The increasing presence of police in schools is something that we should all be concerned about. Although police-school partnerships have a long history, in recent years we have seen a flurry of high-profile calls to increase the number of school-based police officers. The issue is supported by those in positions of power, from Cressida Dick, the Metropolitan police commissioner, to Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester.
At the same time, the huge anti-racist protests of last summer urged us not only to declare (once again) that Black Lives Matter, but to look more critically at the role the police play in society.
Whether it’s stop and search, use of force, racial profiling through “gangs” databases, or the policing of Covid, all of the indicators point to institutional racism in the police that is enduring and deep-rooted. In fact, as a recent Netpol report shows, even the “policing of the BLM protests was institutionally racist”.
In this context, it doesn’t take a great leap to see that Black young people, alongside other over-policed communities such as Gypsy and Roma Travellers, will be particularly vulnerable to the negative consequences of police in schools. The racist and classist disparities in school exclusions make it easier still to see who will suffer most from police in schools.
Earlier this year, as part of a broad coalition of young people, teachers, youth workers, community members and academics, we launched the No Police in Schools campaign to raise awareness about the negative impact of police in schools. We conducted a survey to better understand the views of people in Greater Manchester on this issue.
Published in our Decriminalise the Classroom report, the survey responses showed a range of concerns about police in schools. As one young person pointed out, “The police have historically shown racial and class prejudice in relation to over-policing and I believe it would be inevitable that they would do the same in a school environment.”
For some young people, though, this isn’t a question of what might happen in the future, but of what is already happening and what is set to get worse. Reflecting on their experiences of police in their schools, another young person explained, “The officer was petty and vindictive, treated black kids harsher, and relied on intimidation.” “People of Colour were targeted by the police,” said a third. Given all of the evidence available to us, why would we expect any different?
School-based police are perhaps the ultimate signal of a society’s low expectations for young people. The message they transmit is an incredibly harmful one: what is expected of young people is not “academic success”, but criminality. Surely, this is not the aspirational culture we want to create in our schools.
Whether it’s stigmatising schools, creating a climate of fear and hostility, making young people feel unsafe or feeding a school-to-prison pipeline, there are many issues to suggest that school-based police are emblematic of a society heading in the wrong direction.
But with the National Education Union passing motions for no police in schools in Manchester and Oldham, and the establishment of a campaign in Scotland, the Manchester No Police in Schools group is going from strength to strength and the No More Exclusions coalition is continuing to grow.
The future we are fighting for is one in which, as the secondary school teacher and NEU organiser Vik Chechi-Ribeiro has argued, “the police have no place in schools”.
Remi Joseph-Salisbury is presidential fellow in ethnicities and inequalities at the University of Manchester
