Good morning. Let’s look at what happens when school police arrest children.
In the systemThere are a lot of police officers in Texas public schools. In the four years since a gunman killed 21 people at an elementary school in Uvalde, districts across the state have spent billions of dollars to put cops on every campus. They’re there both to protect against future attacks and to curb misbehavior and fighting, which swelled after the Covid pandemic. The crackdown has had an unintended consequence, according to an investigation by The Times and The San Antonio Express-News: It has swept tens of thousands of elementary students and middle schoolers into the justice system. In the 2024-25 school year, the most recent one for which data is available, about 4,800 Texans between the ages of 10 and 13 were referred for prosecution. That’s a third more than the number a decade before. What “referred for prosecution” means in plain English: Some kid slaps another kid on the playground, or puffs on a vape in the bathroom, or kicks a principal in frustration or rage, and a uniformed officer with a gun puts the child in handcuffs. Just like that the student’s not just in the school system, but in the criminal justice one, too. That can reshape a life. Some referred children receive a warning. Others end up before a judge, where they’re assigned community service, counseling or court supervision. In more serious cases, they end up in state juvenile justice facilities. In few cases do they return to school unchanged. Research shows that getting handcuffed and dragged out of school can hurt academic performance and can lead to future contact with law enforcement. Referrals are one of the places where the so-called school-to-prison pipeline starts. ‘She just gave up’The stories our reporters recount are chilling. In 2024, a 12-year-old girl in Galveston got sent to the principal’s office for being “disruptive.” School officials suspended her and told her to go wait in the lobby for her mother to pick her up.
She refused to go there. The administrators called for a school police officer, who arrived and told the girl: “You’ve got four seconds to walk over there. Otherwise, I’m going to put you in handcuffs, and we’re going to give you a ride.” The girl didn’t move. “OK, I’m done,” the officer said, and slid off her pink backpack to handcuff her wrists behind her back. His body camera footage shows the sequence:
“I didn’t really know why it was happening,” the girl told our reporters later. “Why would they put me in handcuffs?” The girl was eventually charged with trespassing. Two former school district police chiefs who reviewed the case at The Times’s request said that the arrest and the referral were unnecessary. But the girl pleaded guilty and was put on probation for a year, her mother told our reporters. And now her daughter has even more trouble in class. “She just gave up,” her mother said. The witnessKristian Hernández is one of the reporters who worked on the investigation. A native Texan, he grew up on the border and attended public schools in El Paso. Kristian was a straight-A student, but one of those straight-A students with long heavy-metal hair and a skateboard, the kind who gets in fights. He had plenty of contact with law enforcement along the way. The arrests he documented in schools didn’t surprise him, he told me yesterday. It was the age of those arrested. “There’s a lot of emphasis and even support for making schools more secure,” he said. “I haven’t talked to a single kid or parent who hasn’t expressed a fear of a school shooting.” That fear is understandable. Just yesterday, three kids and a teacher were killed at a school in Oregon. Still, Kristian continued: “What we learned that was surprising — and scary — is that no one is paying attention to what happens when schools are hardened against that threat.” Among other things, it’s 10-year-olds getting placed in the back of police cars, and 12-year-olds asking for lawyers. Please read the whole story, which is by Kristian, Asher Lehrer-Small, Clare Amari and Rosie Cima. A shooting in Oregon
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