Fight over police in Fresno schools heats up as political momentum swings against critics
This story is part of The Pipeline, a series of stories written by The Fresno Bee’s Education Lab that explore mental health, students and their experience with law enforcement on campus.
Most students and parents want to keep armed police officers on Fresno Unified campuses, according to recent surveys conducted by FUSD and Fresno State, as part of the nearly year-long debate over the use of law enforcement in city schools.
The survey results also signaled political momentum for keeping police in FUSD schools. As of Tuesday, at least four of the district’s seven elected trustees had expressed their support for campus law enforcement.
An FUSD report released late last month did not provide specific numbers but said the vast majority of students would feel endangered without police in schools.
“If police were not on campus, schools would be more vulnerable to dangerous situations and students would not feel safe,” the FUSD report concluded.
The report, conducted by the district’s Student Voice Initiative groups in January and February, represents the district’s first formal analysis of community input during the months-long debate over the use of police officers on Fresno school campuses.
Supporters of campus law enforcement said the report shows that efforts to remove police from Fresno schools have been spearheaded by a small number of people who don’t represent a majority of the city’s residents.
While FUSD officials led the effort to survey students, Fresno State researchers are taking the temperature of parents and other adult community members.
The Fresno State research has yet to be published, but Andrew Jones, the sociology professor leading the university’s effort, said the FUSD student survey appears to be consistent with his preliminary analysis of parent responses.
Jones on Tuesday said most Fresno Unified parents polled — nearly 75% — opposed removing police officers from city schools. Just 8.9% of parents said they were in favor of eliminating campus police.
But with debate far from over, supporters of the effort to remove police from schools criticized the FUSD student survey, saying they believe the report painted a misleading picture.
Critics said the student voices report was fundamentally flawed because just 114 students participated in the survey in a district of more than 70,000. Most of the students in the survey said they had no personal experience with law enforcement.
FUSD officials late last year postponed a vote to renew a series of school law enforcement contracts, saying they wanted to gather community input before making the decision. In December, FUSD set aside about $48,900 to “research and gauge” how parents, students and staff feel about armed campus police officers.
Supporters of the effort to remove police from campus say they want the district to take the roughly $3 million spent last year on police and put that money into mental-health-related student programs.
While FUSD officials haven’t ruled out the possibility of moving funds around, they have noted the district’s spending on mental-health-related services — more than $42 million this year — already far outpaces what FUSD spends on police.
Law enforcement supporters say removing officers from schools would jeopardize student and teacher safety.
Most Fresno parents want more police in schools, researcher says
Campus safety and security were significant factors for students supporting police in schools, the FUSD report says.
“While participants in the focus groups acknowledged that there are improvements to be made with police on campus, overwhelmingly, students expressed concern and feeling unsafe if police were removed from their school campuses,” the report says. “While a couple of students expressed not caring one way or the other, the majority of students shared that if there were no police on campus, schools could become more of a target for dangerous situations, such as school shootings or strangers coming on to campus.”
Students said they feared that “fights, weapons, and drug use on campus may increase as a result.” Some students also said they believe police officers typically have “positive, close relationships” even with students “who have been suspended or often get in trouble.”
One student said just knowing that police are on campuses made the student feel safer.
“I feel some sense of ease or safety when I see a police officer nearby especially where I live where there are occasional shootings,” the unidentified middle school student says in the report.
The preliminary analysis from Fresno State suggests even stronger support for campus police among parents.
Jones said more than 61% of FUSD parents reported “positive perceptions” of campus officers, and just 8% had negative perceptions.
In fact, just over half the parents polled — about 51% — said they favored increasing the number of officers in schools. About 18% of parents opposed the idea of adding more police, Jones said.
Jones also was quick to note that researchers are still analyzing the parent data and said the numbers could change.
All of the board members who responded on Tuesday to the Ed Lab’s questions about the report — including Elizabeth Jonasson Rosas, Valerie Davis, and Carol Mills — expressed support for police officers on campus.
Jonasson Rosas said she was “not surprised” to learn that most Fresno students support having police in schools. However, she also acknowledged that many people have good reasons for mistrusting law enforcement and suggested significant improvements could be made without eliminating a law enforcement presence on campuses.
“I feel the hurt of our community in terms of what’s going on right now and going on for decades,” she said. “What we really want is to see community policing models.”
Jonasson Rosas also suggested many of the problems students described in the report could be helped if the district had more control over the hiring process for police assigned to schools.
Davis said all students have a different vantage point on having officers on campuses, and they should be on campuses to serve and protect.
“We are in an urban school district and in some not-so-good neighborhoods and some great neighborhoods and some (schools are) by shopping centers and freeways which has always been an outlet for bad guys to be around,” Davis told the Ed Lab. “If anything, our next step is to make sure police officers are in line and in focus with safety and how they can best support students and answer questions and be more than a visual.”
Davis has also received input from teachers and campus police officers about the relationships between students and police, she said. One campus police officer told her that students frequently ask about how the criminal justice system works, Davis said, and it’s a chance for them to learn.
“If on-campus police have the opportunity to network and rub elbows with students, I think that would really be a positive for everybody,” Davis said.
In an email to the Ed Lab, Mills said she was satisfied with the survey process and that “everyone has had ample opportunity to express their opinion.”
