Policing Black Youth

Abstract

Policing has become a popular topic of inquiry in social science literature, but much of this attention has been confined to traditional forms of policing, focusing on state and municipal police departments or, in the case of schools, have focused on disciplinary policies. In seeking to expand the contours of what the scholarly community defines as police, we focus our attention on the origins of K-12 school policing. Specifically, using a multi-modal historical approach, we provide a history of when and why police were stationed in schools in cities throughout the United States. Focusing on the sequencing of events, we show that when the dominant White status quo is challenged by the movement of Black people into formerly White dominated areas and demands are made for education equity from those groups, the state responds by bolstering fears of violence from Black youth and implementing punitive state structures in the form of placing police officers in schools.