See all LastWeekTonight transcripts on Youtube

Speaker 1

00:00

-♪ ♪ -♪ ♪ We're actually gonna start with our main story tonight, which concerns what happened in Uvalde, Texas, 12 days ago, when an 18-year-old armed with 2 AR-15s killed 19 children and 2 teachers at an elementary school. And look, we all know what the key problem is here. It's guns. It's because we let basically whoever wants to buy a gun in this country have 1, which has led to tragic consequences.

Speaker 1

00:29

The vast majority of mass shooters, including the shooters at Uvalde and Parkland, obtained the weapons they used through legal purchases. So we know what the answer to this problem is, too. It's gun control. It's meaningful, effective gun laws.

Speaker 1

00:45

But that hasn't stopped some from desperately pitching absolutely anything other than that as a solution.

Speaker 2

00:51

The only solution is Christ Jesus and being able to get some type of spirituality and prayer back into our schools.

Speaker 3

00:58

Man traps, a series of interlocking doors at the school entrance that are triggered by a trip wire.

Speaker 4

01:04

I would like to see this national push toward instead of parents buying their kids all these tools and toys and games, invest in the classroom to make it safer. I mean, They have blankets that you can put up on the wall that are colorful and beautiful, but they're ballistic blankets.

Speaker 1

01:20

What are you talking about? Use a blanket is not a strategy for stopping deaths during a school shooting. It's barely a strategy for a bird got in the house.

Speaker 1

01:30

-♪ ♪ -♪ And while those ideas are clearly ridiculous, hardening our schools often comes up as an alternative to gun control. And at the NRA convention that inexplicably still took place in Texas, just 3 days after the shooting there, Wayne Lapierre pitched the exact same solution that he did after Sandy Hook and after Parkland.

Speaker 5

01:52

We also need to fully fund our nation's police departments and school security resource officer programs.

Speaker 1

01:59

-♪ ♪ -♪ Exactly. Put police, or school resource officers, or SROs, as they're sometimes called, into schools. And I guess it's not that surprising that the solution from the CEO of the NRA is more people with guns.

Speaker 1

02:15

It'd be like hearing, the garbage dump is overflowing, so we need more piles of garbage from the head of the National Raccoon Association. I mean, what else do you really expect him to say? But the idea of adding police to schools does seem to come up in the wake of every big school shooting, and crucially, it's then the thing that we always do. In fact, in the 6 years after the Columbine massacre in 1999, the federal government awarded over $750 million, resulting in the hiring of over 6,500 SROs.

Speaker 1

02:47

And since then, it has exploded to the point that the most recent data available shows 58% of American schools report having a sworn law enforcement officer on campus at least once a week. And this has happened even as vital resources for students have been starved. A recent report found 14 million students go to a school with police, but without a counselor, nurse, psychologist, or social worker. That is 14 million kids who are in closer proximity to a pair of handcuffs than they are to a medical or mental health professional.

Speaker 1

03:21

And to hear some cops tell it, there is upside to their presence that goes far beyond school safety, that they're also there to build trust in police from an early age.

Speaker 6

03:31

Do you think every school should have a police officer at it?

Speaker 5

03:34

Unfortunately, yes. It's sad. And if you think of it morbidly.

Speaker 5

03:40

But if you think of it, building relationships for our future, why not? Wouldn't hurt.

Speaker 1

03:48

Wouldn't hurt? Are you absolutely sure about that? Because, little secret, if we are showing you something on this show, it could absolutely hurt.

Speaker 1

03:56

There has never been a moment where we've shown you a clip where a cop goes, wouldn't hurt, and we've said, you're right, Officer Big Man, it wouldn't. Anyway, that's our show. Have a great weekend. -♪ ♪ -♪ So, given that, once again, in the wake of yet another school shooting, we seem poised to throw more cops into our schools.

