Seattle Public Schools 'Just Say No' to police
/Photo by Matt Halvorson — Capitol Hill in Seattle, June 2020.
By Matt Halvorson
In case you missed it, there will be no police presence in Seattle Public Schools moving forward.
Following the lead of student activists, SPS ended the practice of having police officers — known as “school emphasis officers” — stationed in five middle schools. This announcement came days after Seattle Police used a middle school parking lot as a staging area for anti-protest response without permission — a move Superintendent Denise Juneau spoke out swiftly against.
Removing police from our schools is an important first step because it prioritizes immediate safety for Black and brown students and their families.
The district still needs to deeply scrutinize the protocols around teachers calling the police on students, however, and to develop protections to keep students safe. The same goes for the district’s prevalent use of in-school security guards, who were getting physical with elementary students as recently as March of this year — when our schools closed.
It’s also important because it acknowledges the need for an intersectional view as we pursue equity in our schools.
We know, for instance, that our schools have long been the beginning of a systemic pipeline to prison for Black students, and so we know that truly equitable schools can’t exist alongside police violence, mass incarceration and state-sanctioned murder.
We know flat-out that police in America put Black lives in danger, and that police reform has repeatedly failed to change that, so it’s important that SPS continues down this path toward abolition and fully severs all ties with SPD. Just snipping the most visible string connecting the police to Seattle’s schools — reforming that relationship, as opposed to abolishing it — is not enough.
Seattle Public Schools have committed to providing our students with a more honest and racially aware education — one that includes Black studies, Indigenous studies and ethnic studies, as well as an almost-unnoticed LGBTQIA+ initiative that passed just last week. How can that effort be combined in good faith with a continued relationship with the police?
Our children look to our schools for the truth. Now is not the time to be timid.
