Submission to SD61 school liaison officer committee
I submitted this presentation to SD61’s school liaison officer committee in June 2021. Notes to go with each slide follow the images. SD61 is running a survey on its SLO program until October 26, 2021 at 4:00 pm.
This presentation highlights what I’ve learned about SD61 SLOs through Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, provides an overview of racism in policing and SLO programs locally and across the country, and makes the case for permanently ending the SLO program.
Some Committee members may have lived some of the experiences highlighted here, and this presentation likely includes information the Committee has discussed through its work reviewing the SLO program.
It is worth noting this presentation does not address other important issues I hope the Committee is addressing, including problematic police enforcement related to gangs and the criminalization of sex work, drug use and mental health.
Through FOI requests, I obtained VicPD quarterly reports, incident reports and presentations from 2017.
As a result, I have a clear picture of VicPD SLOs’ activities from detailed time breakdowns provided in their quarterly reports.
VicPD says SLOs are supposed to promote healthy choices and enhance school safety and security. However, VicPD SLOs spent most of their time at presentations and events, which could have been delivered or attended by anyone.
SLOs also completed 67 incident reports in 2017, not reflected in the time above, which are discussed later.
VicPD SLOs also reported training hours in 2017.
Officers spent far more time on assault rifle and use of force training or other types of training than anything SLO-related.
Ultimately these are police officers, trained and armed as such, and no amount of training will make SLOs education or mental health professionals.
VicPD SLOs – 229 training hours in 2017
Assault rifle and use of force (86 hours)
G-36 Assault Rifle (80 hours)
Use of Force (6 hours)
SLO related (73 hours)
Guns and Gangs Conference (32 hours)
School Safety Conference (30 hours)
Other (70 hours)
SLO-related training was primarily two two-day conferences attended by officers.
A School Safety Conference may seem like a good use of time for SLOs, but to get a sense of the content it’s notable that the conference included an “Optional Bonus Day” — which VicPD officers did not attend — for “Top Gun Training,” from a speaker who teaches officers to be less hesitant to use lethal force.
SLOs spent nearly eight times as long on assault rifle and use of force training than “Role modeling,” “Student at Risk” and “High Risk Student” meetings combined, which VicPD and others like to cite in support of the program.
It’s also notable that Chief Manak told the police board in 2018 that those type of meetings are used to bring students “back in line” at the request of counsellors and teachers, which suggests SLOs are being forced on students as a form of discipline.
Through FOI requests, I obtained copies of the Oak Bay PD SLO job description, policy, presentations and two yearly reports.
Oak Bay PD SLOs’ stated activities include:
Presentations and events;
Recruitment: “administer and mark tests, and select students suitable for police based work experience programs”;
Yoga classes as pretext to discuss drugs or sexting; and
Investigations
Oak Bay PD’s SLO presentations to students frequently highlight offences, fines and consequences for students. E.g. a presentation that touched on marijuana said that “Getting into trouble with the law” can “affect your ability to … get accepted to post-secondary.”
Through FOI requests, I also obtained a Saanich PD SLO job description and information on presentations.
Saanich PD SLOs’ stated activities include:
Presentations and events
Training and safety
Discipline and mental health meetings
This committee will be well aware of the concerns about racism in policing extending to SLO programs and targeting BIPOC students.
We know police in Greater Victoria target BIPOC people.
2021 (Greater Victoria Local Immigration Partnership): 30% of BIPOC survey respondents reported experiencing racism from local police.
2018 (Michael Regis, for Greater Victoria Police Diversity Advisory Committee): Focus groups found that Indigenous, Black and Muslim people are profiled and surveilled by Greater Victoria police.
2015 (SOLID): 45% of respondents disagreed that VicPD responds in a fair way when dealing with racial, religious and ethnic communities.
2012 (VIPIRG): 1 in 5 respondents reported unequal or unfair treatment by VicPD based on their race or ancestry.
These harms are replicated when SD61 brings police into schools.
The use of police at SD61 schools is an extension of school discipline that disproportionately targets Black and Indigenous students
Robyn Maynard has a great chapter on this in “Policing Black Lives.” She has a related article here
Toronto, 2011-16: Almost half of students expelled were Black, 10% were white
Toronto, 2006-07: Suspension rates highest for Indigenous students; Black students three times more likely to be suspended than white students
Halifax, 2015-16: 22.5% of suspended students were Black, compared to 8% student population
Strait Regional School Board, Nova Scotia, 2015-16: 25% of suspended students were Indigenous, compared to 5% student population
Toronto: BIPOC students reported being targeted, intimidated and harassed by SLOs.
Vancouver SLO review (2021):
75% of Black student respondents said the SLO program does not contribute to a sense of positive community in schools
60% of Black student respondents said the SLO program does not contribute to a sense of safety in schools
Burnaby, Haleluya Hailu, Grade 11 (2020): “I haven't gone a day without dealing with some form of racism. RCMP school liaison officials only contribute to that.”
An Oak Bay SLO presented to international students and concluded by telling them to “Be positive representatives of your home nations.”
What sort of enforcement action are officers taking at SD61 schools?
In 2019/2020, SD61 Chair Watters said she was unaware of any arrests at SD61 schools in recent memory.
In 2020, following FOIs, VicPD and Saanich PD could not say how many students had been arrested at SD61 schools.
