Most kids in the U.S. go to a school that’s patrolled by police officers. They’re supposed to keep students safe, but after decades of increased surveillance, in-school arrests have skyrocketed for kids of all ages. And most of the kids arrested at school are students of color.
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Episode 6: Police Free Schools
What does school safety really mean?
A group of students in Des Moines, Iowa didn’t need data to know that police in their school district were harmful to their friends and family, so they set out to do something about it. Here’s how they worked with their community to build a greater movement to protect students, and especially students of color.
Learn more about the Advancement Project’s Opportunity to Learn campaign here.
Read Episode 6 Full Transcript Below
[MUX IN: SWIRLING SAX, THUMPING SYNTH BASS]
ASHLEY [VO]: I’m Ashley C. Ford, and this is Into the Mix, a Ben & Jerry’s podcast about joy and justice, produced with Vox Creative.
[MUX LINGER]
ASHLEY [VO]: Just before we get started: a gentle heads up that we discuss police brutality in today’s episode. There is a lot of hope, and joy here, as well.
[AMBIENT: KAI SETTLING IN TO READ A POEM: THEIR CHAIR SQUEAKS, AND THEY SPEAK QUIETLY AS THEY FIND THE RIGHT PAGE TO READ.]
ASHLEY [VO]: But please: take care.
KAI: things i’m sure of;
ASHLEY [VO]: Here’s Kai Brown.
KAI: “Blk boys look blue in the moonlight
Lips ashy
Neck rung
Gasping
Blue hands touch them like god
and i’m sure blood is red
red like danger, like sticky and promising
because i’ve seen it spill
even after i was told it was blue before it touched oxygen
even after i looked at my blue veins
i was still sure it was red
and if blood was blue
maybe that’s why cops spill it
and i’m sure blk boys look blue in the moon light
and i’m sure i want to tuck them in every night at dusk to make sure they make it to dawn.”
ASHLEY [VO]: Kai, who penned and performed that poem you just heard, called ‘Things I’m Sure Of,” grew up in Des Moines, Iowa.
[MUX IN: SIMPLE, CONTEMPLATIVE PIANO WITH THUMPING BASS LINE. A SWIRLING SAX JOINS THE BACKGROUND]
ASHLEY [VO]: Des Moines is a place that is dominated by whiteness – over 70% of the population is white. Everywhere you look – at family wealth, home ownership, education – the racial disparities are staggering. And nowhere are those disparities more striking than in Iowa’s prisons, where Black people represent 25% of prisoners, despite making up just 4% of the state’s population.
And it starts early. Elementary school early.
[MUX BREATHE, THEN FADE DOWN SLOWLY]
LYRIC: I was able to see, like, the effects of police and policing youth in my own family ‘cuz I had two sisters who were just troubled in school. They got in trouble a lot. They got sent home a lot.
ASHLEY [VO]: This is Lyric Sellers. Lyric graduated from the Des Moines Public School district in 2022. She and Kai were classmates.
LYRIC: But one of my sisters actually ended up in the juvenile justice system and I got to see the effects of that and get to see today the… still the long-term effects of that, because she was never really re-invited into the school climate... as soon as she had any type of altercation where police intervened, she was in the juvenile justice system and only got deeper into the system.
ENDI: When I was a little kid, every time I thought of the police, I thought of ICE and it made me think of my family.
ASHLEY [VO]: Endi Montalvo-Martinez is another Des Moines Public Schools graduate, and a classmate of Kai and Lyric’s.
ENDI: So walking into a school building and the first thing you see is a police officer posted up just like surveilling everyone. It really doesn’t create, like, a safe environment. I like, could feel in my body… like already tense up and like, I felt like I was doing something wrong.
ASHLEY [VO]: Like many, and in fact, most students across the country, Endi, Lyric and Kai went to schools patrolled by police officers, who you’ll hear them refer to as “SROs,” or “school resource officers.”
SROs are sworn law-enforcement officers, empowered to arrest students in school halls all over America.
