Government Study of the Public Fool System Found that the Arrest Rates of Black Students More Than Doubled if their School Had a Police Officer Stationed on Campus

From [HERE] A new government analysis has found that the arrest rates of Black students more than doubled if their school had a police officer stationed on campus. 

The General Accounting Office, a nonpartisan federal watchdog agency, also found that for Black boys with disabilities, including students with special-education plans, the difference in arrest rates widened even further.

“GAO’s analysis of the Department of Education’s data collected from nearly every U.S. school district found that students’ race and ethnicity, gender, and disability status were all prominent with respect to rates of arrest and referrals to police, especially when the characteristics intersected,” according to the report. 

Jackie Nowicki, director of GAO’s education team, said the report shines a light on a critical problem that schools have yet to fully address. 

“It is really clear from our statistical modeling that race, and gender, and disability status all matter when it comes to things like arrests in schools–especially when students have more than one of those characteristics,” she said on “Watchdog Report,” the GAO’s podcast. “But they matter differently for different groups of kids.” 

Titled “K-12 Education: Differences in Student Arrest Rates Widen When Race, Gender, and Disability Status Overlap,” the report found that arrest rates more than doubled in schools with police present compared to similar schools without police. The report also found that, of the 51% of schools with police present at least once a week, arrests were more common when the police were involved in student discipline.

Though procedures vary from one state to another, arrests typically are divided between paper arrests, in which the student receives a citation and is referred to police for investigation, and physical arrests, in which a police officer serving on campus handcuffs the student and takes them into custody. [MORE]