CPS dropping school police officers didn't change whether students, parents feel safe, U of C study reveals

Rashad Talley, the principal at Wendell Phillips Academy High School, believes healthy safety and discipline practices are more about the staff’s relationship with students and not whether the South Side high school has police in the building every day.

“It's hard for me to pinpoint whether a [school resource officer] makes that much of a difference, because I could be an SRO and have a great relationship with a kid,” he said. “I don't think it matters, the title of the person, or the position of the person. It matters, that relationship.”

Phillips was one of three Chicago high schools that were the first to remove police officers in the summer of 2020 amid protests against police brutality in the wake of the George Floyd police killing. Phillips didn’t have a functioning local school council, so Chicago Public Schools officials instructed the principal to talk with the community and make the decision.

Dozens more schools have removed one or both of their officers the past few years. Now only 39 district-run, non-charter high schools have them, or a little less than half. CPS is pulling cops from all the remaining schools in the fall.

Student activists have insisted that police escalated conflicts, disproportionately policed Black children and put them in danger of being thrust into the criminal justice system for in-school behavior. But a lot of high schools have feared that removing their police officers would mean losing important adults who had relationships with students, helped with discipline and made parents feel their kids’ schools were safe.

In reality, CPS has dramatically cut back on its use of cops in disciplinary incidents in the past decade. And research has shown school resource officers don’t usually prevent school shootings from outside threats. So the presence of officers in schools has often come down to perceptions of safety: Do they make parents, staff or kids feel safe or unsafe with a cop in the building?

A study released Wednesday by the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research examined the effects of CPS schools removing their police officers and found there were minimal changes to perceptions of safety. But the analysis discovered a reduction in high-level discipline infractions at schools that had gotten rid of their cops and found Black students are more likely to have officers in their schools than other racial groups.

The researchers compared outcomes in schools that removed both of their officers with schools that kept one or both.

They found that students’ and teachers’ perceptions of whether their schools were safe didn’t change for better or worse without school police officers. Neither did student-teacher trust. Those findings came from the 5Essentials survey developed by UChicago and administered in CPS schools every year.

There also wasn’t a major correlation between removing officers and the rate at which schools called the police on students. But researchers said that was because the number of police notifications, as they’re called, is already too low to have much of a takeaway.

Schools that removed both officers did, however, fare better with discipline infractions. Incidents rose in CPS schools from the 2018-19 school year to 2022-23, the study found, but there were not similar increases in schools without cops — their rates remained relatively flat.

And when examining the demographics of schools with and without officers, the research found schools serving predominantly Black students were more likely to have cops, making Black students twice as likely as other kids to have an officer in their school. Schools with fewer students and higher suspension rates also were more likely to keep their law enforcement. Overall, though, students in all groups were much less likely to have an officer in their school in 2022-23 than in 2018-19.

Talley, the Phillips principal, took over in 2022. As a principal of a neighborhood school, he said he made it a point to develop a relationship with the police district commander so the police department knows it’s urgent if the school calls.

Talley’s main mission is to make sure students have strong relationships with staff. At his first staff meeting, he says he told staff that he wants them to talk to every single student they pass by in the hall.

“Kids want to be seen, they want to be acknowledged,” he said. “We want them to be able to feel that we have their best interests at heart.”

When students have strong relationships with adults, they will feel safe telling them they are having a bad day, rather than acting out. Talley said.

Phillips, like many of the schools that removed police officers, has seen a reduction of misconduct incidents, especially in the most serious categories. Comparing 2019-2020 to 2022-2023, the most recent data, it had fewer in-school suspensions, but more out of school suspensions and police notifications.

  Sarah Karp covers education for WBEZ.