[MUX IN: SIMPLE, THUMPING BASS LINE]
ASHLEY [VO]: Uniformed police officers have been patrolling school halls since the fifties. Their numbers increased steadily through the “tough on crime” eighties, thanks to President Nixon’s War on Drugs policies… but it wasn’t until the tragic Columbine High School massacre in 1999 that their presence really spiked.
After 1999, federal grants put money – and lots of it – towards stationing officers in schools across the country.
ENDI: To think that having a police officer, police officers in every school building to address safety is kind of like dumb ‘cuz it doesn’t really make sense. Cause like, they can only show up after the harm has already been done. To think that schools should be investing in SROs when we’re not investing in social workers, when we’re not investing in psychologists, when we’re not investing in counselors, when we know that the data supports that their placement in schools does positive things for students… really just doesn’t make sense.
[MUX FADE DOWN]
ASHLEY [VO]: While police were put in place with the idea of protecting students, and making schools safer… studies suggest, over and over again, that policing in schools only makes students less safe.
Black students in Iowa are almost eight times more likely to be arrested by school police officers than white students.
Latino students were arrested at nearly two times the rate of their white peers, and students with disabilities were arrested at three times the rate of their fellow students without disabilities.
But: there’s a new experiment happening, in Des Moines, in the very same hallways that Endi, Lyric and Kai walked.
[THEME MUX IN: TRIUMPHANT PIANO, ORGAN AND PERCUSSION]
ASHLEY [VO]: These three incredible leaders wanted to find out: what does safety look like for students? And particularly, for students of color?
ENDI: Safety is like subjective and safety is like complex and, it entails so many things.
And to think that only one person can ensure safety for the 2000 plus students that go to the school building is just…
“Safety is like subjective and safety is like complex and, it entails so many things.“
[THEME MUX PAUSE]
ENDI: …harmful, honestly.
[THEME MUX RETURN]
ASHLEY [VO]: Today, we’re telling the story of how these amazing students came together to keep their classmates safe… by removing SROs from their school district entirely.
Let’s get into it.
[THEME RISE AND LINGER BEFORE FADING OUT]
LYRIC: Seventh grade is kind of when there was like a turning point, and that’s when I just started calling everything racist. I’m like, oh no. Anything that I felt, any type of disrespect, microaggression. As soon as I learned really what that was, you just couldn’t shut me up. I was like Angela Davis up in my school.
ASHLEY [VO]: Lyric and Endi are classmates again at Iowa State, just 30 minutes away from Des Moines.
They’re proud graduates of the Des Moines Public School System. East High School, class of 2022. But just like at any school, there was certainly room for improvement.
LYRIC: I don’t know how else to call it. The audacity, really the caucasity, whatever you wanna call it. Like you could see a lot of, um, white staff trying to make decisions for students that they can’t relate to. And that’s why a lot of staff seen students as a threat and vice versa.
I feel like there was a lot of things that could have been addressed easily and head on if we had the right people in those positions.
“Like you could see a lot of, um, white staff trying to make decisions for students that they can’t relate to. And that’s why a lot of staff seen students as a threat and vice versa. I feel like there was a lot of things that could have been addressed easily and head on if we had the right people in those positions.“
So I think like the fact that our student body was so diverse, but our staff weren’t like, also raised a lot of, um, concerns like amongst the students as well because, then you lack things like cultural competency. Like we saw with our approach to removing SROs, a lot of like, the reasons that they were being diverted to law enforcement was because people just didn’t know how to approach students that didn’t look like them. And so the easiest thing to do was just to push ‘em off to somebody else, but, um, without realizing like the harm that that was causing.
TYLER: Black students are seen as 4.5 years older than their white peers.
ASHLEY [VO]: Tyler Whittenberg leads the Advancement Project’s Opportunity to Learn program, which helps youth leaders reform the practices that criminalize students. Especially students of color. Tyler is also an educator.