Speaker 1

04:13

We thought tonight, it'd be worth talking about school police. Whether they are the answer to this particular problem, the answer to any problems, or whether they're actually a pretty big problem themselves. And let's start by acknowledging that this idea isn't just coming from the NRA. It's coming from parents too, like this man, who back in February, showed up at a county council meeting.

Speaker 6

04:33

Alex Turner tells us he is all in favor of the idea of adding SROs.

Speaker 3

04:38

It's for the simple fact that they've got a force multiplier in the school where they could stop some imminent threat to our children.

Speaker 6

04:46

Turner has 2 young children, and his wife works at a school district in the county.

Speaker 3

04:51

What scares me the most is, is the thought of her having to use a backpack to defend herself from someone with a gun. Our children are the most important thing to our future. They're future taxpayers.

Speaker 3

05:03

They're future citizens that are gonna invest in our community.

Speaker 1

05:07

Okay. Obviously... That guy calling children future taxpayers... Is a little bit weird.

Speaker 1

05:15

Although, who among us has not walked into our sleeping child's room, become overtaken by the serenity on their face and thought to ourselves, wow, what a miracle. I wonder if she'll grow up to file with a W-2 or a 1099. Parenthood truly is a joyous mystery. But I do get what he's trying to say there.

Speaker 1

05:34

The thought of someone coming into a school and hurting your child is incredibly scary. I don't think that all people who believe that police officers make schools safer have bad intentions or are arguing in bad faith. But I do believe that they are wrong. Because for the record, the answer to the question, do policing schools deter school shootings, is basically, no.

Speaker 1

05:56

Experts who've studied this have found that school shooters were not deterred due to the presence of metal detectors, locked doors, security cameras, or school resource offices. And if you're thinking, well, okay, but what about when a shooting's actually happening? They could stop them then, right? Don't be so sure.

Speaker 1

06:12

Famously, both Uvalde and Parkland had school police officers, and things still went the way that they did. Instances of school police stopping shootings are actually incredibly rare. There was 1 example 4 years ago, but when the Washington Post looked into it after that, they could only find 1 other case in the preceding 19 years, where a resource officer gunned down an active shooter. It's actually much easier to find stories of shootings stopped by faculty and school counselors.

Speaker 1

06:40

But rather than arguing anecdote by anecdote, it might be helpful to look at the larger data, because on the whole, an analysis of 179 shootings on school grounds, which is a brutal thing to say out loud on its own, found no evidence that the presence of school resource officers lessened the severity of school shootings. If anything, they could actually make it worse, as this researcher explains.

Speaker 7

07:05

So when we've looked at this, and looked at school shootings and attempted school shootings, what's remarkable is that when you have armed officers on the scene, you actually see more casualties. Often because that perpetrator is suicidal, they're familiar with that school, they know that officer is there, and so they come in heavily armed.

Speaker 1

07:25

Right. And if school cops can make shootings worse, why then are we still pitching them as a solution? If OFF discovered that their mosquito repellent attracted mosquitoes, they'd stop selling it, or at the very least, rebrand it as a cologne for lonely mosquito bachelors. The point is, the evidence for cops in schools deterring school shootings just is not there.

Speaker 1

07:48

And the evidence for the damage they can do is significant. So for the rest of this piece, let's actually put shootings aside and consider the very real impact that school police can have on kids every day that they are there. The National Association of School Resource Officers, essentially the trade group for these officers, will argue that they serve many functions in schools way beyond security. They even developed a triad concept of school policing that suggests an SRO should simultaneously be a teacher, informal counselor, and law enforcement officer.

Speaker 1

08:20

And I will say, there are undoubtedly schools where some kids see their police officers that way. You've probably seen videos of them doing carpool karaoke in their squad car with kids, or doing a fun dance at their halftime show. Some have even joined kids in extracurricular activities.

Speaker 8

08:37

It's not every day that you see the campus police officer taking on the role of cast member in the school musical.

Speaker 9

08:45

She showed up at our first rehearsal, our first dance rehearsal, and I was like, why is Officer Griffin here? Is someone in trouble? But then everyone was like, no, she's joining the show.

