enforcement officer and i will say there are undoubtedly schools where some kids see their police officers that way you've probably seen videos of them doing carpool karaoke in their squad car with kids or doing a fun dance at their half time show some have even joined kids in extracurricular activities it's not every day that you see the campus police officer taking on the role of cast member in the school musical she showed up at our first rehearsal our first dance rehearsal and i was like why is officer griffin here is someone in trouble but then everyone was like no she's joining the show she's gonna dance with us and i was shocked shocked because prior to her participation most of these students were intimidated by the officer tasked with keeping order on campus it's true a cop was in the school musical and just imagine how challenging that casting decision must have been for the theater teacher well susie has a fantastic vocal range hannah b really learned the choreography jillian's a senior so it does feel like it's her time to get a big role but officer griffin has a gun so you know i guess i'm just going to go with officer griffin but clearly tap dancing officer griffin here is not the norm in fact while school police in more well-resourced schools often do have an expanded role including education and mentoring in disadvantaged schools they're more likely to engage primarily in law enforcement activities and for all nazareth's talk of the triad model when they asked their members which prong they identify with the most over two-thirds selected law enforcement because of course they did they're cops most cops don't get into copying because they secretly want to be counsellors they do it because movies make it look exciting and they're tired of stopping at red lights that's why they do it and the problem is faculty and school administrators will sometimes use those cops to deal with basic disciplinary problems in the school as this teacher explains i see that teachers have neglected to figure out a way to handle a lot of problems on their own that they used to things that were up to the teacher before are now just a phone call away how many of your peers are just picking up the phone and calling the school resources i'd say the majority of teachers are doing that definitely 75 percent out of all of us if i just want to make a rough guess are doing that because they go in with a set lesson plan and when the kid doesn't want to do it what do i do i get him out of the classroom yeah but that's not good and i know teachers have an exhausting job and for some reason society has decided that their reward for that is insultingly low pay and occasional thank you apples and it's not the point here but why apples exactly why we decided to reward teachers the same way we reward mediocre horses because the good horses get sugar cubes now am i saying teachers should get sugar cubes instead of apples i'm not not saying that but the larger point is while i understand a frustrated overworked teacher wanting a troublemaking kid out of their classroom involving the police in that is a very dangerous impulse for many reasons one of them is policing schools can and do arrest students in fact in the most recent year recorded they did this to over 54 000 of them which is a huge number if you ask me what do you think happens 54 000 times inside schools i'd say i don't know the number of classroom pets that went missing because a student left the lid off the cage or the number of times a teacher lost total control of her class when any part of her private life was revealed oh my god she had a computer hooked up to the projector and an evite from someone named jim appeared who is jim are you in love will you have his babies and if you're thinking wow a kid must be doing something really bad to get arrested in school not really students have been charged with assault for things like throwing a paper airplane a baby carrot and skittles and drug possession for carrying a maple leaf and when a five-year-old with adhd had a tantrum they were charged with battery on a police officer when clearly the only thing they were guilty of was being a five-year-old and take what happened with kyra wilmot when she was a high school student she tried to replicate the experiment that she'd seen in class where you set off a chemical reaction in a plastic bottle to make the cap blow off and i'll let her and then her mother explain what happened next the principal and vice principal were like about 10 feet away and when it popped they came over and asked what was going on i told him it was a science project and they were just like okay at the end of third period they take me out and then walked me to the resource officer he was like this is considered a felony i might have to arrest you for this and then i was just handcuffed and put in the car a trained officer of the law arrested put my daughter in handcuffed put her in the back of a police car and took her to the juvenile assessment center and charged her with two felony charges that is so stupid for so many reasons one of which is that when you hear felony for a science experiment you're thinking meth if i gave you 500 guesses for what science experiment got someone charged with a felony your first 499 guesses would be meth and the next one would be are you 100 sure that it's not meh never in your wildest dreams would it be popping a bottle cap unless inside that bottle was some meth now i should say the charges against kira were later dropped but she still had to check the box on her college application asking have you been arrested and as crazy as this sounds she was technically lucky in that at least she had press coverage of her ridiculous arrest that she could direct the college to but that is obviously not the case for many many others the fact is kids with criminal records can have a much harder time getting jobs scholarships and a host of other benefits and opportunities and while it's true that you can apply to have your juvenile record sealed usually once you turn 18 there is no guarantee that that will happen so an arrest alone can still do significant damage as some of those involved in this system will admit i think we certainly see a lot of cases that we think seriously garnett says close to 70 percent of the time her probation officers decide the offense isn't actually serious enough to get referred to the district attorney for criminal charges but even in those cases much of the damage is already done the child can still be left with a criminal record well will still show an arrest on their on their um rap sheet yes absolutely they've been arrested i mean if they if the case comes to us they've been arrested whether they were putting handcuffs and brought to us or just given a slip of paper by the police they've been arrested and is that fair well i mean no i don't think it's fair wow that was a long pause and it's not a great sign that a chief probation officer is responding to the question is the justice system fair like they're stalling for time on jeopardy after accidentally buzzing in and i will say at least she is acknowledging that that the system has a significant problem what is absolutely maddening is watching this former director of student services for the county where she works trying to make excuses for it no student on our that's attending our campus is getting a criminal record because of something we've done we don't focus on arresting or sending kids away that's that's completely counter to what an educator should do but that is what's happening that is not happening in my school district but in a single school year 283 kids in your district were referred to police okay so what is happening kids are cited on our campuses sometimes yes and do you know that this can give them a criminal record i know what happens when i issue my own consequences i don't know what happens when police issue their consequences so you have no idea that these kids are getting criminal records i wouldn't know that one way or the other but don't you had discipline for the district and i take care of discipline for the district if consequences go beyond that into the into the legal realm that's not our purview that's not our business holy that is selective not your business oh no my good that is very much your business and i do understand the distinction that budget bill murray is trying to draw there there is school discipline which falls under his purview but if a kid breaks the law then it's a police thing but in practice once you let the police into your schools that line gets really blurry and you're going to start getting stupid arrests for things like science experiments or throwing baby