A funny thing happened recently in San Jose. First, in June, the woke cop haters, using the George Floyd case as their excuse, forced the school board—Santa Clara County’s largest--to get rid of all cops that had been protecting the schools. Then—surprise!—school violence flared, and guess what? Parents demanded that the cops return to protect their kids. An embarrassed school board was forced to reverse themselves and bring the cops back.
This farce began on June 25, when the school board, by a narrow 3-2 majority, voted to end their contract with the San Jose Police Department, ending a long relationship that included responding to violence on school grounds.
With the events following George Floyd’s murder, anti-police sentiment in San Jose grew, as it did here in Oakland. At the June 25 school board meeting, cop haters held signs with slogans like “Counselors not cops” and “Schools not prison.” A few worried parents tried to dissuade the board from getting rid of police protection in the schools, but they ended up on the losing side.
The main group lobbying for ending police presence in schools was the San Jose Unified Equity Coalition. Organizations don’t get much more woke than SJUEC; their Facebook page says, puzzlingly, “Communities of color don't need to be policed at school” (but white communities do?), while their Google page claims that “In fact, having police on campus is often harmful to Black and Latinx and BIPOC students, and students with disabilities, who are more likely to be suspended, cited, arrested, and expelled for normal teenage behavior” (as if there’s anything “normal” about bringing a gun to school).
SJUEC got exactly what they demanded. But their success was short-lived: On August 12, barely 6 weeks after the fire-the-cops vote, the website San Jose Spotlight headlined, “UPDATE: Largest San Jose school district brings cops back as security.”
What happened to cause this whiplash-inducing switcheroo?
Well, you can guess. Violence erupted, and teachers and school staff were totally unequipped to deal with it. Parents realized that, Hey, sometimes you need a cop around for protection. It’s one thing to theoretically demand that those horrid cops be eliminated from schools. But it’s quite another thing when it’s your kid whose safety is threatened.
Granted that San Jose’s new rehire-the-cops policy currently applies only to moonlighting officers—those not in uniform or official patrol, but who hire themselves out for private duty, usually at night to safeguard a prom or ballgame. Still, it’s a first step towards a resumption of cops-in-schools as the proven way to combat violence. Parents understand that schools need cops to keep their kids safe. They also understand that anti-copism is a form of racism, and they want no part of it.
Meanwhile, here in Oakland, our own Oakland Unified School District, under heavy pressure from an organization called the Black Organizing Project (BOP), by a unanimous vote eliminated cops in schools last June. BOP required all school personnel to take an oath: “I pledge not to call police, ICE, or Homeland Security on Black and brown students for nonviolent issues” (and why isn’t the “b” in “brown” capitalized?). They were supported by a majority of ever-so-woke OUSD administrators. It’s too early to say, yet, whether a flareup of violence in Oakland public schools will result in a reversal similar to San José’s. When an incident occurs—and it will—we’ll just have to see if social workers can successfully intervene in the crisis.
Steve Heimoff