Keeping police out of Victoria and Esquimalt schools

Update: June 2021 presentation to SD61’s school liaison officer committee.

In 2018, when Esquimalt rejected the Victoria Police Department’s request for six new officers, Chief Del Manak said he had “no choice” but to reassign the department’s school liaison officers to patrol duties. For a police force that was angry about not getting its way, it was a useful political tool: city councils, the school board, the Greater Victoria Teachers Association, public and media commentators and the police board were practically tripping over each other to extol the virtue of keeping police in schools.

The superintendent and school board talked up school liaison officers; teachers talked about the program as if it were an essential service; and the police board lamented the program’s demise. Missing from most of that conversation were some basic questions, including: what were school liaison officers actually doing; and, more importantly, why were police officers allowed anywhere near the public school system?

VicPD’s draft 2020 budget proposes a $2.6 million increase and includes $383,000 for the “Potential return of the School Resource Officers.” Those officers don’t have to come back, though, and it’s time those with power over the program ended it.

What do school liaison officers actually do?

According to VicPD, as of 2015 its school liaison program was supposed to:

a) Motivate youth to make healthy choices and adopt a drug and crime free lifestyle;
b) Enhance the safety and security of the school community; and
c) Eliminate barriers and promote accessibility to police officers.

Heading into the 2019-20 school year — Victoria and Esquimalt’s second year school liaison officer-free — I filed a Freedom of Information (FOI) request for those officers’ reports from 2017, the last full year the program was active.

The records released included the officers’ quarterly reports, which detailed their time spent giving presentations and attending meetings and events — about 535 hours in 2017. Dividing those hours by two — no more than two officers filed reports for any portion of 2017 — works out to about 3.3 work days per month of the school year, per officer.

Graph of VicPD school liaison officers’ documented time, 2017. Categories were created by combining similar “Category” and “Meeting Name” descriptions reported by the officers in their quarterly reports. The complete quarterly reports are available … — Graph of VicPD school liaison officers’ documented time, 2017. Categories were created by combining similar “Category” and “Meeting Name” descriptions reported by the officers in their quarterly reports. The complete quarterly reports are available at the bottom of this post.

VicPD also released copies of official “incident reports” involving school liaison officers. There were 67 incident reports, for an average of three reports per officer, per month of the school year. The time spent on those files was in addition to the hours noted above.

Finally, the officers also attended 18 “education and training sessions” in 2017. VicPD refused to release any details on the nature, length or location of that training, despite that training being part of their publicly paid job. [After an appeal, VicPD released the officers’ training information in March 2020, which included assault rifle and use of force training. The training records are discussed here.]

School liaison officers attended training on a combined 31 days in 2017. VicPD withheld all information on what that training was and how long it lasted.

Bike rodeos and presentations that could be delivered by anyone

A separate FOI revealed descriptions of the presentations school liaison officers were giving to students:

Bike Rodeo
Bullying
Community Helper
Halloween Safety
Internet Safety
It’s Your Life – Presentation with the Royals’ Hockey Club
Law
Stranger Danger
W.I.T.S. (Walk Away, Ignore, Talk about it, Seek Help)

Some of these presentations may have value. Should third graders know how to safely operate a bicycle? Definitely! Bike all the time, kids! Bike while reading this post! But do children need to learn about bikes from armed police officers? Nope! Not even a little bit.

Armed VicPD officers running a bike rodeo, 2018. Image source: Twitter. The complete descriptions of VicPD’s school liaison officer presentations, released through FOI, are available at the bottom of this post.

Bike rodeos took up 14% of school liaison officers’ documented time in 2017, but anyone with a stack of orange cones could have filled that role. Discussions about bullying or safety (22% of the officers’ documented time) don’t need to be delivered by police, either.

VicPD’s presentations to students also included problematic content. “Community Helper,” a presentation about “what a police officer is” and “what police do” is misleading on its face.

The police as an institution, in Canada and beyond, are designed to help a very narrow community. We know that Greater Victoria police profile and surveil Indigenous, Black and Muslim people and actively police poverty. And that Indigenous youth account for 46% of correctional services admissions in Canada but only 8% of the youth population. Black people are 20 times more likely to be killed by Toronto police than white people. Trans people are harassed by police in Canada, and alt pride writes that “police violence against members of LGBTQ2IA+ communities” is not “a thing of the past.”

