Parkland parents who pushed safety reforms after Florida’s deadliest school shooting have shifted their attention to a new issue: Keeping police officers on campus as protesters call for them to be defunded.
One of the legacies of the 2018 Stoneman Douglas massacre was a state law that requires at least one armed guard on every school campus in Florida. That has meant more police officers and armed guards patrolling school hallways than ever before.
The intention was to stop another school shooting, such as the one in Parkland that left 17 students and staff dead.
But in the wake of the George Floyd killing, a national backlash has erupted against law enforcement’s presence in schools. Activists say police officers on campus are worsening the school-to-prison pipeline and are too often using excessive force against students of color.
They point to videos like the one that captured the arrest of a 6-year-old girl Orlando who had her hands zip-tied by a police officer at school. The girl had thrown a temper-tantrum.
Ryan Petty, whose 14-year-old daughter was killed in the Parkland shooting, said removing police officers from schools would be a big mistake. More money should be spent on school policing — not less — to ensure officers are properly trained, he said.
“School resource officers play a key role in school violence prevention,” said Petty, who is also a member of the state Board of Education. “It is not just school attacks like we saw in Parkland. It is general school safety.”
School officials in Milwaukee, Denver, Portland, Minneapolis and Oakland have scaled back police presence on campuses. School board members in Oakland adopted “the George Floyd Resolution,” which dissolved the school system’s police force and redirected the money to social workers and mental health services.
Floyd died in May after a white Minneapolis police officer pressed a knee into his neck for several minutes. The handcuffed Black man cried out that he couldn’t breathe.
Tony Montalto, president of the school safety group Stand with Parkland, said he’s been trying to educate leaders that well-trained school resource officers are mentors and role models to children.
“They are a valuable part of the safety picture,” said Montalto, whose 14-year-old daughter died in the Parkland shooting. “Instead of throwing out what we have been doing, we need to accept more training needs to be done. The data does not justify eliminating SROs.”
The juvenile arrest rate fell 74% from 1996 to 2018, even as more officers were placed in schools following the 1999 Columbine school shooting, according to U.S. Department of Justice statistics.
Not everyone affected by the Parkland tragedy thinks more policing makes schools safer or is a wise use of taxpayer dollars.
Cameron Kasky, a 19-year-old student activist who co-founded March for Our Lives, said money spent on school police would be better channeled into mental health services that could help troubled children before a tragedy occurs.
“You open Pandora’s box for racist, violent attacks by putting more police officers in school,” he said.
About 14 million students in the United States attend schools with police but no counselor, nurse, psychologist or social worker, according to a study by the American Civil Liberties Union.
Stoneman Douglas had a dedicated school resource officer, but former Deputy Scot Peterson did not rush in to confront the shooter.
“We had an armed officer in our school, and he ran away from the shooting and hid like a baby,” Kasky said.
Petty and Montalto cite a U.S. Secret Service review of 41 school attacks that found none of those incidents was ended by off-campus law enforcement intervention. The review found on-campus law enforcement ended six of those attacks.
The Parkland gunman’s attack was over in about six minutes.
Ryan Deitsch, a 20-year-old student activist and March for Our Lives co-founder, said he thinks each community should decide whether police should be in schools, as opposed to a blanket state law requiring an officer on every campus.
“It is not a preventive measure,” he said. “It is a response measure.”
Skyler Swisher can be reached at sswisher@sunsentinel.com, 561-243-6634 or @SkylerSwisher.
