Many racialized students are celebrating a decision by Canada’s largest school board to pull the plug on a program that saw Toronto police officers stationed in high schools across the city.
Officials at the Toronto District School Board voted to remove police officers from schools on Wednesday, a long-awaited decision met with booming applause and cheers from students, parents and activists who had packed the meeting room.
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All but three trustees, and one who abstained, voted in favour of get rid of school resource officers, who were responsible for: crime prevention, relationship building, investigating criminal offenses on school property, and working with school officials to decide whether or not to arrest or lay charges against students.
The program started in 2008 with the goal of making students feel safer, but many complained that having police in their schools made them feel unfairly targeted and uncomfortable.
Our schools are meant to reinforce the power of education and not the power of stigmatization.
The move means officers who were posted at 45 schools in the city won’t be returning. They haven’t been there since the start of the school year when the program was suspended pending review.
“Ten years ago our board made a mistake by not consulting the public, and not listening to the voices in the community,” trustee Tiffany Ford told the meeting.
The program started a year after 15-year-old Jordan Manners was gunned down and killed at C.W. Jefferys Collegiate Institute. Critics have argued it placed officers in schools in mostly racialized communities.
“Our schools are meant to reinforce the power of education and not the power of stigmatization,” said Ford.
The vote follows a survey of about 15,000 students which found that while the majority had a “generally positive impression” of the program, about 11 percent said the presence of officers was intimidating and 14 percent said it made them feel targeted.
On Wednesday, TDSB director John Mallow said while the majority voice is often considered the most important, “a small number spoke their truth of being uncomfortable with [school resource officers] and we have to take those students’ concerns seriously.”
He pointed out there had been no “challenging circumstances” in the last few months, despite officers not being in schools. The number of suspensions and expulsions has also dropped since the cops stopped coming to school, he said, although there’s no definitive correlation between the two.
For almost a decade, students, teachers, parents, and community groups like Black Lives Matter Toronto (BLMTO), Education Not Incarceration, and Educators for Justice and Peace have been calling for an end to the program.
Critics have argued the presence of armed police officers was especially harmful to black and other racialized students who felt like they were being surveilled, and undocumented kids whose families are in danger of being outed to border services by police.
Supporters of the program have argued that the decision was counterproductive in terms of building bridges between police and young people.
One trustee argued the decision shouldn’t be made based on surveys, but on hard data about whether or not the program had been successful.
“It’s very unsatisfactory for us to make a decision as important as this without data, we have opinion but not data,” Gerri Gershon said. “This is a horrible pun, but I think this is a big cop out.”
The Toronto Police Association’s Mike McCormack also blasted the decision, calling it a “huge step backwards for students, our members and the community.”
“We need to build bridges, not tear them down,” he said in a tweet.
But community activists see the decision as a massive victory.
“It is moments like this that we are reminded of the power of collective and Black-centered community action,” said BLMTO co-founder Rodney Diverlus. “Ten years in the making, this victory is historic and creates new possibility for Black children’s lives.”
The program will continue at Toronto’s Catholic schools for now. The Toronto Police Services Board is set to vote on whether or not to keep it going at their meeting next month. An independent review is also being conducted by researchers at Ryerson University.
