A Web of Punishment: Examining Black Student Interactions With School Police in Los Angeles

The presence of armed police officers in schools has sparked considerable policy debate and demands for reform. Thus far, much of the debate has centered on an empirical analysis of school resource officers rather than school police officers and their impact on particular student populations, especially those burdened by their greater vulnerability to punitive interactions such as detention and arrest. In this article the authors show that an examination of the data reveals that interactions between students and police follow distinct patterns with respect to race and geographic space. The authors use the “sociospatial dialectic” method to explain why certain student populations are most vulnerable to negative interactions with school police within particular spatial settings. Oral history interviews with 120 Black students in a large urban public school district reveal two self-reinforcing pathways: (1) soft coercion, when care and courtesy meet preemptive criminalization to produce punitive policing, and (2) shielding, when referrals to school police officers by school personnel shift blame onto students and invite the use of punitive policing without care. These findings underscore the racialized and contextually specific nature of school policing’s social and spatial processes for Black students in low-income communities.