TYLER: And we also have to remember, if you’re viewed as older, your response to their behavior is gonna be different. May not be a temper tantrum if I see you as 18, 19, right? The same officers that killed, uh, Eric Garner, the same officers that killed Mike Brown and that, that spurred this nationwide uprising that we are still currently in… are the same officers in our schools.
They are no different. SROs receive maybe a couple weeks of training before they go into the school building, and many SROs are placed in the school building because of an issue they had while they were policing and likely harming people of color in the streets.
LYRIC: I mean it makes students feel like you’re a threat as soon as you walk into the building. Like, there’s a sense of distrust and I think it’s kind of all, it was just very tone deaf to have, um, police in schools ‘cuz it disregarded like the, the traumatizing experiences that students of color have with police.
ASHLEY [VO]: That trauma – that fear that any interaction with police could be a threat to your safety – is what makes their very presence in schools an obstacle to education.
ENDI: I remember like when Lyric and I first started this work, my friend telling me like, “oh yeah, like I had interaction with the SROs,” and I was like, “girl, like, why didn’t you never told me before?”
And she was just saying how like, she had gone into school and she was just trying to get a class and that an SRO and administrator stopped her to like search her bag. They pulled her to the side, put her in office and just like searched her bag. And she obviously didn’t have anything, but like that experience for her was like very exclusionary and like she didn’t feel comfortable in school, like from that point forward.
ASHLEY [VO]: Across the country, all these factors – the lack of cultural competency among the adults in charge, the racial biases that lead to students of color being seen as older than their peers — combine with devastating consequences for kids like Endi, Lyric and Kai.
Before a cop or an SRO can even get involved, Black students are punished more often, and more harshly than their white peers in educational settings.
“Before a cop or an SRO can even get involved, Black students are punished more often, and more harshly than their white peers in educational settings.”
And even when they engage in the same behavior, Black and brown students are more than twice as likely to be referred to police at school… or even arrested.
TYLER: We’re supposed to create educational environments where students feel nurtured, where they feel able to make mistakes and be vulnerable. Adolescence is a time where you’re developing your identity, where you’re constructing your sense of fairness.
And when we create schools that target students of color, we’re essentially pushing them out of the school and into the hands of the justice system where they will continue to be traumatized. That’s why we call it the school to prison pipeline.
“And when we create schools that target students of color, we’re essentially pushing them out of the school and into the hands of the justice system where they will continue to be traumatized. That’s why we call it the school to prison pipeline.”
[MUX IN: SOBER PIANO WITH SYNTH BASS BED]
ASHLEY [VO]: The school to prison pipeline is exactly what it sounds like: a series of policies and disciplinary actions that push students into the criminal legal system.
It’s what happened to Lyric’s sister: cops, placed inside her school, were empowered to arrest her, and criminalize her at their own discretion.
In the Des Moines Public School system, where she was educated, SROs could respond to any incident on the school radio – regardless of whether or not their backup was requested. And once a kid in Des Moines came into contact with an SRO, the school administration had no power over whether or not they were actually charged for a crime.
Out of the school system, and into the justice system.
And for what? Tyler says the school to prison pipeline often starts with the criminalization of age appropriate behavior.
TYLER: If a teacher asks the student to, to stand up and the student refuses to, that could be a suspension, maybe a detention. Maybe we just need to talk to the student to figure it out. It really shouldn’t be any of those things, but that’s what it would be if an officer isn’t there.
[MUX OUT]
TYLER: When you place an officer there, they may be disobeying a lawful order, and now it’s become a misdemeanor, it’s become an arrestable offense. So yeah, essentially the school to prison pipeline is, you know, a system of underinvestment. Of punitive zero tolerance policies that target students, especially students of color in a way that just make it so that they’re more likely to enter the justice system from attending school rather than staying at home.
ASHLEY [VO]: This is how those shocking disparities in Iowa’s prison system begin: when Black and brown students are targeted by the exact people meant to keep them safe. In Des Moines specifically, between 2015 and 2019… the number of in-school arrests doubled. And 41% of those arrests – I’m going to say it again… arrests… happened in elementary and middle schools. These are students between 5 and 13 years old.
