Defunding School Police for the Liberation of Black Students Supports Queer and Trans Students
by Emily Grijalva and Zacariah Flores
On Tuesday, June 30, 2020, amidst weeks of protests organized by Black Lives Matter Los Angeles and Students Deserve, the LAUSD Board of Education voted to defund the Los Angeles School Police Department by $25 million, a 35% divestment. National demands to “Defund the Police” come as a direct response of historic over policing leading to death in Black communities and the recent murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis Police.
It has become a poignant articulation of the need for change related to the practice of policing and its direct impact on Black communities. The idea of defunding the police is not exactly novel, as abolitionists for over a century have denounced state-sanctioned police violence and a corrupt prison-industrial complex.
Since its inception, formal policing was a strategy to protect and defend those with capital, property and commodity goods. This legacy of police protecting private economic interests is a legacy visible today and often the cornerstone of police advocates who wish to see property protected from society’s misfits and criminals. This maintenance of dominant culture: colonial, cis-hetero patriarchal white supremacist status quo — works as a modus operandi within municipal policing and is contemporaneously deeply entrenched in all forms of policing and militarization, including school policing.
WHAT THE HECK IS DEFUNDING THE POLICE AND WHY IS IT IS SO CONTROVERSIAL
Defunding the police is a critical and thoughtful approach of looking at government budgets (city, county, school district, state, federal) holistically and identifying major choices elected officials are making with public dollars; especially when it comes to the perpetual increase in police and militarization budgets over social services like housing, food, employment, education, and healthcare. It is a point of inflection to demand that governments invest in opportunities for Black communities instead of investing in their incarceration via the prison-industrial-complex. A stark example is Mayor of LA, Eric Garcetti’s City Budget Proposal demonstrating 53.8% of the budget going to police, instead of services needed immediately due to COVID-19.
Its controversy lies in the traditionalist beliefs that:
1. Police are the best option at keeping law in order in communities of crime
2. Individual positive experiences with police overhauls decades of state sanctioned violence against Indigenous land and people; Black communities; LGBTQI2-S gender and sexual identities; and youth
Police were an imagined human construct for private and “public” safety, and the call to defund is a call to reimagine a new construct of human safety without inflicting perpetual harm and trauma against oppressed people and identities. The $25 million reduction in LA School Police budget is one step further in this process of reimagination.
LASPD’S OPENLY GAY OFFICER TESTIMONY DEMONSTRATES A CULTURE OF TOKENISM and DIVISIVENESS
At Tuesday’s board meeting, senior police officer, Erin Harvey who works for the mental health evaluation team self-identified as being openly gay. She claimed that she packed everything up from the midwest to join “the best school police department in the nation.” Furthermore, she added, “you are the model, the standard and the tone for the country.” She also claimed that when Santee Learning Complex opened their all-gender restroom in 2016, LA School Police defended queer youth from protesters. She says she advocates for the LGBTQ students who suffer in silence and highlighted that “a school officer is a beacon of light for some of these kids.” Unfortunately, officer Harvey failed to acknowledge the arrest of a Black student that day who responded to being called a derogatory racial epithet by protesters.
It is cringeworthy to think anyone would be satisfied with a police officer being the only source of support for LGBTQ+ students in a school community. These positive anecdotes are not a blanket experience for all LAUSD queer youth. GSA sponsor and Restorative Justice Coordinator Emily Grijalva had a different experience when their school officer announced she planned to guard their all-gender restroom because she didn’t think it was “right.” Even when Grijalva assured her that it was LAUSD policy and a right for students, she continued to harass queer youth that attempted to enter the restroom. At one point, she asked if she should “out” a trans student, which Grijalva immediately disagreed with and again, pointed to the rights of LGBTQ+ students. She was unaware, untrained, and completely biased against their queer youth on their campus. She was not “a beacon of light.” This is why anecdotes and highlighting “the good ones” are problematic. The defunding school police movement also calls out systematic homophobia and transphobia that black and brown queer youth face at alarming rates on school campuses. Situational experiences do not negate the data that exists in which LGBTQ youth of color are disproportionately entering the school-to-prison pipeline due to zero-tolerance policies, the disproportionate targeting and disciplining of LGBTQ students and an increase in police presence.
