{"id":20922,"date":"2020-06-08T06:03:31","date_gmt":"2020-06-08T06:03:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=20922"},"modified":"2020-06-08T16:08:17","modified_gmt":"2020-06-08T16:08:17","slug":"the-good-guy-image-police-present-to-students-often-clashes-with-students-reality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/the-good-guy-image-police-present-to-students-often-clashes-with-students-reality\/","title":{"rendered":"The good-guy image police present to students often clashes with students’ reality"},"content":{"rendered":"

F. Chris Curran<\/a>, University of Florida<\/a><\/em>; Aaron Kupchik<\/a>, University of Delaware<\/a><\/em>, and Benjamin W. Fisher<\/a>, University of Louisville<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Eight days after George Floyd was killed<\/a> during an encounter with Minneapolis police in an incident that sparked protests around the world<\/a>, Minneapolis Public Schools terminated<\/a> its contract for the Minneapolis police to provide officers in schools.<\/p>\n

\u201cI value people and education and life,\u201d school board chairwoman Kim Ellison told a local newspaper<\/a>. \u201cNow I\u2019m convinced, based on the actions of the Minneapolis Police Department, that we don\u2019t have the same values.\u201d<\/p>\n

On June 4, Guadalupe Guerrero, the superintendent of Portland Public Schools in Oregon, followed suit, saying: \u201cWe need to re-examine our relationship\u201d with the Portland Police Bureau.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe time is now,\u201d Guerrero tweeted<\/a>. \u201cWith new proposed investments in direct student supports (social workers, counselors, culturally-specific partnerships & more), I am discontinuing the regular presence of School Resource Officers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Research<\/a> supports these efforts to limit the number of police officers regularly stationed in schools. Other approaches, such as improving school climate<\/a>, are better at keeping schools safe.<\/p>\n

Further, as researchers who study school safety and the use of police in schools<\/a>, we recently discovered another reason why taking cops out of America\u2019s schools may be a welcome trend.<\/p>\n

\"\"
The image police project in schools doesn\u2019t always mirror reality.<\/span>
\nSDI Productions<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Based on our research<\/a>, school resource officers don\u2019t view their job only as keeping kids safe. They also spend a lot of time trying to make students trust the police and believe that the police are generally good.<\/p>\n

School resource officers<\/a> are sworn police officers who work in schools. They are usually armed and in uniform, and are trained and generally supervised as police officers, not school employees.<\/p>\n

The problem we see with that sort of pro-police messaging is that the message is often at odds with some of the violent police behavior students have experienced<\/a> or seen in their communities<\/a>.<\/p>\n

For example, research on the experiences and perceptions among black students and students from largely black communities finds that they have also learned<\/a> that the police are an ever-present threat to their freedom<\/a> and their lives. The all too common scenes<\/a> of people of color dying at the hands of police reinforce what they\u2019ve learned.<\/p>\n

Thus, when the cops they see in their schools are saying one thing but the cops on the street are doing something else, it puts students in a position where an authority figure is asking them to believe something that blatantly contradicts their own reality.<\/p>\n

A better way, we think, would be to have educators and police think more critically about the conflict between what police tell students and what they see \u2013 and to consider whether police even need to be in schools to start with.<\/p>\n

Message versus reality<\/h2>\n

Consider, for instance, the words of one student we interviewed who told us how his school resource officer\u2019s message contradicts what he sees in the news about the police.<\/p>\n

\u201cI always see on the news police officers doing everything to hold people down and stuff and I\u2019m like nope, don\u2019t want to run into them,\u201d the student said. He added that his school resource officer \u201cjust makes me think different about them they may be doing the right thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

In another instance, a teacher described how a school resource officer justified the arrest of a student\u2019s father, suggesting that the father was at fault for the family\u2019s suffering. \u201cWe weren\u2019t out to get your father,\u201d the officer told the student. \u201cYour father broke the law.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a different case, a Hispanic student asked whether the school resource officer was going to arrest the student\u2019s mother due to concerns about her citizenship status. The officer dismissed the student\u2019s concern as biased, failing to recognize how law enforcement\u2019s role in actions against undocumented immigrants<\/a> might have contributed to the student\u2019s worries.<\/p>\n

Pro-law enforcement message<\/h2>\n

About half of all public schools<\/a> nationwide have police officers in schools, including large proportions<\/a> of rural (44%), town (58%), suburban (49%) and city (45%) schools.<\/p>\n

Over the past several years, we, along with education researcher Samantha Viano<\/a> of George Mason University, have discovered<\/a> dozens of instances where school resource officers use their positions of power to deliver pro-law enforcement messages \u2013 often to counter the negative news coverage<\/a> that police have been getting as of late for use of excessive force.
\nThe school resource officers in our study, who worked at all levels of K-12 education, from elementary school through high school, consistently described teaching students to trust police as their second-highest priority, safety being the first. They saw negative portrayals of police as unwarranted. One officer argued that \u201cthe news media\u2026 puts a bad rep on a lot of police officers.\u201d<\/p>\n

The school resource officers actively sought to counter negative views about their profession with positive messages about what they do. One officer told us \u201cit\u2019s a PR thing \u2026 we\u2019re wanting to make sure that those kids know that, you know, police are not the bad guys.\u201d<\/p>\n

To build trust and goodwill, the officers fostered relationships with students, greeted them with high-fives and worked to be approachable.<\/p>\n

School leaders reinforced this approach. One district leader stated: \u201cI think that is desperately needed to understand that law enforcement are a positive in our society.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alleged anti-police bias<\/h2>\n

School resource officers, as well as teachers and principals, recognized that not all students came to school with a positive view of police. But, rather than considering how police might contribute to such views, our research shows that they described students as biased against police because of negative news stories.<\/p>\n

The officers acknowledged to students that sometimes police need to arrest people or use force. However, they taught students that this happens only when the person is committing a crime. They taught students that incidents of police violence are the result of isolated \u201cbad apple\u201d officers and not true of police in general. And, they explained that students shouldn\u2019t blame police for doing their jobs \u2013 even if the person arrested is a loved one.<\/p>\n

Moving forward<\/h2>\n

Where there are schools with officers present, we see a need for school leaders, teachers and school resource officers to allow more critical discussions about policing. This could involve explicitly teaching about police violence<\/a>, facilitating student-led activism<\/a> projects or dialogue<\/a> about police behavior.<\/p>\n

As school resource officers seek to build positive relationships with students, they should also recognize that the high-fives they give them at the school door aren\u2019t emblematic of the treatment those children and teens may receive once they leave the school premises. Educators and the police should listen to and validate students\u2019 experiences and acknowledge problems of policing rather than ignore them.<\/p>\n

[Deep knowledge, daily.<\/em> Sign up for The Conversation\u2019s newsletter<\/a>.]\"The<\/p>\n

F. Chris Curran<\/a>, Associate Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy, University of Florida<\/a><\/em>; Aaron Kupchik<\/a>, Professor of Sociology & Criminal Justice, University of Delaware<\/a><\/em>, and Benjamin W. Fisher<\/a>, Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice, University of Louisville<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

F. Chris Curran, University of Florida; Aaron Kupchik, University of Delaware, and Benjamin W. Fisher, University of Louisville Eight days after George Floyd was killed during an encounter with Minneapolis police in an incident that sparked protests around the world, Minneapolis Public Schools terminated its contract for the Minneapolis police to provide officers in schools. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":20923,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[292],"tags":[2763,1570,8167,8131,1737,2895,3823,4234,4380,1586],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20922"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20922"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20922\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20930,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20922\/revisions\/20930"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}