Police Return to Schools Plagued by Drugs and Violence

Much to the chagrin of “anti-racist” activists

Image from the Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

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By Igor Stravinsky (Teacher, commentator)

In May of 2007, Jordan Manners, a 15-year-old black boy was gunned down in the hallway of a Toronto District School Board high school by another black boy. The board was finally forced into action to deal with the increasing level of violent crime in its schools. The School Resource Officer program was created, in which officers were assigned to specific schools where they got to know the kids and partnered with the school administration to improve school safety. Most GTA school boards adopted some form of the program, which, while imperfect, was widely viewed as successful. In a poll taken in 2020, the vast majority of TDSB students reported that they felt safer in the schools knowing police were present. Only about 10% said they felt less safe.

Nevertheless, the TDSB scrapped the program in 2021. This was at the height of the social panic over the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis, Minnesota . Floyd was a career petty criminal who was high on fentanyl when he violently resisted arrest, having been reported for passing counterfeit currency in a local store. Cast as a victim of “systemic racism” by Black Lives Matter and other “anti-racism” activists, the Floyd incident cemented the idea in the minds of progressive people all over the Western world that police forces were agents of white supremacy bent on keeping black people down. Of course, a dispassionate analysis of the facts shows that deaths of unarmed black people in police custody were, and still are, very rare in the United States, and the vast majority of incidents of violent crime against black people are perpetrated by other blacks. But in matters of anti-black racism, few people are much concerned about facts.

The point is that in the climate that existed at the time, it was pretty easy for the local activists such as the notorious Parents for Black Children (PBC) to convince the TDSB to scrap the SRO program, even though only 10% of students felt less safe with it in place. Why? because most of the kids who didn't want the cops in school were black. And why do you think those kids didn't like the cops? Because so many of them were criminals. 

That's right- black kids were committing a disproportionately high amount of the crime, often violent crime, in schools, just like blacks do in society generally. This is obviously a great frustration for the majority of black people, who are honest and law-abiding. The stereotypes around black people clearly result in racism against them. That's wrong and needs to be addressed, but it doesn’t change reality. 

And the solutions proposed by BLM and PBC, essentially to disband police forces so as to eliminate the higher arrest and conviction rates among black people, were, and still are, absurd. No one likely actually thought this would be a positive step in terms of reducing crime, but opposing it put you in the crosshairs of the “anti-racist” warriors. Accepting the “defund the police” mantra became an essential virtue signal to stay on the right side of the whole anti-black racism issue, and quickly became what American writer Rob Henderson has coined a “luxury belief”, which he defines as a belief which has a negative impact on society overall held by a privileged person (who is insulated from those negative impacts) that gives that privileged person the moral high ground. A great example is the rich person who has a sign on their property which says “defund the police” while their home is spattered with stickers from their private security company.           

PBC members and their activist friends didn’t like the fact that black kids were getting arrested more often than, say, Asian kids. Rather than doing the necessary soul-searching and the hard work to determine why so many black kids were engaging in criminal behavior, which would be difficult and expensive, and require admitting that there is something amiss among black families and social groups, they just wanted to get rid of the cops. No cops, no arrests! Problem solved.

The result of this strategy was totally predictable. In the same way that black homicide rates exploded in the USA in the wake of the George Floyd incident due to police defunding, since SROs were removed from schools in Ontario, crime and violence have ramped way up. Consequently, people are asking for a renewed police presence (as police forces are being refunded in the USA).

So, police will soon be back in several GTA schools, but the cops are bending over backwards to insist that it will be different this time. According to a media report the new program “promotes trauma-informed, anti-racist, and anti-oppressive approaches”, which attribute anti-social and criminal behavior by blacks to their status as victims in a white-supremacist society (it seems to have the opposite effect on Asians, though. Go figure.).

These are the same approaches school boards have been using for the past several years, and they have proven to be ineffective. Will they suddenly start working now that the police are involved? 

I guess we will have to wait and see.

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read “The Lord of the Flies” has been playing out in Ontario Schools for Years

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