[MUX IN: SINGULAR SOBER PIANO KEY IS JOINED BY RISING STRINGS AND SWIRLING SAX]
LYRIC: I guess when I think of school and what my ideal experience is there, there’s no police there, there’s no need for police there. And there are services that prevent the need for, um, having law enforcement or anyone that could put you in handcuffs in your school.
Less than twenty percent of students who enter the juvenile justice system are likely to graduate high school, and almost sixty percent of detained youth are likely to drop out of high school.
And then: there’s the fact that SROs are rarely trained to deal with children, leading to the horrific stories you hear about excessive use of force against minors.
But the moves made in Des Moines show: it doesn’t have to be this way.
[MUX LINGER]
ASHLEY [VO]: When we come back… Lyric and Endi are joined by Kai and Tyler to tell us how they removed SROs from Des Moines, and to discuss the enduring promise of police-free schools.
[MIDROLL BREAK]
LYRIC: After the murder of George Floyd, that’s when everybody swore they was – up and down – they was gonna do everything to do justice to the black community.
ASHLEY [VO]: And that’s where Endi, Lyric, and Kai’s journey to get SROs out of Des Moines Public Schools began.
ENDI: Towards the end of my sophomore year, um, I was just thinking to myself, reflecting on my personal experiences and I was like, dang, like, what’s something that can make this school a little more like, you know, like justice oriented! A little more vibrant, a little more inviting, a little more like, you know!
And, I just like started researching on like what racial equity looks like in education and what sort of changes other schools have done, like in the past. And, I basically started with a proposal. It was just like a line like: revising whitewashed curriculum, removing SROs, hiring and retaining more educators of color, racial equity trainings for educators and administration, like more authentic engagement with students.
LYRIC: And that’s when our district made a proclamation that said they would commit to anti-racism and equity. And so we was like, okay… bet! We got the whole rundown on what y’all, what y’all need to do first!
ASHLEY [VO]: What they needed to do first, was address the SROs in the hallways.
To do that, they put Kai in charge of gathering student testimonials to buffer data around in-school interactions with police in Des Moines… data that didn’t even exist until Lyric and Endi went looking for it.
The data was powerful… but not as powerful as the stories Kai’s classmates shared.
KAI: Policing doesn’t just stop when it comes to like racial issues, if that makes sense. Like policing exists on multiple fronts in marginalization. So like even students who are white would talk about like… a lot of like white girls and white, like female students would talk about like police officers not believing like their sexual assault cases or things like that. A couple of stories were about like students with disabilities and them, like having a flare up with their disability or maybe they were having like, quote unquote “a meltdown.” And then police also like not aiding them or making the situation worse or even like escalating the situation.
And so I think that like, policing has always existed as a structure within like white supremacy to police people of color. But I think that it’s interesting to see how even at the school level it still works to police so many other identities.
ASHLEY [VO]: Those stories inspired the teacher’s union to join their call to remove SROs from the district… a major win.
[MUX IN: A CONTEMPLATIVE LO-FI HIP HOP BEAT WITH RECORD SCRATCHES AND A FLUTE]
[AMBIENT: News tape from WHO13 in Des Moines.
Anchor: “Back to Des Moines schools now, that could be changing their approach to safety and to security. It could start with the removal of school resource officers.”]
ASHLEY [VO]: After months of town halls, conversations with parents, students, and administrators, and unrelenting tenacity from Endi, Lyric and their team of leaders… The Des Moines Public School System suspended their 1.5 million dollar contract with SROs in early 2021.
Later that year, students began a school year free from police, supported instead by a comprehensive, restorative justice-fueled approach to their growth.
ASHLEY: How did you feel when your school decided to remove the security resource officers? What did that feel like for you?
LYRIC: Um, I think it was a really gratifying feeling when um, we finally got to hear that. Cause I think it kind of just proved to us just the power of student voice. Um, because we had everyone and their mom telling us that it was gonna take forever, if ever. Um, but it happened in the span of eight months. And some people said like, we wouldn’t even see this before we graduated, if that.