Speaker 9

08:55

She's gonna dance with us. And I was shocked.

Speaker 1

08:57

-♪ ♪

Speaker 10

08:58

-Shocked, because Prior to her participation, most of these students were intimidated by the officer tasked with keeping order on campus. It's true. A cop was in

Speaker 1

09:08

the school musical. And just imagine how challenging that casting decision must have been for the theater teacher. Well, Susie has a fantastic vocal range.

Speaker 1

09:17

Hannah B. Really learned the choreography. Jillian's a senior, so it does feel like it's her time to get a big role, but Officer Griffin has a gun, so... You know, I guess I'm just gonna go with Officer Griffin.

Speaker 1

09:31

But clearly, tap dancing Officer Griffin here is not the norm. In fact, while school police in more well-resourced schools often do have an expanded role, including education and mentoring, in disadvantaged schools, they're more likely to engage primarily in law enforcement activities. And for all Nasro's talk of the triad model, when they asked their members which prong they identify with the most, over two-thirds selected law enforcement. Because of course they did, they're cops.

Speaker 1

10:00

Most cops don't get into copying because they secretly want to be counselors. They do it because movies make it look exciting and they're tired of stopping at red lights. That's why they do it. And the problem is, faculty and school administrators will sometimes use those cops to deal with basic disciplinary problems in the school, as this teacher explains.

Speaker 11

10:21

I see that teachers have neglected to figure out a way to handle a lot of problems on their own that they used to. Things that were up to the teacher before are now just a phone call away.

Speaker 3

10:31

How many of your peers are just picking up the phone and calling the school resource office?

Speaker 11

10:34

I'd say the majority of teachers are doing that. Definitely 75 percent out of all of us, if I just want to make a rough guess, are doing that. Because they go in with a set lesson plan, and when the kid doesn't want to do it, what do I do?

Speaker 11

10:47

I get him out of the classroom.

Speaker 1

10:49

Yeah, but that's not good. And I know teachers have an exhausting job, and for some reason, society's decided that their reward for that is insultingly low pay and occasional thank you apples. And it's not the point here, but why apples?

Speaker 1

11:03

Exactly. Why have we decided to reward teachers the same way we reward mediocre horses? Because the good horses get sugar cubes. Now, am I saying teachers should get sugar cubes instead of apples?

Speaker 1

11:16

I'm not not saying that. But the larger point is, while I understand a frustrated, overworked teacher wanting a troublemaking kid out of their classroom, involving the police in that is a very dangerous impulse for many reasons. 1 of them is, policing schools can and do arrest students. In fact, in the most recent year recorded, they did this to over 54,000 of them, which is a huge number.

Speaker 1

11:43

If you ask me, what do you think happens 54,000 times inside schools? I'd say, I don't know, the number of classroom pets that went missing because a student left the lid off the cage, or the number of times a teacher lost total control of her class when any part of her private life was revealed. Oh, my God! She had her computer hooked up to the projector and an e-vite from someone named Jim appeared.

Speaker 1

12:04

Who is Jim? Are you in love? Will you have his babies? -♪♪ And if you're thinking, wow, a kid must be doing something really bad to get arrested in school.

Speaker 1

12:17

Not really. Students have been charged with assault for things like throwing a paper airplane, a baby carrot and Skittles, and drug possession for carrying a maple leaf. And when a five-year-old with ADHD had a tantrum, They were charged with battery on a police officer. When clearly the only thing they were guilty of was being a fucking five-year-old.

Speaker 1

12:39

And take what happened with Keira Wilmot. When she was a high school student, she tried to replicate the experiment that she'd seen in class, where you set off a chemical reaction in a plastic bottle to make the cap blow off. And I'll let her, and then her mother, explain what happened next.

Speaker 12

12:53

The principal and vice-principal were, like, about 10 feet away. And when it popped, They came over and asked what was going on. I told them it was a science project, and they were just like, okay.