“I have consistently received feedback from students, parents, and staff that they feel safer with police officers on campus,” she said. “The survey validates what I have always heard. I believe there is a small but vocal minority that oppose police officers on campus.”
Trustee Terry Slatic has been the school board’s most outspoken supporter of campus police.
Early Tuesday, Slatic appeared on the nationally televised Fox and Friends program, where he restated the FUSD report’s conclusion that most students support campus police officers.
“As of six months ago, my fellow trustees, who are fundamentally leftists, wanted to either have no police or to have police in civilian clothes with no weapons, no badges, etc.,” Slatic said during the early-morning television appearance.
Fresno police Chief Paco Balderrama has also said he is against removing police officers from schools.
“I’ve seen the positive impact that these school resource officers have on young people,” Balderrama said in a previous interview with The Bee. “I’ve seen lives changed through programs like the school resource officer programs.”
Critics question FUSD student report on campus police
Supporters of the effort to remove police from Fresno schools said they were skeptical of the FUSD report’s findings.
They questioned the methodology FUSD used to compile the data, noting that only 114 students participated in a district of more than 70,000. And of students surveyed, most said “they did not have direct experiences with police in their communities,” according to the report.
Ashley Rojas, executive director of Fresno Barrios Unidos, said those surveyed made up only about 1% of the student population and said it was “certainly not a comprehensive reflection of the climate within the district or the community.”
“I would urge folks to read the report because it doesn’t show ‘overwhelming support of law enforcement on campus,’” Rojas said Tuesday in a telephone interview. “It actually reveals some pretty significant critiques of law enforcement on campus, but what it reveals more so is the district’s bias and desire to protect police.”
Jonasson Rosas defended the district’s survey, saying people can always find flaws with studies when they disagree with the conclusions.
“No study is full proof in terms of how you conduct it,” she said. “How many students would have been enough?”
She also noted that while the sample size was small, it was diverse and included Black students, English learners, foster youth, students experiencing homelessness, and students with disabilities.
While the report painted a predominately positive picture of student-police relations within FUSD, it also acknowledged that at least some students feel differently.
“However, not all students agreed that having police on campus was a benefit. For example, a few students shared that they believed police on campuses perpetuates the negative relationship between youth and police officers,” the report says. “Students also shared that this issue is not isolated to just school campuses – it extends to neighborhoods and communities — and that across the board, some students felt that police officers should be replaced with community workers and neighborhood watch.”
At least some of the students surveyed described “a lack of consistency of police officers’ interactions with students” and “cited negative and inappropriate behavior of some police officers on their campuses.”
“One student shared an experience where during a fight, a police officer accidentally took out their gun instead of the taser and it made the student feel uncomfortable,” the report says.
Michael Yamamura, a 17-year-old junior at Sunnyside High School, said he was one of the students who participated in the FUSD surveys.
“I think it’s really important we get (police) off campus,” Yamamura told The Bee on Tuesday. “Having the cops on campus treating us like criminals — we already have everyone else doing that.”
Rojas criticized the district’s surveying efforts, saying she believes FUSD only wants to collect data that would give the school board enough political cover to keep police on city campuses.
She noted that, during a board meeting last year, her organization collected nearly 200 comments — almost double the FUSD student survey sample size — from residents in favor of removing police from schools.
“If the district was interested in a conversation about (police) that was unbiased, they would have heard the public comments from last summer and heard the public comments from years before,” Rojas said.
Supporters of the effort to remove police have also pointed to Fresno Police Department data that shows Black students were disproportionately arrested in 2019. That year, Black students made up about 7% of the FUSD student population. However, Black students accounted for about 25% of all school-related arrests.
FUSD Board President Kiesha Thomas did not respond to requests for comment this week. However, in a previous interview with The Bee, Thomas said campus police officers in Fresno have a history of “profiling” Black students.
California Department of Education data shows Black FUSD students had the highest suspension rate during the 2018-2019 school year at 16.7% than all other student demographics by almost double.
Data shows Black students in Fresno County are among the top three groups of students statewide who miss the most days of learning due to suspensions, losing a rate of 105 days of school during the 2018-19 school year.
According to data from the California Department of Education, 38.4% of FUSD students were suspended multiple times, a higher rate than the statewide rate of 30.4% and the county rate of 33.8%.
To address at least some of those issues, the FUSD student voices report made five recommendations for how FUSD should use police going forward.
The recommendations included limiting “the exposure of weapons while on our school campuses, “ongoing” cultural proficiency training, and hiring officers from diverse backgrounds that reflect Fresno’s demographics.
What’s next?
Fresno State researchers are still working on their analysis, and it wasn’t immediately clear this week when that work might wrap up.
Jones said researchers would analyze surveys of FUSD employees, as well as parents and campus police officers. Those surveys are available in English, Spanish and Hmong.
“For focus groups, we are doing multiple groups for parents (including one for Hmong- and one for Spanish-speaking parents), at least two for staff, possibly two for administrators, and two for (school police),” Jones told The Bee in an email.
He said the Fresno State research would be included alongside the FUSD student voices survey in a final report to the board of trustees.
“Once we write our report, we will submit it to the Fresno Unified team, and they will synthesize the two reports to present to the board.”
The Education Lab is a local journalism initiative that highlights education issues critical to the advancement of the San Joaquin Valley. It is funded by donors. Read more from The Bee’s Education Lab on our website.
This story was originally published March 10, 2021 at 5:00 AM.