University of California study shows: CPS’s withdrawal of school police officers did not change students’ and parents’ sense of security

Rashad Talley, principal of Wendell Phillips Academy High School, believes that sound safety and disciplinary practices depend more on the relationship between staff and students, rather than whether police officers are in the building every day at South Side High School.

“It’s hard for me to say whether a (school resource officer) makes that much of a difference, because I could be a school resource officer and have a great relationship with a kid,” he said. “I don’t think the title or position of the person is important. It’s that relationship that counts.”

Phillips was one of three Chicago high schools that were the first to lay off police officers in the summer of 2020 amid protests against police brutality following the police killing of George Floyd. Phillips did not have a functioning local school board, so Chicago Public Schools officials instructed the school’s superintendent to speak to the community and make the decision.

Dozens more schools have laid off one or both of their police officers in recent years. Now they have just 39 district-run, non-charter high schools, a little less than half. CPS is pulling police officers from all remaining schools in the fall.

Student activists insisted that police escalated conflicts, disproportionately policed ​​black children and put them at risk of criminal prosecution for their behavior at school. But many high schools feared that firing their police officers would mean losing key adults who maintained relationships with students, helped with discipline and made parents feel their children were safe at school.

In fact, child welfare services have drastically reduced the use of police officers in disciplinary actions over the past decade. And studies have shown that security guards in schools generally fail to prevent shootings from outside. So the presence of police officers in schools is often a question of perceived safety: Do parents, staff or children feel safe or unsafe when a police officer is in the building?

A study released Wednesday by the University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research examined the impact of firing police officers at CPS schools and found that there was minimal change in feelings of safety. However, the analysis found a decline in serious disciplinary violations at schools that fired their police officers and found that black students are more likely to have police officers at their schools than other racial groups.

The researchers compared the results in schools that fired both officers with schools that retained one or both.

They found that students’ and teachers’ perceptions of the safety of their schools did not change, for better or worse, without school police officers. Trust between students and teachers also decreased. These findings come from the 5Essentials survey, developed by UChicago and administered to CPS schools each year.

There was also no strong correlation between the removal of officers and the frequency with which schools called police on students. But researchers said that’s because the number of police notifications, as they’re called, is already too low to draw any meaningful conclusions.

However, schools that removed both police officers fared better on disciplinary violations. The number of incidents in CPS schools increased from the 2018-19 to 2022-23 school year, the study found, but schools without police officers did not see similar increases — their rates remained relatively constant.

And when examining the demographics of schools with and without police officers, the study found that schools with predominantly black students were more likely to have police officers, meaning black students are twice as likely as other children to have a police officer at their school. Schools with fewer students and higher suspension rates were also more likely to retain their police forces. Overall, however, students of all groups were much less likely to have a police officer at their school in 2022-23 than in 2018-19.

Talley, Phillips’ principal, took over in 2022. As principal of a neighborhood school, he said he made it a goal to build a relationship with the police district chief so that when the school calls, police know it’s urgent.

Talley’s main job is to make sure students develop good relationships with staff. At his first staff meeting, he said he wants them to talk to every single student they pass in the hallway.

“Children want to be seen, they want to be recognized,” he said. “We want them to feel that we care about their well-being.”

“When students have good relationships with adults, they can feel comfortable telling them they’re having a bad day instead of freaking out,” Talley says.

Phillips, like many other schools that have fired police officers, has seen a decrease in misconduct cases, especially in the most serious categories. Comparing 2019-2020 to 2022-2023, the most recent data, there were fewer in-school suspensions but more out-of-school suspensions and police notifications.

Sarah Karp reports on education for WBEZ.