carrots or in the district where that guy worked the indefensible arrest of this autistic student two years ago adrian was at a school bret hart middle in san jose when he used a small rock to etch the letters a-d-r-x on the sidewalk the abbreviation is how adrian often signed his name on school assignments the letters measured just six inches tall but the school believed they were big enough a reason to involve campus police adrian was arrested at 13. i thought maybe someone would look at it and say oh look a legend or look at a legend that this is so cool a legend was at this school okay for the record that kid was and remains a legend because to 13 year olds there is simply nothing cooler than initials written somewhere it doesn't matter where or with what all that matters is that initials are somewhere and that is cool on a desk yes please on a lamppost i love it way high up on a wall how did they get it up there we even put adrian's initials onto the set behind me to make it absolutely clear to everyone that a legend was very much here that story is completely bananas even before you learn that the letters he etched came right off with some soap and water after his mother had him clean it up but it also speaks to a bigger issue which is that students with disabilities are almost three times more likely to be arrested even though kids with developmental disabilities can have difficulty understanding or following the rules and require support staff familiar with their specific needs and they are not the only students disproportionately singled out because cops in schools do tend to behave the same way they behave outside of schools which explains why black students account for nearly a third of all students arrested despite the fact that that is twice their share of enrollment that is just one reason why while you may hear a lot of white kids talk about their friendly sro black students even in the same school may see them very differently it was almost like this man was judge jury and executioner and he was menacing looking and literally he walked through the halls like he owned the place every conversation you had with him was tense it was literally just students of color i don't think even the black sro that we had at southwest i i had never seen him speak to a white student they knew who they were looking for they had their kids that they like low-key terrorized there are so many students who would have had a great time but had a horrible time because of an sro or because of a cop right the presence of police can make school miserable for some kids and we frankly don't need any more ways to make school scarier it's already terrifying enough if you ask me what is the scariest place i can imagine it's not a haunted house or the inside of tom cruise's brain it's high school because remember i was this and it's it's not just no key terrorizing you may be familiar with viral videos of school cops behaving violently videos that sometimes went on to make awful headlines like these and because cops in schools enjoy all the same protections they do everywhere else the consequences in many of these cases can be non-existent in osceola county florida an officer was filmed throwing a female student to the floor knocking her unconscious but he wasn't charged with any wrongdoing and his supervisor the county sheriff fully supported that outcome a lot of things are never going to look pretty on camera but guess what you know this worked out and it's a positive thing for law enforcement sheriff lopez defending deputy fournier's actions despite criticism and public scrutiny it's unfortunate that the young lady went through this incident but it's also unfortunate that my deputy had to suffer a lot of uh constant bashing and uh harassment you know when he just did what how he was trained i honestly think no one makes a better case for defunding the police than the police themselves if throwing your kid to the ground and then having your boss complain about how everyone was rude to you afterward is emblematic of how you were trained then the problem is clearly the training the cops themselves the entire system and not for nothing that shows fake oakley sunglasses but but the sheriff of flavourtown here does raise an interesting point school police get trained as cops but that might be the only training they get because requirements vary widely in each state if they exist at all and national training requirements for school-based law enforcement simply do not exist and when you've got law enforcement stationed in a school taking ordinary disciplinary situations and escalating them the consequences as you have seen tonight can be truly terrible in researching this piece we've found so many stories where kids are still traumatized by the experiences they had even years later and felt they both changed the trajectory of their lives and how they interact with the world if you are over a certain age this is so much more prevalent than you might think we don't have a particularly large staff but multiple members of it have come forward as we put this story together this week citing terrible behaviour by school police they'd either directly witnessed or experienced first hand and we're not even getting into the fact that schools with sros have higher rates of exclusionary discipline things like suspensions and expulsions than comparable schools without sros which has been shown to be associated with lower academic achievement dropout and increase behavioral problems both in and out of school so when that guy that you saw earlier argued for more police in every school saying why not it wouldn't hurt the odds to that is it absolutely can and it does all the time and for all the arguing right now about how we need more police in schools i would argue that we may actually need significantly less and small reforms just are not going to cut it here some places have tried that with tactics that kept the police in schools but tried to make them appear less intimidating about five years ago some districts in minnesota where that kid went to school redesigned their school police uniforms to light blue polo shirts something that unsurprisingly students there including him saw right through every day i go to school as a young black male teen and i have to see our sro just wandering the hallways he's always in our classrooms he's always in the hallways your compromise is to give them softer outfits that doesn't make sense like it's at the end of the day a cop is a cop whether you dress them up in red yellow blue it doesn't matter yeah he's right teenagers aren't stupid you can't send the cop uniform to a farm-up state they know what is going on a cop is going to be a cop no matter what we dress them up in fuchsia still a cop the million still a cop cher's dress from the 1986 oscars still a cop and now they're wearing something they couldn't pull off in their wildest dreams now there are some slightly bigger steps that we can take like demanding school districts adopt rules that keep cops out of routine student discipline and we can also require that they have comprehensive training that includes de-escalation and working with students with disabilities or we could just try and get them out of schools altogether some cities like oakland california have done that and i am not saying it is simple there is still a thoughtful ongoing conversation there about how to handle everything from routine discipline to emergency situations because they know getting rid of school police doesn't mean walking away from school safety what it means is asking ourselves what really keeps kids safe and i would argue that one good way to do that might be to take the money that it seems we're now inevitably about to flood towards school cops and instead directed toward councillors nurses and all the other resources that actually protect students school police are not the answer to school shootings the answer to that is gun control and when we throw more cops into schools as an easy way out of that difficult and necessary conversation we not only fail to keep our kids safe from gun violence we condemn them to a system that criminalizes the very essence of childhood kids deserve to be annoying without being arrested to be sad and angry without being body slammed they deserve to have tantrums throw carrots do science experiments talk and carve their name into stuff without risking ending up in the back of a police car they deserve to be curious to make mistakes to go a little too far to be a little too loud to basically be a kid and they definitely deserve better than the fundamental lie that the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy who can arrest a five-year-old you