Speaker 12

13:06

At the end of third grade, they take me out and then walked me to the resource officer. He was like, this is considered a felony. I might have to arrest you for this. And then I was just handcuffed and put in the car.

Speaker 13

13:20

A trained officer of the law arrested, put my daughter in handcuffs, put her in the back of a police car, and took her to the juvenile assessment center... ...And charged her with 2 felony charges.

Speaker 1

13:37

That is so fucking stupid for so many reasons. 1 of which is that when you hear felony for a science experiment, you're thinking meth. If I gave you 500 guesses for what science experiment got someone charged with a felony, your first 499 guesses would be meth, and the next 1 would be, are you 100% sure that it's not meth?

Speaker 1

14:00

Never in your wildest dreams would it be popping a bottle cap, unless inside that bottle was some meth. Now, I should say, the charges against Keira were later dropped, but she still had to check the box on her college application asking, have you been arrested? And as crazy as this sounds, she was technically lucky in that at least she had press coverage of her ridiculous arrest that she could direct the college to. But that is obviously not the case for many, many others.

Speaker 1

14:28

The fact is, kids with criminal records can have a much harder time getting jobs, scholarships, and a host of other benefits and opportunities. And while it's true that you can apply to have your juvenile record sealed, usually once you turn 18, there is no guarantee that that will happen. So an arrest alone can still do significant damage, as some of those involved in this system will admit.

Speaker 14

14:50

I think we certainly see a lot of cases that we think, seriously?

Speaker 15

14:53

Garnett says close to 70% of the time, her probation officers decide the offense isn't actually serious enough to get referred to the district attorney for criminal charges. But even in those cases, much of the damage is already done. The child can still be left with a criminal record?

Speaker 14

15:10

Well it'll still show an arrest on their on their rap sheet, yes absolutely. They've been arrested. I mean if they're if the case comes to us they've been arrested.

Speaker 14

15:19

Whether they were put in handcuffs and brought to us, or just given a slip of paper by the police, they've been arrested.

Speaker 15

15:24

And is that fair?

Speaker 14

15:27

Well...

Speaker 16

15:28

I mean...

Speaker 14

15:31

No, I don't think it's fair.

Speaker 1

15:33

Wow, that was a long pause. And it's not a great sign that a chief probation officer is responding to the question, is the justice system fair? Like they're stalling for time on Jeopardy after accidentally buzzing in.

Speaker 1

15:46

And I will say, at least she is acknowledging there that the system has a significant problem. What is absolutely maddening is watching this former director of student services for the county where she works try to make excuses for it.

Speaker 16

16:00

No student that's attending our campus is getting a criminal record because of something we've done. We don't focus on arresting or sending kids away. That's completely counter to what an educator should do.

Speaker 16

16:12

But that is what's happening. That is Not happening in my school district.

Speaker 15

16:16

But in a single school year, 283 kids in your district were referred to police. Okay. So it is happening.

Speaker 16

16:24

Kids are cited on our campuses sometimes, yes.

Speaker 15

16:26

And do you know that this can give them a criminal record?

Speaker 16

16:30

I know what happens when I issue my own consequences. I don't know what happens when police issue their consequences.

Speaker 15

16:34

So you have no idea that these kids are getting criminal records?

Speaker 16

16:37

I wouldn't know that 1 way or the other.

Speaker 15

16:40

But don't you head discipline for the district?

Speaker 16

16:42

And I take care of discipline for the district. If consequences go beyond that into the legal realm, that's not our purview, that's not our business.

Speaker 1

16:50

Holy shit, that is selective. Not your business? Oh, no, my good bitch!

Speaker 1

16:56

That is very much your business. And I do understand the distinction that budget Bill Murray is trying to draw there. There is school discipline, which falls under his purview, but if a kid breaks the law, then it's a police thing. But in practice, once you let the police into your schools, that line gets really blurry, and you are gonna start getting stupid arrests for things like science experiments or throwing baby carrots, or in the district where that guy worked, the indefensible arrest of this autistic student.

