Rantz: On school safety, ACLU pushes anti-cop propaganda

The ACLU of Washington believes it’s detrimental to have police officers as a regular presence in schools. While some of their points are valid, unfortunately, it seems fueled more by their anti-cop bias and less about helping students.

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In a report titled “Students Not Suspects,” Vanessa Hernandez, youth policy director at the ACLU, says “The ACLU of Washington believes that police officers should not be a regular part of the school environment. Students, teachers and school staff deserve safe, quality schools — but this cannot be accomplished by reliance on school policing.”

The ACLU should be concerned with teachers and administrators, not necessarily cops. But, they support school staffers and are not fans of the police, so they present incredibly biased information to convince you cops are the problem.

The basic claim from the ACLU is that when police are present, there is a higher likelihood that students will be arrested for misbehavior. That’s troubling to the ACLU since 84 of the 100 largest school districts in the state have police officers present.

In their report, for example, the ACLU cherry-picks a small 2009 study (not out of Washington state) in the Journal of Criminal Justice. The ACLU says the report suggests when officers are presents “arrest rates for disorderly conduct dramatically increase.”

That’s one way of looking at it. Let me quote the points that the ACLU don’t like, and therefore, don’t present:

Concerning the role of SROs (“school resource officers”) in criminalizing student behavior, this study yielded mixed results. The findings showing that SROs were not associated with an increase in total arrests when controlling for school poverty and that schools with an SRO had fewer arrests for weapons and assault charges are encouraging. Such results are contrary to the criminalization hypothesis and may even signify that SROs have a positive impact at schools.

I wonder why the ACLU left this information out. Possibly because it shows the police in a positive light.

The ACLU takes a naturally antagonistic view of police officers and that shades the way they choose to report on this issue. In the opening portion of their report, they highlight the story of a 13-year-old black Washington student who was arrested for refusing to leave the classroom for discipline. The bad guy, as they present, is the cop, but not the teacher who called the officer in.

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Even when discussing the absurd fact that disturbing school is a crime in Washington (though there were only 800 charges against juveniles over a 20-year period), the ACLU manages to criticize the cops for the arrests, not the schools that asked the cops to intervene.

In fact, in the entire 24-page report, I didn’t see anything presenting officers in schools in a positive light, even when the research they use to hate on cops offers positive viewpoints.

This appears to be a report written to prove their point, not to look honestly at the issues and come up with a conclusion. It was written to support their bias. And while you shouldn’t simply dismiss the data, as it raises important questions, you should know it’s a report driven by an anti-cop agenda.

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