Expansion of police power in public schools and the vanishing rights of students.

• Author: Beger, Randall R.

Look inside a high school, and you are looking in a mirror, under bright lights. How we treat our children, what they see and learn from us, tell us what is healthy and what is sick--and more about who we are than we may want to know (Gibbs, 1999).

Schools cannot expect their students to learn the lessons of good citizenship when school authorities themselves disregard the fundamental principles underpinning our constitutional freedoms (Justice Brennan, dissenting in Doe v. Renfrow, 1981).

Introduction

GROWING PUBLIC ANXIETY OVER ACTS OF VIOLENCE IN SCHOOLS HAS PROMPTED educators and state lawmakers to adopt drastic measures to improve the safety of students. In the wake of recent high-profile campus shootings, schools have become almost prison-like in terms of security and in diminishing the rights of students. Ironically, a repressive approach to school safety may do more harm than good by creating an atmosphere of mistrust and alienation that causes students to misbehave (Noguera, 1995; Hyman and Perone, 1998).

This article examines law enforcement expansion in schools and the vanishing Fourth Amendment rights of public school children. The climate of fear generated by recent school shootings has spurred school administrators to increase security through physical means (locks, surveillance cameras, metal detectors) and to hire more police and security guards. State lawmakers have eagerly jumped on the school safety bandwagon by making it easier to punish school children as adults for a wide range of offenses that traditionally have been handled informally by teachers. Instead of safeguarding the rights of students against arbitrary police power, our nation's courts are granting police and school officials more authority to conduct searches of students. Tragically, little if any Fourth Amendment protection now exists to shield students from the raw exercise of police power in public schools.

The Gap Between the New School Security Culture and the Realities of School Violence

In response to the latest string of sensationalized school shootings, schools everywhere have made safety a top priority. A recent U.S. Department of Education survey of public schools found that 96% required guests to sign in before entering the school building, 80% had a closed campus policy that forbids students to leave campus for lunch, and 53% controlled access to their school buildings (Gegax et al., 1998). A National School Board Association survey of over 700 school districts throughout the United States found that 39% of urban school districts use metal detectors, 75% use locker searches, and 65% use security personnel (Welsh et al., 2000). Schools have introduced stricter dress codes, put up barbed-wire security fences, banned book bags and pagers, and have added "lock down drills" and "SWAT team" rehearsals to their safety programs. Officials in Dallas, Texas, unveiled a $41 million state-of-the-art "security conscious" school that has 37 surveillance cameras, six metal detectors, and a security command center for monitoring the building and grounds (Applebome, 1995: B8). At Tewksbury Memorial High School in Massachusetts, 20-video cameras bring the school into the local police department via remote access technology. According to one source, "the video cameras record almost everything students say and do at school--eating in the cafeteria, cramming in the library, chatting in the halls" (Current Events , 2002: 3). The new security culture in public schools has stirred debate over whether schools have turned into "learning prisons" (Chaddock, 1999:15) where the students unwittingly become "guinea pigs" to test the latest security devices.

Since the mid-1990s, a growing number of schools have adopted zero tolerance policies under which students receive predetermined penalties for any offense, no matter how minor. Students have been expelled or suspended from school for sharing aspirin, Midol, and Certs tablets, and for bringing nail clippers and scissors to class (Lozada, 1998). There is no credible evidence that zero tolerance measures improve classroom management or the behavior of students (Skiba and Peterson, 2000). Such measures are not only ineffectual, but also appear to have a negative impact on children of color. Research indicates that black children are more likely than are whites to be expelled or suspended from school under zero tolerance (Harvard Civil Rights Project, 2000; CQ Researcher, 2000).

Although most Americans believe that public schools are violent and dangerous places, numerous surveys on school safety contradict this notion. For example, according to U.S. Department of Education statistics, only 10% of public schools experienced one or more serious violent crimes during the 1996-1997 school year. Over the same period, almost half the nation's public schools (43%) reported no incidents of serious crime (National Center for Education Statistics, 1999). Data from the Uniform Crime Reports show a decline of approximately 56% in juvenile homicide arrests between 1993 and 1998. In Justice Blind? Ideals and Realities of American Criminal Justice, Matthew Robinson (2002: 120) explains why the conventional wisdom that schools are dangerous places is irrational:

There are more than 51 million students and approximately 3 million teachers in American schools. In 1996, there were approximately 380,000 violent victimizations at school against these roughly 54 million people. This means the rate of violent victimization at U.S. schools is about 704 per 100,000 people. Stated differently, about 0.7% of people can expect to become victims of serious violent crimes at schools.

The odds of a child being killed at school by gunfire during the 1998-1999 school year were about one in two million (Justice Policy Institute, 2001). Contrary to media hyperbole about violence in public schools, most school-related injuries are nonviolent in nature, and the majority of crimes that occur in schools are thefts (Leone et al., 2000).

The Police Buildup in Public Schools

Despite the relative rarity of school violence, officials everywhere are feeling pressure to improve the safety of students and staff. An increasingly popular "quick fix" strategy is to hire police and security guards. According to a U.S. Department of Education study, about 19% of public schools had the full-time presence of a police officer or other law enforcement representative during the 1996-1997 school year (National Center for Education Statistics, 1998).

School police officers take many forms. Some are regular uniformed police officers working on apart-time basis for a school district (Boyle, 1999). Others are hired and trained by school security departments (Caine et al., 1998). In New York City alone, some 3,200 uniformed school security officers work in the Division of School Safety of the City Board of Education, "a contingent larger than the Boston Police Department" (Devine, 1996: 76). Many school districts use more than one form of police, such as campus police with support from local police or private security guards (Casella, 2001).

School Resource Officers (SROs) are the fastest-growing segment of law enforcement officials stationed in public schools. These armed and uniformed law enforcement officials perform multiple tasks, such as patrolling school grounds, assisting with investigations of students who break school rules, and...