On School Resource Officers
A couple of days ago, on March 20, 2022, a batch of data from the Edmonton SRO Research Project was released. Reading the numbers was like a punch to the stomach that I knew was probably coming but still couldn’t prepare myself enough to take.
The data confirmed what I knew was the likely truth: that the school resource officer program that placed Edmonton Police Service officers in Edmonton Public Schools up until the program’s suspension in 2020 and that continues to operate in Edmonton Catholic Schools has been a significant contributor to the suspension, expulsion, and criminalization of Edmonton youth. The statistics were shocking: over a 10-year period, SROs made more than 2000 arrests and were involved in more than 5000 suspensions and nearly 700 expulsions — processes that in themselves massively increase the risk of dropout and eventual criminalization for youth.
Almost 21,000 students were designated as offenders (an undefined but troubling term).
And these numbers don’t include thousands more students who were affected by experiences of surveillance, racial profiling, intimidation, and harassment by the SROs placed in their schools — experiences many young people told us about when they came to speak to the board.
I have tried to reassure myself by remembering that in 2020, I acted to try to end the program by asking for a suspension of the program and a study. I knew in asking for a suspension that EPSB would pull out of the MOU with the police service, and a year later, as policy chair, I worked to ensure that the board of trustees would have to vote in public on any new agreements with police, military, or paramilitary organizations, meaning they would have to face the public political pushback on bringing policing back into schools. In the meantime, I hoped that the study would reveal what this data release has now shown: that SROs are a significant factor in the school-to-prison pipeline, and despite claims that SROs primarily divert students from the court system, they laid charges in nearly half of all incidents.
However, despite bringing the motion calling for the study and having been part of developing the RFP, I still don’t know what has happened with that process. I don’t know the methodology other than a very broad set of criteria set out in the RFP, and I don’t know what team was eventually hired. Although I was part of the review process, meetings were repeatedly delayed until after the end of my term in office, I suspect so that I would not be an opposing voice to the majority of administrators who were open supporters of policing in schools and wanted a report that agreed with their views.
I am left in the dark about the study, as much as everyone else who wants some sort of transparency and accountability around policing in schools and the review process for these programs. We won’t know until the report is finished and released, unless the decision is made to bring it to a caucus meeting and keep it behind closed doors forever.
And in the end, I can’t really reassure myself with the actions I took. They were far later than they should have been. In 2018, not long after the start of that board’s term, I began to try to raise questions behind the scenes about the program with my colleagues and administration. I thought, naively, that I could get information if I asked for it and have an open conversation about the program. Instead, the response was a lunch-and-learn from SROs and a high school principal and a lunch with the chief for the chair.
I should have taken the fight public then, but I didn’t. I worried that in the political climate of the time, soon after the Edmonton truck attack and other incidents, that any criticism of police would fail and that I could not mobilize my colleagues in support. Instead, I talked to community members about their concerns, but I did nothing significant myself.
In 2020, however, the window opened to act. Following the murder of George Floyd and the death of Brianna Taylor, the conversation about police violence and the Black Lives Matter movement made people around the world reconsider questions of policing in their communities, and that included here in Edmonton, where our police have their own dark histories of racism and violence (including officers who served as part of the SRO program). After conversations with students, parents, and community members, I decided it was time to get answers about the SRO program and, I hoped, end the practice of placing police in schools.
That was the right thing, but I can’t turn away from the truth: for the first five years I was in office, I never asked a public question about school resource officers. I didn’t raise the issue of paying police salaries with classroom dollars during budget deliberations. I didn’t ask, when we talked about lower graduation rates for Indigenous students, whether experiences with school policing were a factor for any of those children. I didn’t raise the issue when we talked about seclusion rooms of the relationship between confinement of young children and the carcerality common to both seclusion rooms and school police.
I haven’t known what to say for the last two days as I face the reality that thousands of students were negatively affected by school policing in my six years on the board. I feel the weight of those children’s lives — the same children I committed and continue to commit to care for through my work.
I don’t know what to do with this feeling that I did the right thing far too late, and that with how late it was in my term, I couldn’t be there to see it through to the end. All I know is that I have to continue to speak up now, along with the thousands of others who have called on school divisions to end SRO programs, and demand an end to the criminalization of youth in schools.