Speaker 15

17:26

2 years ago, Adrian was at his school, Bret Hart Middle in San Jose, when he used a small rock to etch the letters ADRX on the sidewalk. The abbreviation is how Adrian often signed his name on school assignments. The letters measured just 6 inches tall, but the school believed they were big enough for reason to involve campus police.

Speaker 15

17:47

Adrian was arrested at 13.

Speaker 17

17:49

I thought maybe someone would look at it and say, oh, look, a legend. Oh, look, a legend. This is so cool.

Speaker 17

17:58

A legend was at this school.

Speaker 1

18:00

Okay, for the record, that kid was and remains a legend. Because to 13-year-olds, there is simply nothing cooler than initials written somewhere. It doesn't matter where or with what, all that matters is that the initials are somewhere and that is cool.

Speaker 1

18:15

On a desk? Yes, please. On a lamppost? I love it.

Speaker 1

18:19

Way high up on a wall, how did they get it up there? We even put Adrian's initials onto the set behind me to make it absolutely clear to everyone that a legend was very much here. That story is completely bananas even before you learn that the letters he etched came right off with some soap and water after his mother had him clean it up. But it also speaks to a bigger issue, which is that students with disabilities are almost 3 times more likely to be arrested, even though kids with developmental disabilities can have difficulty understanding or following the rules and require support staff familiar with their specific needs.

Speaker 1

18:57

And they are not the only students disproportionately singled out, because cops in schools do tend to behave the same way they behave outside of schools, which explains why black students account for nearly a third of all students arrested, despite the fact that that is twice their share of enrollment. That is just 1 reason why, while you may hear a lot of white kids talk about their friendly SRO, black students, even in the same school, may see them very differently.

Speaker 6

19:24

It was almost like this man was Judge Juree and Executioner, and he was menacing looking. And literally, he walked through the halls like he owned the place. Every conversation you had with him was tense.

Speaker 6

19:38

It was literally just students of color. I don't think even the black SRO that we had at Southwest, I had never seen him speak to a white student. They knew who they were looking for, they had their kids that they like... Low-key terrorized.

Speaker 6

19:54

There are so many students who would have had a great time, but had a horrible time because of an SRO or because of a cop.

Speaker 1

20:03

Right. The presence of police can make school miserable for some kids, and we frankly don't need any more ways to make school scarier. It's already terrifying enough. If you ask me what is the scariest place I can imagine, it's not a haunted house or the inside of Tom Cruise's brain.

Speaker 1

20:21

It's high school, because remember, I was this. And it's not just... No key Terrorizing. You may be familiar with viral videos of school cops behaving violently.

Speaker 1

20:34

Videos that sometimes went on to make awful headlines like these. And because cops in schools enjoy all the same protections they do everywhere else, the consequences in many of these cases can be non-existent. In Osceola County, Florida, an officer was filmed throwing a female student to the floor, knocking her unconscious. But he wasn't charged with any wrongdoing, and his supervisor, the county sheriff, fully supported that outcome.

Speaker 18

20:59

A lot of things are never gonna look pretty on camera, but guess what? You know, this worked out, and, it's a positive thing for law enforcement.

Speaker 4

21:08

Sheriff Lopez defending deputy Fournier's actions despite criticism and public scrutiny.

Speaker 18

21:15

It's unfortunate that the young lady went through this incident, but it's also unfortunate that my deputy had to suffer a lot of constant bashing and harassment, you know, when he just did how he was trained.

Speaker 1

21:28

I honestly think no 1 makes a better case for defunding the police than the police themselves. If throwing a kid to the ground, and then having your boss complain about how everyone was rude to you afterward is emblematic of how you were trained, then the problem is clearly the training, the cops themselves, the entire system, and not for nothing, that sheriff's fake Oakley sunglasses. But the sheriff of Flavortown here does raise an interesting point.

