New Report Analyzes Hundreds of School Policing Assaults Across the Country, Finds the 2023-24 School Year Was The Most Number of Students Assaulted By School Policing

October 3, 2024

Washington, DC—Today, Advancement Project and Alliance for Educational Justice released a new report analyzing 460 assaults against students by school police officers and security guards starting from the 2013-2014 school year. The report  examines time trends, geographical spread, and the school levels where assaults occur, concluding that school policing leads to violent outcomes for Black and Latine students rather than make schools safe.

The report, titled, ‘#AssaultAt: The Legacy of Lynching in School Policing,’ draws comparisons from two lynching datasets that span from 1882 to 1936 to assess the relationship between lynching in the U.S. and modern police violence against students.. The report finds a positive statistical relationship between the number of lynchings and the number of school police assaults at the county level, demonstrating that school policing assaults are acts of state sanctioned violence that extend the legacy of lynching into the modern classroom.

READ THE FULL REPORT HERE.

Some of the topline takeaways from the report include:

• Police assaults of students have increased over time. In the 2023-24 school year, there were 180 school policing assaults, marking last year as the most students assaulted by school police or security.
• Black students make up  84% of school policing assault victims.
• 56% of assaults occurred in schools with a majority Black and Latine student population.
• Sexual assault is the third most common type of assault (25%) and is perpetrated against girls and young women more than their male peers.
• Sexual assaults have increased more than 300% since schools reopened after the pandemic
• 54% of assaults against students occur in the South.
•  For every additional 100 lynchings in a county, there are an additional 4 students assaulted by school police or security guards. There is a positive statistical relationship between the frequency of lynchings and the frequency of school policing assaults. As the number of lynchings increased within a county, so has the number of school policing assaults in the same county:

The report is authored by Tyler Whittenberg, Deputy Director of the Opportunity to Learn Program at Advancement Project and Kaneesha Johnson, Post-doctoral Fellow at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. This edition of the report is the third installment of the AssaultAt report, which  analyzes school assault data from the previous school year and over time.

“The alarming spike in assaults against students by school police and security guards underscores the troubling reality that our schools are not safe, equitable or nurturing environments for students, particularly for Black and disabled youth. School policing does not prevent violence, it is a harbinger of it.,” said Tyler Whittenberg. “Students throughout the U.S. are going to school each day in fear of policing assaults, sexual violence, and criminalization. This report reveals a deeply entrenched legacy of state sanctioned violence used to intimidate and control Black students and deny them the promise of an equitable education. It’s time to debunk the myth that policing makes schools safer and confront the systemic injustices that put our most vulnerable students at risk. We are standing up for a world where schools are free from violence and built on trust, equity, and true safety for every child.”

“#AssaultAt illustrates what many Black and Latine students, students with disabilities, girls and young women of color, and students attending predominantly low-income schools know–school policing jeopardizes their physical safety and mental and emotional health. It’s no surprise that policing in schools is tied to a long history of racial oppression through state sanctioned violence,” said Leidy Robledo, Co-Executive Director of the Alliance of Educational Justice and co-convener of The National Campaign for Police Free Schools. “It’s time to listen to young people on what they need. To create equitable and nurturing school environments, we must first stop policing students and remove the vestiges of lynching and violence from all educational systems and implement education policies and practices that promote care and compassion, not control and fear.”

# # #