However, they disclosed the following information (documented further here):
Saanich PD: 93 youths were chargeable, had charges recommended, or were charged in files on school grounds between 2014 and early 2020
VicPD: 128 incident reports for arrests at schools or on school property for 2019 alone (youth and adults)
Note that files don’t necessarily mean arrests, and “youth” may not be students. However, from incident reports discussed later in this presentation, it is clear that schools are frequently calling the police on their students.
The Committee may have obtained this information, but police departments have not publicly released meaningful information on incident and arrest data for SD61 schools.
In June 2020, in response to an inquiry about whether SD61 had the type of data Bashir Mohamed FOI’d in Edmonton regarding discipline impacts on BIPOC students, the SD61 Board said the following information could be provided following the Committee’s work:
The ethnicity, age, gender and ELL status of students suspended or expelled;
How many students officers have ticketed, arrested, or gathered intelligence on at SD61 schools, and their ethnicity, age, gender and ELL status; and
How the above statistics compare to the student population
From the data disclosed through FOI, it’s clear there is police enforcement happening on SD61 property. That the board was unaware at the time is inexcusable.
Given what we know about the harms of policing, and given what Indigenous and Black people and people who use drugs have said about policing, a lack of information is no excuse to delay ending the SLO program; however, I am hopeful the Committee has made progress in studying how internal discipline and SLOs have affected BIPOC students in particular, which is likely to match experiences elsewhere.
FOIs for VicPD SLO incident reports, which provide basic narrative information about specific incidents where SLOs were involved, show there were 67 SLO incident reports in 2017, the last full year of the VicPD SLO program:
Elementary Schools: 18
Middle Schools: 8
High Schools: 26 (17 Esquimalt High; 7 Vic High; 2 SJ Willis)
K-12 Schools: 5
Unknown: 11
30% of 2017 incident reports with named schools were for Esquimalt High.
VicPD SLOs also completed 15 incident reports from January to April 2018.
These incident reports don’t include all school calls to police, including calls about student behaviour.
It’s worth noting that the idea that SLO “familiar faces” will be there for police interactions is not true. SLOs are not necessarily responding to schools’ calls for police.
Additionally, contrary to Chief Manak’s public statements that students approach SLOs, only 4% of 2017 SLO incident reports indicate they may have begun with a student reaching out to an SLO.
There are some troubling events in the incident reports, including assaults, but others show administrators failing to weigh the harms of criminalizing students when they called the police for events ranging from theft to the discovery of drug paraphernalia.
As an example of the low threshold schools have for calling the police, Sundance Elementary School called their VicPD SLO in 2018 because people weren’t picking up after their dogs.
I do not have incident reports for Saanich PD or Oak Bay PD SLOs.
I also obtained VicPD incident reports taking place on school property in 2019, after the SLO program ended.
There were 128 incident reports on SD61 property, in and out of school hours.
The majority of incidents (59%) were not related to students (e.g. people sheltering).
53 reports (41%) appear to clearly involve students in some way. Of those reports:
Elementary Schools: 42%; Middle Schools: 30%; High Schools: 28%
There were lots of incident reports for elementary schools. At least seven were staff calls to assist with students, including at least two instances where staff called the police on children under 10.
Other reports include theft; fights; calls about suicidal students; student disclosure of assaults; missing students; calls about no contact orders; and more.
Eight calls were flagged as mental health related. Police are not mental health workers.
Most calls were about student behaviour or alleged offences. For example:
Macaulay Elementary staff called police on an “unruly child” who “would not calm down and was banging doors and throwing things.”
Rockheights Middle School staff called police to “stand by while they suspend a student.”
VicPD’s disclosed incident reports do not include “ethnicity” data for the students mentioned, which is found in some other types of VicPD reports.
I hope through its work the Committee has information on which students are targeted by SLOs, as well as by the teachers and administrators who choose to call the police — including SLOs — on students.
Armed police are not appropriate student supports or disciplinary responses.
Here are two calls where, through FOI, we can see staff called the police on children under 10 years old in 2019. The number of times staff called police on children under 10 may be higher, as age can only be inferred on a handful of files.
In the first case, staff at George Jay Elementary believed a student with a mental health issue was “out of control.” They called the police on that student.
The second was also a child under 10, described as “verbally aggressive.”
Were armed police an appropriate response in either case?
A response that doesn’t criminalize young children is possible.
The School Board, teachers and administrators need to rethink their relationship with the police and the harm officers can have on students’ lives.
Police can harm any student, but we know Greater Victoria police departments target BIPOC people.
SD61 may have a data gap, which hopefully it has been working to close; however, we know the harms of racist policing play out in school discipline and SLO programs across the country.
Identifying the harms of discipline and policing on BIPOC students is work that should have been done by the Board and administrators before deciding to let police into its schools decades ago.
We know who policing targets, and how it can follow people and ruin lives. There is no reason to wait to end the program.
VicPD, Saanich PD and Oak Bay PD say their programs are about building relationship with schools and students, but SD61 can work on building student relationships with their schools and with the broader community without involving police, who have the power to arrest and harm those students.
Police have been permitted to become involved in the school community, even though we know their presence and potential for harm disproportionately affects BIPOC students.
In light of all we know about policing and SLO programs, in Greater Victoria and beyond, I hope the committee will recommend ending SD61’s School Liaison Officer program.