Speaker 1

21:55

School police get trained as cops, but that might be the only training they get. Because requirements vary widely in each state if they exist at all, and national training requirements for school-based law enforcement simply do not exist. And when you've got law enforcement stationed in a school, taking ordinary disciplinary situations and escalating them, the consequences, as you have seen tonight, can be truly terrible. In researching this piece, we found so many stories where kids are still traumatized by the experiences that they had even years later, and felt they both changed the trajectory of their lives and how they interact with the world.

Speaker 1

22:34

If you are over a certain age, this is so much more prevalent than you might think. We don't have a particularly large staff, but multiple members of it have come forward as we put this story together this week, citing terrible behavior by school police they'd either directly witnessed or experienced firsthand. And we're not even getting into the fact that schools with SROs have higher rates of exclusionary discipline, things like suspensions and expulsions than comparable schools without SROs, which has been shown to be associated with lower academic achievement, dropout, and increased behavioral problems both in and out of school. So when that guy that you saw earlier argued for more police in every school, saying, why not?

Speaker 1

23:15

It wouldn't hurt. The answer to that is, it absolutely can, and it does all the time. And for all the arguing right now about how we need more police in schools, I would argue that we may actually need significantly less. And small reforms just are not gonna cut it here.

Speaker 1

23:33

Some places have tried that with tactics that kept the police in schools, but tried to make them appear less intimidating. About 5 years ago, some districts in Minnesota, where that kid went to school, redesigned their school police uniforms to light blue polo shirts. Something that unsurprisingly, students there, including him, saw right through.

Speaker 6

23:52

Every day, I go to school as a young black male teen, and I have to see, our SRO just wandering the hallways. He's always in our classrooms. He's always in the hallways.

Speaker 6

24:03

Your compromise is to give them softer outfits? That doesn't make sense. Like, it's... At the end of the day, a cop is a cop.

Speaker 6

24:11

Whether you dress them up in red, yellow, blue, it doesn't matter.

Speaker 1

24:15

Yeah, he's right. Teenagers aren't stupid. You can't send the cop uniform to a farm upstate.

Speaker 1

24:21

They know what is going on. A cop is gonna be a cop no matter what we dress them up in. Fuchsia? Still a cop.

Speaker 1

24:28

Vermilion? Still a cop. Cher's dress from the 1986 Oscars. Still a cop, and now they're wearing something they couldn't pull off in their wildest fucking dreams.

Speaker 1

24:38

Now, there are some slightly bigger steps that we could take, like demanding school districts adopt rules that keep cops out of routine student discipline. And We could also require that they have comprehensive training that includes de-escalation and working with students with disabilities. Or, we could just try and get them out of schools altogether. Some cities like Oakland, California, have done that.

Speaker 1

24:58

And I am not saying it is simple. There is still a thoughtful, ongoing conversation there about how to handle everything from routine discipline to emergency situations, because they know getting rid of school police doesn't mean walking away from school safety. What it means is asking ourselves, what really keeps kids safe? And I would argue that 1 good way to do that might be to take the money that it seems we're now inevitably about to flood towards school cops, and instead, direct it toward counselors, nurses, and all the other resources that actually protect students.

Speaker 1

25:32

School police are not the answer to school shootings. The answer to that is gun control. And when we throw more cops into schools as an easy way out of that difficult and necessary conversation, We not only fail to keep our kids safe from gun violence, we condemn them to a system that criminalizes the very essence of childhood. Kids deserve to be annoying without being arrested, to be sad and angry without being body slammed.

Speaker 1

26:01

They deserve to have tantrums, throw carrots, do science experiments, talk shit, and carve their name into stuff, without risking ending up in the back of a police car. They deserve to be curious, to make mistakes, to go a little too far, to be a little too loud, to basically be a fucking kid. And they definitely deserve better than the fundamental lie that the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy who can arrest a five-year-old. You