Just The Facts:
Police and Metal Detectors In Schools
The safety of our children could not be a more important or emotional topic. To effectively protect our children, though, we must examine the facts and adopt solutions that not only “sound good” or that some “believe” will work but embrace those that have a proven record of making schools safer. Citizens for Juvenile Justice has extensively studied the effects of stationing police officers in schools and recently did an analysis of peer-reviewed research and data on metal detectors in schools. This body of research, reflecting the experiences of schools in Massachusetts and around the country, proves no safety benefit from increased police presence or metal detectors in schools. These interventions instead put students at risk, from harms like arrest and trauma, while wasting money that could be put toward evidence-based interventions.
Give parents multiple options for school safety
The majority of adults expressed concerns about their children’s safety and emotional well-being in a recent MassINC poll funded by the Shah Family Foundation. Since the central task of parenthood is to protect and nurture our children, this comes as no surprise.

The poll’s approach to the issue of school safety was one-sided and flawed, as parents were not questioned about best practices like restorative justice, peer mediation, or many other approaches that protect safety and emotional well-being in schools. The only actions to address their concerns that the poll presented were more police and more metal detectors in schools. Those choices got many positive responses because they were the only choices. We’d encourage the press when covering polls to ask questions about methodology and share this information in their reporting.
More police will mean more students being criminalized – not safer schools
In a meta-analysis of 12 studies looking at police on campus, none of the studies showed that police made schools safer. 

When police are stationed in schools, they frequently drift into enforcing school rules rather than the law. Students end up arrested for behaviors that may be troublesome or disrespectful but do not rise to the level of crime. Schools with police report 3.5 times more student arrests than schools without them. 

Youth subjected to aggressive and often persistent involuntary police encounters (ex. stop and frisk) report significantly higher levels of anxiety, trauma and even post-traumatic stress disorder with similar findings in students stopped by school police.    
When police take action against students, children and youth of color are more likely to be targets. Our reviews of school discipline in Massachusetts during the 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 school years showed that Black and Latine students were sanctioned at higher rates than their white peers, and students with disabilities were also disciplined at elevated rates. Overall, data revealed that Black and brown youth made up 27% of the overall student body in Massachusetts but 67% of the school-based arrests. An earlier study that we conducted with the American Civil Liberties Union and ACLU of Massachusetts found that schools with police had the highest arrest rates in the state’s three largest cities, including Boston. This report not only found that students of color or with disabilities were arrested at higher frequency, but that they were arrested at higher rates for minor charges.
Metal detectors provide no safety benefit, damage student experience 
Our recent report, Metal Detectors: “Security Theater, Not Safer Schools", reviewed research on this technology’s effect on students. Studies show that metal detectors do not reduce violence in schools or make schools safer. But they do show that the detectors increase students’ perception of danger and so produce negative social, psychological and developmental outcomes. Even school personnel have reported that metal detectors are time consuming and disrupt the learning environment. This harm caused by the implementation of metal detectors in schools falls disproportionately on students of color, as Black and Latine students are nearly 5 and 3 times as likely, respectively, to pass through a metal detector at school than white students.
Metal detectors can also create a prison-like feeling among students, have been linked to diminished academic performance, and, worst of all, don’t work well in school settings.
Policing and metal detectors are expensive
A metal detector costs $4,000-$5,000 per machine. This amount does not account for significant additional costs, including the personnel to operate them as well as ongoing training for both the security personnel and other members of the institution’s staff to be able to properly use and maintain the technology.  

Though research shows that metal detectors do to not help students or make them safer – in fact, they have been demonstrated to hurt students – spending is too often directed toward them as a “quick fix” for school safety, rather than being applied to long-term strategies and investments in student well-being that have been proven to protect students, reduce violence and improve overall school climate.
The danger in investing in school safety solutions that aren’t supported by research
Far too often, the issue of school safety is presented as a zero-sum scenario where police and hardening schools are promoted as the only options to address parental concerns around safety. This could not be further from the truth, as school districts across the country are exploring and implementing diverse pathways to school safety. Unfortunately, the false dichotomy of ‘it’s either hardening schools or doing nothing’ continues to be pushed despite the overwhelming evidence and research establishing that these approaches ultimately don’t increase school safety and that they do cause additional consequences for students.