Research suggests that these practices fail to improve school safety or to create positive learning environments and that they actually make schools and communities less safe. According to data from #OutForMentalHealth, LGBTQ youth are at a higher risk for being suspended and expelled from school and being stopped and arrested by police. In one survey, 47% of Black and 44% of Latinx students reported being disciplined at school compared with only 36% of White peers. Of incarcerated LGBTQ and gender non-conforming youth, 85–90% are youth of color. More than two-thirds of LGBTQ youth ages 18 to 24 reported having school security or police at their middle or high schools and stated that this made them feel untrustworthy and that any misstep would be treated as a crime.
None of these students saw school police officers as “beacons of light,” and this is why we celebrate the board’s decision to defund school police. Officer Harvey’s public statement was a divisive tactic that does not truly reflect the intersectional experience of black queer youth. The funds used to increase support services for Black youth will lead to a turning point in this data.
LIBERATION OF BLACK YOUTH IS LIBERATION FOR LGBTQI2-S YOUTH
Defunding the police to invest in Black student resources directly liberates LGBTQ+ students from current, and hxstorical, sexuality and gender policing. School sites generally reproduce cis-hetero patriarchal notions of gender and sexuality (i.e. boys’ and girls’ line, nuclear family unit, men as providers and women as subservient to men).
Although large strides have been made towards LGBTQI2-S inclusion, there still remains a large deficit of inclusive curriculum, sex education, healthy school climate, teacher and administrator competency, and accessible gender-inclusive restrooms within the Los Angeles Unified School District. A variety of these factors lead to poor student achievement, self-esteem, physical and mental peer violence, gender and sexuality policing by teachers and administrators; ultimately implicating LGBTQ+ youth in push-out, drop-out, and interaction with the criminal justice system.
School policing does not lend itself the flexibility and adaptability to combat its own colonial, cis-hetero patriarchal white supremacy and therefore cannot effectively support students who are Black, Brown, LGBTQI2-S, undocumented, or low-income. Their presence on campus is often leveraged as a tool to suppress sexual and gender variance, discredit victimhood, and leads to the “outing” of students without their consent.
As advocates and educators demanding mandatory LGBTQ+ curriculum and instruction via the FAIR Act, it is important to recognize the hxstorical trauma of police brutality as the catalyst for much of the queer and trans liberation movement. These hxstories cannot be told without the impact the police-state has had in relation to the trans and queer liberation movement. Cooper Do-nuts Riots, Black Cat, Stonewall and Compton Cafeteria Riots were all incited by police violence/ brutality towards BIPOC queer and trans identities. Embedded in policing (school and municipal) is a dominant culture system of racist cis-hetero patriarchy white supremacy which is anti-Black, anti-queer, and anti-trans.
Therefore, the liberation of Black youth through the defunding of police is the liberation of LGBTQI2-S youth.
NEXT STEPS: POLICE-FREE SCHOOLS & INTERSECTIONAL EQUITY
As the fight for education equity for Black students continues, we must continue to be in actionable solidarity with Black Lives Matter Los Angeles and Students Deserve. Several resolutions to increase supports for LGBTQI2-S students have gone through the LAUSD Board of Education (Rodriguez (2018), Gonez (2019), Goldberg (2019)). We continue to seek district follow- through on their implementation and continue to advocate for intersectional approaches to meeting these student needs, believing police-free schools is a necessary step towards liberatory public education for BIPOC queer and trans students.
By investing in the well-being of black queer youth, we can stop the school-to-prison pipeline. As queer icon Marsha P. Johnson claimed there is “No pride for some of us without liberation for all of us.” Our collective stands with Students Deserve, Black Lives Matters, and all the students, parents, teachers, community organizers that demanded police-free schools so that our students can thrive. As GSA Network included in their statement : “LGBTQ+ youth of color can only access a quality education and safe school environments if we disband school police departments that disproportionately target and apprehend students of color.” Our struggle for liberation is interlaced and not over yet.
Emily Grijalva, M.Ed, is a Restorative Justice Coordinator, Community School Coordinator, and GSA Club Sponsor at Mendez High School(LAUSD).
Zacariah Flores is a Youth Organizer with Latino Equality Alliance, a Latinx LGBTQ+ organization in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles.
