State laws that encourage alternatives to school-based policing in California may have done little so far to decrease the number of students funneled into the school-to-prison pipeline, but a bill introduced in January aims to change this through policy enforcement and data collection.
Current state law requires California schools to collect data on police and student interactions to be submitted to the Department of Justice upon request. In reality, the law’s enforcement mechanisms are unclear. A report published by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) found that one-third of California school districts do not require staff to keep any records of police-student interactions. And even the districts that do require some data collection generally do not use it for analysis purposes.
Following a wave of media reporting and academic research showing the negative effects of using law enforcement for minor misconduct on school campuses, two Assembly bills were introduced in January, both with the title “School Safety: Peace Officer Interactions with Pupils.”
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