Calling police “community helpers” ignores the systemic racism, classism, homophobia and transphobia that policing upholds every day.

“A basic understanding of law and order … will lead [students] to become co-operative as adults”

The police worked their way into the Victoria and Esquimalt school system to the extent that after presentations, sporting events (basketball, charity golf, rugby, the Terry Fox Run, etc.) took up 13% of their documented time, with another 10% spent at things like concerts, fundraisers and a pancake breakfast.

What possible value was there in having police at those events? Based on the program’s recent and historic policies, one of the fundamental justifications for the program was that cops liked the idea of kids growing up to be cop-loving adults.

In 1985, the Times Colonist quoted the objectives of the school liaison officer program as reducing crime by “orient[ing] the students toward a more positive attitude towards police and law enforcement.” Additionally, they said they were there to “give students a basic understanding of law and order … so that … this understanding will lead them to become co-operative as adults in relation to the law.”

Greater Victoria school liaison program objectives in the 1980s. Image source: Times Colonist, 11 June 1985. — Greater Victoria school liaison program objectives in the 1980s. Image source: *Times Colonist,* 11 June 1985.

A school liaison officer assigned to S.J. Willis in 1982 said his goal was “to develop a rapport with both staff and students … so policing in the future will be thought of in a more positive and friendly light.”

Those comments and the 1985 policy may be decades old, but you can draw a direct line between those statements and the police-as-community-helper presentations officers were giving in 2017, or the 2015 VicPD policy calling on school liaison officers to “establish relationships” and “be a visible presence” in schools. Teachers were on board with that idea, too. When the Greater Victoria Teachers’ Association wrote VicPD to praise the program in November 2018, they said the officers had “promote[d] a positive image of law enforcement.”

Under all that warm and fuzzy relationship building was another role for school liaison officers: to “Investigate offences and enforce laws within schools.” Dr. Shama Rangwala, talking about school liaison officers in Edmonton and an officer who called a Black child’s durag ‘gang-affiliated,’ writes that having uniformed, armed officers in schools is used “to normalize police officers” who are actively “policing racialized school kids.”

Schools should not willingly partner with the police. The police are still police, with the power to arrest and harm students, whether it’s at a bake sale or a graduation event. Having officers at everyday functions to normalize their presence and the criminalization of students may have created an unsafe space for some students. In particular, Greater Victoria police target Indigenous, Black and Muslim people, and there is no reason to believe those harms would not be replicated by police in Victoria and Esquimalt schools.

Bringing students “back in line”

Chief Manak told the media schools relied on officers to manage those “at-risk students” with guidance and mentorship. “When [students are] struggling with conflict, bullying etc., they’re more likely to approach a liaison officer,” Manak told Victoria Buzz.

However, only 3 of the 67 school liaison officer incident reports in 2017 clearly indicate they were initiated by somebody approaching an officer at a school; despite Manak’s claims, it was typically schools making the calls. And Manak seemed to slip a bit in talking about those relationships at the December 2018 police board meeting, when he said officers were there to bring at-risk students “back in line” at the request of counsellors and teachers.

It’s possible that officers, teachers and even students might say that the 11 hours spent on “Role modeling,” “Student at Risk” and “High Risk Student” meetings in 2017 were meaningful. But if the schools believed those students needed role models — for someone to bring them “back in line” — they could have found people who would be less likely to lock up, assault or kill those same students later in life.

In addition to relationships with “at risk” students, the Greater Victoria Teachers’ Association said children benefited from “having a familiar and trusted person engage and deescalate a situation” when police are called to schools. Similarly, SJ Willis staff said they sometimes had the officers “pay home visits” to some students (which sounds problematic) and that it was “helpful when we had students who needed to be questioned, or … arrested, if there was a friendly and known face.” I suspect the administrators told themselves that to feel better about what they were doing, because at the end of the day they were still calling the cops on students who they thought “needed” it.

Over at Victor Brodeur, a K-12 school, administrators asked a school liaison officer to speak on the first day of school as “a general reminder” about “making smart choices and appropriate behaviour in and outside of school hours.” In other words, straighten up and fly right, kids! Or the police will find you, at school or at home, and bring you “back in line” and/or churn you through the criminal justice system, which will haunt you for the rest of your life.

