WASHINGTON – A crowd of people stood in the dark, surrounded by three flat-screen TVs. Black-and-white footage played of police officers pinning down students and dragging them out of classrooms. Statistics flashed across the screens.
“1.6 million students attend a school with school police, but not a school counselor,” one read.
The immersive digital presentation kicked off an event by two civil rights groups – the Advancement Project and the Alliance for Educational Justice – called “We Came to Learn: Defining Safety for Black + Brown Students.”
At Eaton DC, a Washington, D.C. hotel, the nonprofits hosted a panel discussion on school safety and unveiled a new website that tracks police violence against students of color: www.wecametolearn.com.
The website comes a year after the participating organizations released a national report – “We Came to Learn: A Call to Action for Police-Free Schools.” The report said that 24 percent of U.S. elementary schools and 42 percent of high schools have some sort of police presence, with Black and Latinx students disproportionately arrested by school officers.
In a time of school shootings, some say on-site police are necessary to keep schools safe. But these officers play a role in the school-to-prison pipeline, said Judith Browne Dianis, executive director of the Advancement Project, and they make students of color unsafe by violently penalizing them for normal childlike behavior.
“We are spending money to allow cops to assault our children, and we are giving them a pass,” she said.