And so I think it also, um, proved to us that if something is made a priority, it will get done because we remember being told like, oh, it’s not likely to… there’s not enough funds, or we don’t… this and that and the other. Um, but then it happened.
When we finally were able to announce that it actually happened, the amount of students that were just like, thank you… it was enough for me.
ASHLEY: Tyler, I saw you smiling when Lyric started to respond, how did her response strike you? Like what hope does that story give you for kids across the country?
TYLER: We work with grassroots youth-led organizations throughout the United States, um, helping them develop proposals to remove police from schools and demands about the things that they want. They always say there’s not enough funding. They always say they propose a soft policing reform. Let’s take the guns away.
Let’s change their clothes. Let’s put ‘em in an office. They want police officers to be a part of restorative justice. If they give you mental health money, they give you mental health money with the SRO in the hallway. So it really is rejuvenating, um, to hear from both Endi, Lyric and Kai, because we don’t, you know, we are winning in many places, but we don’t win a lot, you know what I mean?
To hear them and hear it’s such a similar struggle that we’ve heard, uh, you know, a struggle that is similar to what we’ve heard throughout the United States. And to hear that they just wouldn’t take it. We’re just not gonna take it. We hear you, but we’re still gonna fight.
Um, and then to hear the joy, uh, that that is, that is felt, um, when they actually attain that victory. It’s just, yeah, I feel like I’m going to take this back to my colleagues and to youth, uh, throughout the United States and let them know about it. And hopefully you all get to meet some of these youth too. But we can talk about that offline *laughs*.
ASHLEY [VO]: When they first set out on this mission, Endi, Lyric and Kai were told over and over again that it was never going to happen. Des Moines would never rid its school halls of SROs.
But, just 8 months after they first started knocking on doors, and holding people of power accountable – asking the adults in the room to take care of them, as children – Endi, Lyric and Kai did just that.
KAI: I think one thing that I’ve been trying to remind myself of is that like so many people in power will look at black and brown folks and tell them that their dreams are too big.
Like I remember getting this speech so often when we talk about like a SRO removal at DMPS, that like our dreams are too big, right? And we have to be realistic about what we want. We know that we can’t live without police and we know that like harm and violence exist and that we can’t like live in a world without that.
And I think that every day just reminding ourselves that like community exists, right? And folks that we love and lean on exist and that like our dreams are, are big, are huge. And that does not mean that they’re not going to come true. That doesn’t mean that we can’t fight every day to make them true.
ASHLEY [VO]: But even once the district made the final call, there was still work to be done to educate parents on the new, data-supported ways their children were going to be kept safe.
ENDI: Following the removal of SROs, there was a lot of push from Latino parents to bring them back. But, um, after having those difficult conversations with them and presenting them the data, like I realized that it truly came from a lack of understanding.
And I remember, um, something that like I will always remember is that at a specific town hall where a lot of Latino parents were, were trying to organize to have them back, um, I showed up and like was able to like hold that space for them to like do that unlearning and like learn about like the student testimonials and learn about the disproportionate data and like what we’d be investing to.
It truly did come from a misunderstanding because they didn’t know that it was a removal. But then in implementation of restorative justice and I remember my Tia was there in support of bringing SROs back, which was okay, still love her and everything. You know, no hard feelings, still see her every Sunday *laughs*.
But she came up to me after crying and like, she hugged me. She was like, “I’m sorry, mijo. Like, um, I truly wish I could see things the way you do.” And that sticks with me to this day because it made me realize that like a lot of parents live in fear. And I think that’s like something that I like about the youth is like they don’t live in fear.
They live in the future andhope in, in the joy and see like the possibilities that that can exist.
KAI: I think that like one thing Angela Davis always talked about, like in her pedagogy is like almost this idea of like killing the cop inside yourself, right? Institutions have taught us to be policed at a very interpersonal level. And I think that is the same, the education system, like the way that teachers talk to students in the hallway or like in the classroom, I think is like a really good example of this, right? Like I work with little kids all the time and so often their teachers will be like, you can’t touch this. You can’t walk on this side of the hallway. You can’t use your voice when you want to.
