In October 2015, a Black 16-year-old in Spring Valley High School, South Carolina, was trapped in a headlock, flipped over, and dragged across her classroom by a school police officer when she refused to surrender a cellphone. Meanwhile, her classmates recorded the incident on their phones. One of those videos went viral, and Deputy Sheriff Ben Fields, called “Officer Slam” by students, was exposed.
However, the girl and her classmate who recorded the video were arrested and sent to juvenile detention on the grounds of “disturbing a school function,” a law later ruled to be unconstitutionally vague.
A report by the Advancement Project analyzed 460 school policing assaults against students by police officers and security guards in the 2023-24 school year. It found that 1,072 students were assaulted between the 2013-14 and 2023-24 school years, and Black students comprise 84% of school policing assault victims.
Eighty-four percent.
The report, “#AssaultAt: The Legacy of Lynching in School Policing,” was written by Tyler Whittenberg, deputy director of the Opportunity to Learn Program at the Advancement Project, and Kaneesha Johnson, postdoctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill.
“The alarming spike in assaults against students by school police and security guards underscores the troubling reality that our schools are not safe, equitable or nurturing environments for students, particularly for Black and disabled youth,” Whittenberg said. “They are quite the opposite. Instead, students are going to school each day in fear of policing assaults, sexual violence, and criminalization.
The study compares data from two lynching datasets from 1882 to 1936. Its aim is to assess the correlation between the Southern era of lynching and modern violence against students by school police and security guards, which disproportionately targets Black people.
With a rise in the frequency of lynchings in a county, the number of policing assaults also rose. For example, for every additional 100 lynchings in a county, an additional four students are assaulted, with Black students making up a majority of them.
Moreover, more than half (56%) of such assaults occurred in Black and Latino majority schools.
Again, schools in the South make up the bulk (54%) of those experiencing policing assaults.
Ranking of States With Highest Number of Assaults:
- Florida (53),
- Texas (39),
- North Carolina (34),
- California (26), and
- South Carolina (24).
“This report reveals a deeply entrenched legacy of racial violence rooted in historical lynchings and its link to modern policing practices in our educational institutions. It’s time to dismantle the myth that policing makes schools safer and confront the systemic injustices that put our most vulnerable students at risk,” Whittenberg added.
Assaults Took Place Under These Methods:
- Physical assaults (39%)
- Assaults with a weapon (35%)
- Sexual assaults (25%)
The study focuses on the key aspect behind such discriminatory behaviors toward Black students: police officers perceived Black boys as four and a half years older than their actual age and less childlike than white boys of the same age, according to a study. Moreover, adults perceive Black girls as less innocent and do not need as much support and protection as their white peers.
The authors argue school policing will not reduce violence but will, instead, increase the number of Black students to be pushed out of schools, arrested, and placed in youth and adult criminal legal systems.
What’s Happening in Texas, Harris County, and Houston?
Texas Appleseed, a nonpartisan nonprofit that aims to promote social, economic, and racial justice for Texans, among other organizations like the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and Texas State Teachers Association, theorized in a letter that armed security officers do not keep schools safe.
Taking cognizance of the threats to school safety and gun violence recently, the letter argued that the presence of armed security officers in schools, pursuant to HB 3, harms and criminalizes young people. Moreover, officers caused suspensions and arrests to increase, according to the University at Albany and the RAND Corporation, which analyzed data from 2014 to 2018.
It said Black students were doubly punished than white students. Black and Brown students are also disproportionately enrolled in districts with school police departments, where this trend is more prevalent. Texas has the highest number of school police departments, and racial disparities with regard to police referrals and arrests are common.
Houston ISD, the largest school district in Texas and the eighth-largest in the United States, has the second-largest school district police department in the country. While Black students comprised 24% of the district’s population during the 2017-18 school year, they accounted for over 43% of referrals to law enforcement and school-based arrests.
In Harris County, the referral rate for African American youth who are referred to the county’s Juvenile Probation Department is 8.2 per 1,000 youth. In 2016, Spring ISD referred 65% more African American youth than the county’s rate.
Also, African American youth receive 35% of all In-School Suspension (ISS) referrals, 47% of all Out-of-School Suspension (OSS) referrals, and 41% of all referrals to the Disciplinary Alternative Education Programs (DAEPs) in Aldine, Houston, Pasadena, Alief, Katy, Spring, Cypress Fairbanks, Klein, Spring Branch and Goose Creek ISDs, according to the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition.
Of these ISDs, African American students in Klein, Goose Creek, Katy, and Spring Branch make up the largest proportion in terms of overrepresentation in referrals to HCJPD. Klein ISD and Katy ISD had the highest and second highest overrepresentation of African American students referred to In-School Suspension (ISS), Out-of-School Suspension (OSS), and Disciplinary Alternative Education Programs (DAEPs).
“School policing assaults against Black and other students of color are acts of state-sanctioned violence that extend the legacies of lynching into the modern classroom,” the study reads. “Just as southern lynch law was used to oppress and control Black southerners attempting to exercise their civil rights, school police officers and security guards, especially those placed in southern schools, are tools of violent intimidation used against Black students who represent 84.2% of all school policing assaults.”
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