Channel: LastWeekTonight

Views: 8,351,165

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Id: KgwqQGvYt0g

Length: 26min 42sec (1602 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 05 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/the6thReplicant]

Sees a fire.

The rest of the Western world: “Quick put it out! Is it an oil fire? Or not? Use the fire extinguisher to be safe.”

America: Pours gasoline on the fire.

[u/Infinited007]

I literally graduated from the high school showed on this video. Police acted up like assholes who owned the place and there were multiple times when they used excessive forced. Some wild stuff .

[u/Bahamabanana]

Honestly, I'd say even beyond gun control, you'd get far just making a law that an arrest cannot lead to a criminal record on its own. Why the hell does someone even get a criminal record before due process?

I mean, other than controlling poor and minority groups by making certain their communities that are much more heavily surveilled than well-to-do communities, will get a spot on their record for minor misdemeanors so they can be kept out of high class opportunities and blasted in the media until they're shunned by society.

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/Xander_PrimeXXI]

Even before I realized how messed up police were I knew that SROs would be useless.

Put police in school and they think their job is gonna be to arrest students.

Police aren’t there to keep anyone safe.

[u/cgg419]

Love my country, but it always pisses me off how many things are unavailable in Canada.

[u/disgustandhorror]

My high school in the mid-2000s had a cop. He was a fat dickhead who did absolutely nothing helpful or productive. In fact, the only thing I ever saw him do was cuff and escort some kid who got caught with weed. 99.9% of the time, he'd just stand around slack-jawed and kind of wheezing.

It was also an open secret that he had an inappropriate relationship with the football team; the players (all minors, ofc) were known to drink and party at his house. Years after I graduated I heard he got into trouble over sexual allegations, but I never heard the details.

[u/iRustic]

As a European living in a social democracy country, this show is basically "let me tell you why America is a horrible place to live part 146"

I get that this piece is cherry picking bad instances with a bad look to make a good case. But goddamn I'm grateful for not being born in the US.

[u/Klunkey]

Even worse was that the Uvalde Police did almost jack shit to try and prevent more deaths as soon as they could when the shooting was happening that the some of parents had to come in and rescue the children.

THIS FUCKING REASON ALONE is proof why we shouldn’t focus on having police officers in American schools.