School police presence multiplies arrests and vague disruption laws criminalize normal teen behavior

Evidence

Schools staffed with police—euphemistically referred to as “school resource officers”—make “three and a half times more arrests than in schools without police,” according to Kristin Henning, my Georgetown colleague, Blume Professor of Law, director of the Juvenile Justice Clinic and Initiative, and author of The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth. Since 2016, lawmakers in twenty-two states and numerous cities have enacted laws “making it a crime to disturb or disrupt the school.” But what actually qualifies as a “school disturbance” is up to the discretion (and biases) of teachers and administrators. Until it was repealed in 2018, a South Carolina law allowed students to be arrested for “disturbing the school if they…acted in an obnoxious manner.” What teenager can go a day without violating that law? — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 424