An excerpt of a 2017 “incident report” noting that a school liaison officer delivered a presentation to students about “making smart choices.”

Having police interact with students will always include the threat of criminalization, arrest and harm, particularly for students of colour. Criminalizing people is garbage, and it’s not “helpful” for schools to call police on their students or to host presentations that include the explicit or implicit threat of arrest.

What else did school liaison officers do?

When they weren’t setting up cones or talking about how great the police are, school liaison officers were involved in 67 “incident reports” in 2017.

Many of those reports were initiated by calls from school staff, while others were referrals from different officers or dispatch. Reports initiated by somebody approaching a school liaison officer — the type of relationships the chief said this program fostered — were very rare.

Of the 56 reports where a school was named, Victoria and Esquimalt’s high schools topped the list: 30% involved Esquimalt High School, followed by 13% for Victoria High School and 11% for Rockheights Middle School.

Some of the reports did reference troubling events, and unless or until police are abolished, school administrators are likely to keep upholding the police as their default response in those cases. Those incidents were in the minority, however, and administrators should have been weighing the harms of normalizing police and criminalizing students before they involved officers in events ranging from theft to the discovery of drug paraphernalia.

Lest someone say that school administrators are thinking carefully every time they call the police, in 2018, Sundance Elementary called their school liaison officer about people not picking up after their dogs. That “incident report” shows that schools will absolutely call the police for issues that do not require an armed response, and it demonstrates a total disconnect between the benefits schools think the police provide and the real harms police can have on people’s lives.

A 2018 “incident report” where Sundance Elementary contacted a school liaison officer due to “ongoing issues with dogs off leash and owners not picking up dog excrement during and after school hours.”

Keeping police out of schools

While the Greater Victoria School Board can’t get police back in its schools fast enough, elsewhere, people are organizing to keep police out of schools. Black Lives Matter Toronto called for an end to the Toronto School Board’s program placing officers in schools, which was subsequently shut down in 2017. A report found that the officers “caused some students to feel uncomfortable and even intimidated” and that the program was “not welcome by a significant number of our students.” Phillip Dwight Morgan wrote that “Black and Brown students said they felt targeted, harassed and intimidated.”

In Edmonton, Bashir Mohamed wrote about the importance of exposing school resource officers’ activity given the Edmonton Police’s “history of racial profiling and discrimination” and “considering how reports from across North America show how Black and Indigenous kids are disproportionately punished.”

In Chicago, students said the idea of putting police officers in their schools “made them feel less safe,” while one school board member said “Research is overwhelming that having police in schools is the entry point to the school to prison pipeline.”

The fact that the Greater Victoria School Board, which could have ended the school liaison program, talked instead about how sad they were that it was taken away, suggests they weren’t paying attention to the harms police do every day, including to Indigenous, Black and Muslim people. And instead of embracing the opportunity to shift away from a police presence, the Greater Victoria Teachers’ Association said schools were “struggling to replicate the support they received from school liaison officers.” Convinced of the program’s alleged benefits, they couldn’t conceive of a world without police in schools.

Conclusion

In March, 2019, a VicPD police board member said “If we don’t get [a school liaison] officer reinstated, people may start questioning the need for that officer in the first place.”

Those questions might include whether we really want VicPD to “establish relationships” in our schools, and if so, why, and who does that actually serve? And why were those relationships, with the constant threat of criminalizing students, allowed to go unchecked for decades? How did we get to the point where school officials think it’s appropriate to talk about their students who “need” to be arrested? And why would administrators, who are supposed to keep students safe, welcome a police force that profiles and surveils Black, Indigenous and Muslim people into their halls?

People with the power to abolish the school liaison officer program should have been asking those questions years ago.

The school board took a first step in 2018 by asking schools what they relied on the officers for, but based on their recorded meetings, they seemingly didn’t follow up on whether those functions were needed or whether police were best suited to perform them. They were told about all the good the program had allegedly done, and they chose to praise it.

With the school liaison program poised to come back, the school board should reflect on the harms of welcoming police into their schools and end the program for good.

VicPD’s school liaison officers’ quarterly reports for 2017, released through FOI, are posted below, followed by descriptions of VicPD’s school liaison officers’ presentations for 2018, released through a separate FOI.

Quarterly Reports VicPD Sch... by needsmorespikes on Scribd

Presentations VicPD School ... by needsmorespikes on Scribd