Regular readers won’t be surprised to know that I think police officers in our schools are a bad idea. In Chicago, where I live, each public high school is assigned two police officers at a cost of $75,000 a year each. This is in addition to security staff that already work in our schools. In Chicago and other cities across the country, the police serve as a gateway to the school-to-prison pipeline. I believe that a lack of data transparency contributes to the invisibility of this pipeline for most parents and community members. As such, I have spent the past couple of months working on a report about school-based arrests in Chicago Public Schools.

Today, I am happy to announce the release of “Policing Chicago Public Schools: A Gateway to the School-to-Prison Pipeline.” The report analyzes data from the Chicago Police Department to show (for the first time in seven years) the type of offenses and the demographics (gender, age and race) of the juveniles arrested on CPS properties in calendar year 2010.

I am proud to have co-authored the report with my friend Frank Edwards.

From the introduction of the report:
Our purpose in writing this report is to ensure that the public is informed about the scope and extent of policing in Chicago Public Schools. We hope that this will galvanize educators, parents, students, policymakers and community members to advocate for a dramatic decrease of CPS’s reliance on law enforcement to address school discipline issues. Instead, we would like to see an increase in the use of restorative justice, which is an effective approach, to respond to student misbehavior in our schools.

In light of a push for budget austerity, limited resources should be re-directed away from policing and into affirming programs and opportunities for students. This, we believe, will improve the overall well-being of all stakeholders in the educational system (most especially students). We also call on our city council to improve data transparency by passing an ordinance requiring CPS and CPD to report quarterly on the numbers of students arrested in the district. Having timely and reliable information will support efforts to hold CPS and CPD accountable. Finally, we believe that student privacy should be protected rather than further eroded. Current reporting practices between schools and law enforcement do not need to be reformed to increase the exchange of student information between these parties.

You can find the report HERE.