The mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in December brought the issue of school security into the national spotlight. NRA spokesman Wayne LaPierre called for armed guards in every school. Civilian teachers from 15 states signed up for armed teacher training. And schools across the country began cracking down on supposedly troublesome behaviors, from making a “gun out of Lego” to playing “cops and robbers” in the playground. Heightened sensitivity following Sandy Hook and now a food fight at South High School in Minneapolis — which escalated into a riot involving hundreds of students — has renewed debate over “zero tolerance” in schools. The question is why do we always “get tough” and reach for our guns when school crime and violence has been decreasing nationally for two decades?
I come at this issue from a unique perspective. I’m a professor of criminal justice who teaches courses on violence, including school violence, to active and aspiring Minnesota peace officers. But I previously taught special education in the New York City public schools, which have their own dedicated police force and pioneered many of the new and harsher disciplinary practices that punctuate today’s classrooms: metal detectors, random searches, drug-sniffing dogs, radio frequency monitors, surveillance cameras, “school resource officers.” Every day my students and I would be greeted at the school gates by a barrage of security guards and airport-style scanners. It was a different sort of education.
Armed security and teachers are the logical extension of the systematic criminalization of public schools that has been policy and practice for years. There is no clear evidence such measures make schools safer. Some studies have found a decrease in violence in schools with in-house police officers, while others have found no relationship at all.
Student problems increase, causes go unaddressed
Part of the problem is that police officers are trained in how to deal with conflict, not how to counsel youth and defuse typical adolescent drama. Student problems, in turn, are redefined as criminal issues requiring a criminal justice response. And student problems increase because suspension, expulsion, arrest, etc., fail to address the underlying social and psychological causes of student misbehavior.
Students who have strong school attachments, involvements, commitments and beliefs do better in school. But as I observed firsthand in New York, students won’t speak to appropriate adults if their problems involve criminal activity (for example, drug use) for fear they will be punished under the rubric of zero tolerance. In other words, zero tolerance alienates children from statistically the safest place for them to be — school.
In the 2010 book, "Homeroom Security: School Discipline in an Age of Fear," moreover, sociologist Aaron Kupchik finds, “the presence of police in schools is unlikely to prevent another school schooling and the potential for oppression of students — especially poor and racial/ethnic minority youth — is a more realistic and common threat than Columbine.”
This is especially poignant given some students and parents of Somali descent are now speaking out against excessive use of police force during the melee at South High School and a failure on behalf of school administrators to calm the racial tensions that precipitated the incident. During the fight at South it was noted that students used “anything they could get their hands on.” God only knows what would have happened if the teachers had been armed.
More downsides to teachers toting guns
Which brings me to my final point. If students can’t relate to cops in the corridors, they certainly won’t respond to teachers toting pistols in the classroom. Further, it takes months to learn to circumvent the confrontational tension and fear police experience in a gunfight, say firearms instructors I work with. Most people in life-or-death situations freeze or shut down entirely. Teachers are as poorly equipped to take down body-armor wearing bad guys as police officers are to differentiate instruction based on student readiness, interest and learning profile.
The chances that an armed educator will shoot a child by accident are high. The chances of arriving officers’ mistakenly shooting a teacher because he or she is seen with a weapon in the aftermath of a shooting incident are higher.
Law enforcement can’t do much to prevent another Sandy Hook, although they may, in a few instances, be able to reduce its severity. If the ultimate goal is prevention, then focusing on students’ well-being rather than suppression in schools is a step in the right direction.
James Densley is an assistant professor in the School of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice at Metropolitan State University. He is the author of "How Gangs Work: An Ethnography of Youth Violence" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Densley holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford.
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