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More than 650 police officers are working in British schools, many of whom are assigned to sites in areas of great deprivation..
The number may be revealed as two police forces across the country are in the process of reviewing the role of officers in schools, following legal challenges over concerns that they disproportionately affect black and ethnic minority students.
The activities of school police officers, often referred to as safer schools officers (SSOs), range from being a point of contact for teachers to more intensive interventions such as stopping and searching and monitoring students. children suspected of being gang members.
While police forces say that SSOs play an important role in protecting children, activists and charities warn that their presence risks criminalizing youth, could exacerbate inequalities and create a culture of low expectations. and a climate of hostility.
“When the police are brought into schools, they threaten to jeopardize a child’s education by criminalizing them at a very young age. School is no longer a safe haven, a space where they feel they can be helped, ”said Dr Remi Joseph-Salisbury, a professor at the University of Manchester and co-author of a report on police presence in schools.
Details of the police deployments were revealed in a freedom of information request to all UK police forces. They showed that 23 forces employed 683 officers whose duties were focused exclusively on schools.
In 2020, the metropolitan police said they would review the role of officers in schools following a legal challenge that raised concerns that they could have a disproportionately negative effect on students of BAME origin. Avon and Somerset have also now agreed to conduct an SSO Equity Assessment in response to a similar legal challenge.
The Met employed the largest number of school police officers in the UK. The number of SSOs in London has nearly doubled to 357 in the last decade, based on evidence presented to the home affairs committee.
Met Commissioner Cressida Dick said in 2019 that she wanted “SSOs to be embedded in the DNA of schools.”
The Met told The Guardian that it sometimes used data on the number of disadvantaged children to choose “priority schools” for more intensive interventions. In the capital, all schools are offered a point of contact with the police, but priority schools are usually assigned a dedicated officer.
A list of metrics used by the police to choose priority schools, provided to the Guardian by the Met, included “the provision of free school dinners (as an indicator of social deprivation)” as well as GCSE achievement rates, data school-related crime and persistent levels of absence.
Norfolk Constabulary said it also looked at the number of children with scholarships from the pupil premium, as well as factors including the number of children with assigned social workers.
In Bristol, 31.4% of children in schools with a police officer were eligible for free school meals, higher than the local authority rate: 22.7%.
In some areas, such as Wales, virtually all schools had a designated official to deliver educational programs and assist with incidents when necessary, but they were not based in any school. In others, they were used to target a much smaller number of schools, such as in Bristol, where Avon and the Somerset Police assigned an officer to each of the seven schools.
Joseph-Salisbury’s report, Descriminalize the Classroom: A Community Response to Police in Greater Manchester’s Schools, was released by the Kids of Color charity and the Northern Police Monitoring Project last year, in response to plans for at least 20 officers. additional police stations in Greater Manchester. schools in a quarter.
Based on interviews with teachers, youth and parents across Greater Manchester, he found that the presence of the police had a negative impact on BAME students.
Joseph-Salisbury spoke of his own experience of robbing a school cafeteria, which resulted in being disciplined by the principal. He fears that such behavior is now criminalized.
“I was caught stealing from the canteen when I was 17 years old, but the director took care of it and my punishment was to miss some football games… I became an academic, but when you have a police officer, it automatically accelerates the situation. in criminal behavior, ”he said.
A Met spokesperson said the SSO’s key priorities were keeping London’s youth safe by preventing and detecting crimes that affect the school community.
“It also means promoting positive life choices and offering opportunities for fun. Early intervention has been shown to be extremely effective. The MPS [Metropolitan police service] believes that safer schools partnerships are enormously valuable to all students, as well as to the schools and the broader communities in which they are present ”.
The spokesperson said SSOs were involved in a variety of youth outreach programs, including supporting rugby and soccer teams, developing knife crime videos and working with youth clubs.
A Norfolk Police spokesperson said: “The students and the principal interview safer school officials, and their primary role is to assist children and youth, ensuring that they have the proper support they need to develop, while who provide early intervention when needed to help them steer clear of crime. “
However, an investigation by a member of the London assembly, Sian Berry, did not find a clear relationship between the number of SSOs in each London borough and the decline in juvenile delinquency between 2011 and 2015.
The first dedicated school cops were introduced in the 1960s, but their use expanded significantly in the New Labor era as part of Tony Blair’s street crime initiative.
Vik Chechi-Ribeiro, a secondary school teacher and vice president of the Manchester National Education Union, wrote that the police presence in schools brought more children into contact with the criminal justice system. He said that young people would travel from schools to student referral units and safe schools, to institutions for juvenile offenders (where half of the inmates are black and ethnic minorities) and eventually to prison.
Former Ofsted chief inspector Sir Michael Wilshaw, who was headmaster at a secondary school in Hackney, London, told The Guardian that he was not entirely against the idea of police in schools, but said that often found the assigned officers to be inadequate.
“I felt that sometimes the problem was that some officers sent to the schools were not the right ones for a school setting. We need energetic and vibrant officers who really care and who have been properly trained to engage with these children, ”he said.
“They can be a good thing, make students and staff feel more secure, but everything should be appropriate. The school should always strive to determine the facts about misconduct before even thinking about asking the police to talk to the children. “
The National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) said it was working in conjunction with the educational charity PSHE Association and the London School of Economics to assess the role of the police in the classroom. A report, to be published later this year, will focus on the policing experiences of young people in schools and universities.
Police Chief Jo Shiner, NPCC leader for children and youth, said: “We are aware of the concerns raised by some communities and charities around the role of the police in schools. The focus of the evaluation is education to build trust between young people and the police ”.
A government spokesman said the deployment of officers was an operational decision of the police forces and a matter for individual schools.