There are multiple dangers to this one-sided view of school safety solutions. Dr. Kenneth J. Trump, president of National School Safety and Security, is a school safety expert and consultant who has testified before Congress and the US Commission on Civil Rights. Dr. Trump speaks to these dangers, terming school hardening approaches like metal detectors as “security theater,” stating that they “provide an emotional security blanket but not really making a significant difference.” Promoting solutions to parents desperate for answers to school safety that “look” and “sound” good but that have no research backing to their effectiveness in improving school safety is irresponsible. 

Spending money on approaches that are not research- or evidence-based wastes crucial funding that could be directed towards meeting student needs. It has been well established by numerous studies that young people face significant mental health challenges, with a recent report from the Center for Disease Control (CDC), citing concerning statistics of depression, anxiety and suicide ideation in teens. Furthermore, a poll of Boston Public Schools teachers conducted by Educators for Excellence found that “77% of teachers feel their students’ mental health was somewhat or much worse than before the pandemic”.

At a time when students are experiencing high levels of mental health concerns, school districts should not be directing funds towards the “sizzle” of visible hardening measures over the “steak” of investing in addressing student mental and behavioral health needs which are often root causes of school safety concerns. Dr. Trump calls the phenomenon of spending on hardening over student supports “the triumph of the wow over the how” and warns that this approach comes with a cost beyond what is recorded on a district's bottom line, stating that “a skewed focus on target hardening neglects the time and resources needed to spend on professional development training, planning, behavioral and mental health intervention supports for students, and other best practices.” Further, investments in non-evidence based approaches ignored the recommendation of the CDC report, which calls for “evidence-based steps to foster the knowledge, skills and support needed to help prevent and reduce the negative impact of violence and other trauma and improve mental health.” As examples, the CDC report emphasized the importance of "safe and trusted adults—like mentors, trained teachers, and staff—who can help foster school connectedness, so that teens know the people around them care about them, their well-being, and their success.”  
What works
Districts around the country have implemented safety measures that recognize mental and behavioral health challenges and developmental needs and do not criminalize students. Boston and other cities in Massachusetts should learn from these promising practices rather than stubbornly insisting repeating failed strategies that have no evidentiary or research support. For example, the Los Angeles Board of Education diverted $25 million originally earmarked for school policing to a “Black Student Achievement Plan” that added 221 psychiatric social workers, counselors, "climate coaches," and restorative justice advisers to schools. Other large urban districts, like Denver, Oakland and San Francisco, are also shifting funding from policing to student support.

The CDC cites universal school-based programs, sometimes known as social-emotional learning approaches, as reducing aggressive behavior, bullying and other behaviors associated with youth violence. In pre-K through high school, the Task Force for Community Preventive Services found a 15% relative reduction in violent behavior among students when these programs were in place. Among high school students, the reduction rate was 29%.
Real choices to make schools safer
Families have legitimate concerns about their children’s safety and emotional well-being. The leadership at Boston Public Schools owes it to parents to offer them something better than the proven failures of policing and facility hardening. Throwing money into visible measures that have no evidence of success at making schools safer will not bring about short- or long-term school safety and will only serve to convey a false sense of security. Additionally, as we have demonstrated, both metal detectors and school police placement come with significant risks to students and will deepen racial and ethnic disparities in children’s educational experience. This, on top of the disproportionate learning loss experienced by students of color during the pandemic, runs the risk of decimating the future of a generation of students, sending them into the school-to-prison pipeline and on the pathway to dropout and negative future outcomes. 

But it does not have to be that way. Despite efforts of some public officials to convey the opposite, policing and school hardening are not our only options to make our schools safer. We can balance the significant needs of students entering our schools and the promotion of improved school climate and safety. These are not mutually exclusive. If we simply follow research and evidence-based practices, we can reimagine our schools as places that are trauma-responsive, healing-centered and that have a framework of best practices that de-escalate conflicts before they rise to the level of violence. This is the best pathway rather than simply recycling discredited approaches. We implore leadership in the City of Boston, and in cities across the Commonwealth, to direct resources into our schools to support practices that protect children, make our schools safer and, most importantly, actually work.