And I think that is like an example of how the cop exists. Like without the uniform, it exists. Like within the teacher’s voice it exists. And like the teacher wanting to control everything that the student does, even though like thinking about it like, what if I’m seven years old? Why would I want to sit down in one space for eight hours? Right.
And so I think that we need to decolonize the way that we teach and what we say to students in the classroom in order to continue having this education system, right, in a way that supports students in what they need in their learning.
[MUX IN: LO-FI CHOIR WITH TRIUMPHANTLY BUILDING STRINGS AND PERCUSSION]
ASHLEY [VO]: At the start of the 2021 school year, the Des Moines Public School system reinvested the money they’d been spending on SROs since 1999. Instead of hiring cops, they hired counselors: 33 new staff members trained in restorative practices.
First: check and connect. Quite simply: make sure students know there are adults they can trust in the building.
Second: identify the problem. Empower students to resolve conflict together, and tend to community connections.
And third: keep kids in the education system. Rather than suspending them for behavior violations, give them the option to seek direct support. Help them re-integrate into the community after a serious violation, rather than adhering to a zero tolerance policy.
[MUX BREATHE]
ASHLEY [VO]: That school year, arrests plummeted across the district, from 538 to just 98. Students reported feeling safer. More connected to their classmates.
ENDI: Schools are a reflection of our community.
And schools can exist as like a fortress and protect students from the outside world when in reality they like coexist. And I think oftentimes we have conversations with people on what we’re against when we should really have conversations on what we’re for. And oftentimes we’re for the same things.
We’re for safety, we’re for love, we’re for joy. It’s just about, um, doing the work to get us there. And I think schools, um, exist in fear. And that fear, um, causes, uh, SRO programs to be funded, causes punitive measures, harms students, causes all the horrible things that we’ve been talking about. But I think shifting that conversation to the endless possibilities of investing in our youth and knowing that, um, that investment is worth, worth it for, for our students.
“And I think oftentimes we have conversations with people on what we’re against when we should really have conversations on what we’re for. And oftentimes we’re for the same things.We’re for safety, we’re for love, we’re for joy.”
[MUX LINGER]
ASHLEY [VO]: Want to remove police officers from your school district? Check out the Advancement Project’s tool kit, at the link in our show notes.
And before we go…
[AMBIENT: Kai setting up to read a poem:
“I have this really short poem that I’m thinking about. Okay. It’s like it’s very short. It’s like five lines. That’s cool. Okay.”]
[MUX OUT]
KAI: Hey, this is Kai again. Here’s a short poem called “Say,” inspired by the poetry community that’s in Des Moines.
“Say: luck.
Say: light.
Say: longevity.
Say: we survived that shit.
Say: we will prosper… in spite.”
[THEME MUX IN]
ASHLEY [VO]: Into the Mix is a Ben & Jerry’s Podcast produced by Vox Creative.
This episode was written by Shaquille Romblay, and Martha D. Salley.
The Vox Creative team includes Lead Producer Bethany Denton, Production Manager Taylor Henry, and Production Coordinator Jessica Bae. Shaquille Romblay was an associate producer on this episode. Martha D. Salley is our supervising producer. Annu Subramanian is our executive producer.
The team also includes Ariana Jiffo, senior manager of creative services, Design Director Brittany Falussy, and post-production stars Greg Russ and Andrew Hammond.
Kyle Neal engineered this episode. Original music by Israel Tutson.
Thanks to AJ Gutierrez and Laura Delarato for their production support, as well as Anah Tillar.
The Ben & Jerry’s team includes Jay Tandon, Jay Curley, Sanjana Mahesh, and Chris Miller.
The news tape you heard in this episode came from WHO and NexStar.
Next month, we’re heading to Florida, for another look at a growing movement inside schools today: the battle over book bans.
I’m Ashley C. Ford. Thank you for listening.