Chicago aldermen want cops out of schools
Ordinance crafted to halt $33M in police funding, divert resources to public schools
Aldermen Roderick Sawyer and Jeanette Taylor speak at Tuesday’s news conference outside Chicago City Hall with student Caleb Reed just behind them. (One Illinois/Ted Cox)
By Ted Cox
Three Chicago aldermen are proposing to defund the police by taking the $33 million spent deploying officers to Chicago Pubic Schools and diverting that funding to education.
“Police officers in school are not the answer,” said Alderman Rod Sawyer of the city’s South Side at a news conference held Tuesday outside City Hall. He called the proposal “an initiative to improve learning” and devote “more resources for our children.”
Sawyer is joined by Aldermen Jeanette Taylor of the South Side Carlos Ramirez-Rosa of the West Side as lead sponsors of an ordinance to be introduced at Wednesday’s City Council meeting. It will call for the city to halt the $33 million spent on average annually on Chicago Police to patrol schools and instead spend that money on resources like case managers, counselors, therapists, and nurses — personnel Taylor said will be critical in reacclimating students as they return to classrooms in the fall.
“We don’t need police officers and people with guns in public education,” Taylor said.
“We have adequate security officers that are in schools right now,” Sawyer said. Charging that adding police officers to that mix amounts to “overpolicing our schools,” Sawyer said, “We don’t think the money is well-spent to have police officers” in school.
The aldermen cited data from the U.S. Department of Education finding that Chicago had the highest reported number of school-based arrests of any district in the country in the 2015-16 school year, the most recent data available. Of the 1,030 arrests of students, more than 70 percent were African-American students, even though they represent less than 40 percent of CPS’s student population. Some 97 percent of the school-based arrests were of students of color.
Caleb Reed, a student at Mather High School and a leader of Voices of Youth in Chicago Education, a grassroots student group, said he’d been arrested at a basketball game as a sophomore because he hadn’t had his student identification card and was held for six hours.
“Is that what we teach young people?” Taylor said. “You have a bad day you can go to jail?”
“They should be around schools. They should not be in schools,” Sawyer said. “We want police officers to support us. We don’t want them to occupy us. We don’t want them occupying our schools, occupying our streets. We want them to support. On the car it says, ‘Serve and Protect.’ That’s what we want them to do.”
He charged that kids were being “criminalized for being students at CPS.”
The proposal comes in the midst of a national debate in the wake of the killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police late last month, as well as many other incidents across the country, and amid moves to “defund the police,” meaning to divert resources from police departments to other issues they’re usually forced to deal with, such as the homeless and the mentally ill.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot, however, has resisted calls to remove Chicago Police from the city’s public schools, saying, “Unfortunately, we need security in our schools. … I think we’ve got a very good track record this school year making sure that CPS is in control — that officers are there for a limited purpose.”
On Tuesday, though, she issued a statement that seemed more sympathetic, and basically threw the issue to Local School Councils: “As our CPS school communities have made clear to me, the first priority in bringing safety to any school setting is a strong, interconnected community that engages with the criminal-justice system only as a last resort. That's why CPS has begun hiring a social worker and nurse for every school to support the needs of Chicago students and to attempt to avoid needless interaction with the justice system. I support CPS' steps, following their lengthy and deliberative process with CPD and community members over the past year, to balance serious concerns for safety in schools with the need to stem the school-to-prison pipeline that has harmed too many children in communities across the country. CPS implemented sweeping changes earlier this year to ensure Local School Councils are empowered to make their own decisions about whether to have school resource officers in their schools. I am pleased that both CPS and CPD are soliciting feedback and engagement on this issue so they can be sure to respond to various communities' concerns.”
“I understand the mayor’s position, and I have great respect for her,” Sawyer said. “But we have to look at what the facts are.”
“To me, it’s common sense,” Taylor added, “and any elected official who doesn’t agree the police need to be out of school doesn’t deserve to serve the citizens of Chicago.”