Why Texas Students Are Being Tackled and Tasered, and Trump’s Latest Target for Retribution
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From The New York Times, it's The Headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Thursday, May 28th. Here's what we're covering.
Let's go back to when the officers were called, when the deputies came.
I was trying to text my mom, just to tell her what was going on. And so that's when the sheriff was like, OK, you're under arrest for theft.
A new investigation from The Times looks at what has happened as more police officers have been hired at schools. to keep students safe.
They had released my mugshot and other teachers started getting a hold of it. Everyone started screenshotting it.
My colleagues, in partnership with the San Antonio Express News, looked at Texas specifically. Back in 2022, the state was rocked by one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history when a gunman opened fire at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, killing 21 people. The next year, lawmakers passed legislation requiring one licensed police officer at every public school, the most ambitious effort of its kind. Now, Texas has more school district police departments than all other states put together.
The law that Texas passed was largely cast as a way to protect students from school shooters. But we have found that the way officers use force on students raises questions about whether something that was meant to help them is actually harming some students instead.
Claire Amari is part of the team who dug through thousands of pages of police records and did hundreds of interviews with students, parents, teachers, and law enforcement officials in Texas to see how the influx of officers has played out. The team found that while many people welcomed the police presence on campus, there were also many incidents where officers grabbed, tackled, or even used tasers on students, leading to injuries in extreme instances. Some of these were captured on camera.
In these videos, we've seen police officers knee one student in the face, slam another student into a metal lunch cart, and pin other students to the ground. We have also seen videos of officers punching students, of officers using pepper spray on students, and officers handcuffing young children.
In all, the Times documented more than 2,600 individual cases in which school police officers in Texas used force in the last few years.
Everything kind of, like, blurred out once, like, I hit the ground. And I just remember that there was, like, a lot of tugging and pushing, and I had somebody— Like, my head was against the ground. And at one point, my head had hit the desk, too.
In one case, a 17-year-old honor student was accused of stealing a little classroom doorbell worth 13 bucks, which she says she accidentally knocked off the wall. Still, an assistant principal called in the police. And when she pulled away, they wrestled her to the ground. Video footage shows her gasping for air for three minutes. Her mugshot was later posted online, and she was so upset by the whole experience that she finished the school year online and skipped her graduation ceremony. Overall, the investigation found that the constant presence of police has transformed how many Texas schools manage discipline. While state law says that districts should not assign officers to handle, quote, routine student discipline, there were many incidents where police were responding to conduct that appeared to be minor, the kind of thing that once would have just landed kids in the principal's office.
Policing experts say that what's happened in Texas is that lawmakers went all in on school policing without putting in place adequate safeguards to protect students.
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