Black students still make up more than their fair share of disciplinary interactions with campus police, new data from Fresno Unified show.
Trustees voted in June to restore contracts with the Fresno Police Department, providing middle school campuses with Student Resource Officers, or SROs. The contracts for the district’s middle schools had lapsed during a tense, pandemic-era debate over the role of law enforcement in schools and amid renewed efforts by some to defund the police in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.
Fresno police faced new stipulations in these most recent contracts with Fresno Unified, however, including being tasked with more thoroughly tracking their interactions with students. Out of that came a new district data tool where officers log both positive and discipline-related interactions with students, as well as instances when students report safety concerns to them.
The latest batch of this data – which covers the period from August 2022 through mid-March – shows that Black students and students with disabilities comprise a disproportionate amount of disciplinary interactions with campus police.
Specifically, Black students represent only around 8% of the district’s over 70,000 students, while they represented roughly 17% of disciplinary interactions. Students with disabilities make up about 11% of the student population but also comprised around 17% of these interactions.
That’s bringing back old concerns for some, including Trustee Veva Islas, who’s been critical of certain aspects of the district’s contracts with law enforcement and how they affect students.
“There still seems to be some inequity with some of our students of color,” Islas said of the SRO data during a recent Fresno Unified board workshop on safety.
“That’s concerning, and I want to make sure that we’re interacting in ways that … are mitigating that,” she added, “that (are) not driven by racism. That we are trying to make the investments that allow all of our students to be successful, and that we’re not creating these pipelines into prison.”
The data on Black students also mirror the Fresno Police Department’s records on student arrests. Black students’ share of arrests by SROs in the fall 2022 semester decreased overall from pre-pandemic levels but remained disproportionate, according to a February report shared with The Bee’s Education Lab.
Fresno police officers told the Ed Lab in an interview that officers’ involvement in disciplinary incidents is often at the request of school staff rather than self-initiated – and that disciplinary interventions are just a small part of what they do on campuses.
“The last thing our men and women in the schools want is to take enforcement action,” said Capt. Tom Rowe. “Now, we have to provide for the safety of the school, and there’s certain behaviors that are going to require that. Weapons on campus — you can’t really look the other way right now on that one.”
“They want to serve (as) that positive role model,” he added, “that bridge between the school, the staff and law enforcement. And I think that gets overlooked.”
The data
The SRO data tool, first piloted last March, prompts officers to self-report interactions with Fresno Unified students under one of three categories: a positive interaction, a discipline incident, or a safety concern, based on the officer’s discretion.
The vast majority of interactions logged in the tool fall under the first category: 2,369 out of 2,823, or roughly 84%. Positive interactions were recorded with students across all races and other subgroups noted in the reports.
There were much fewer safety concerns and disciplinary incidents recorded – 202 and 252, respectively.
While Black students made up a disproportionate amount of the disciplinary interactions in particular, other student groups were either proportionate or in some cases under-represented in the data.
For instance, Hispanic students – who represent just over 69% of the student body – made up a proportionate percentage of just under 69% of disciplinary interactions.
White and Asian students, on the other hand, made up a disproportionately low share of the disciplinary interactions. The former makes up about 8.3% of the student body but only about 6% of disciplinary interactions. The latter represents almost 11% of FUSD students but less than 3% of the reported disciplinary interactions.
Other student groups within Fresno Unified were also overrepresented in the SRO data on discipline, including students with disabilities, socioeconomically disadvantaged students, and foster youth.
Student arrest data tracked by the Fresno Police Department tell a similar story of Black students being disproportionately represented.
Black students made up 16.5% of student arrests but only about 8% of students on campuses with an SRO during the fall 2022 semester.
The data are not exclusive to Fresno Unified’s SROs, however, and include Central Unified and Sanger Unified campuses that also have contracts with Fresno PD.
Arrests also cover an array of outcomes with law enforcement: from being referred to peer mediation to being booked into the Fresno County Juvenile Justice Campus.
Fresno officers ‘respond to behaviors’ not race, police say
When asked about disparities in the data, Fresno police said that everything they do is with the intention of keeping campuses safe.
“We actually respond to behaviors or activities,” Rowe said. “It doesn’t matter what ethnic group is involved, and if they’re involved in something that warrants a law enforcement response, we’re obligated to respond.”
Campus police usually aren’t initiating their involvement in disciplinary actions, officers emphasized, but rather responding to staff needs.
The latest contracts with PD also stipulate scenarios when officers are not to take any “enforcement action,” said Sgt. Anthony Alvarado.
An example is a mutual fight with no injury. “We’re not going to automatically hang a case on a kid for that,” he said. “That’s going to be a school discipline (case) only.”
Officers aren’t always initiating the reported safety concerns, either, but are typically hearing concerns from students.
“That’s a positive,” Rowe said, “that those relationships are in place, and the students are feeling comfortable enough to do that.”
Those two categories – discipline incidents and safety concerns – should be accurately reflected in the self-reported data, Alvarado said, while positive interactions may be underreported because of how they’re logged.
Officers aren’t asking students about their race or disability status at the end of an interaction. Instead, they will either ask a student or administrator for their ID number to upload into the self-reporting system, but that doesn’t always happen if it doesn’t come up organically.
Fresno trustee calls for more training in schools
Despite the provisions in place to prevent over-disciplining students, concerns with how these interactions may be affecting some of Fresno Unified’s students remain.
Islas also voiced concerns about the “vast preponderance” of interactions reported between campus police and the district’s students with disabilities.
“These are students that are displaying or having a lot more stress in their life, that are acting out. Sometimes it’s beyond their ability to self-regulate,” she said.
“How are we helping to defuse situations by more professional learning so that these are not just the students that we’re seeing with high rates of interactions with our SROs?”
On the SRO side, PD told the Ed Lab that officers won’t necessarily know a student has a disability prior to an interaction.
“We don’t know how the child is classified,“ Rowe said, “until we have that contact” and log it into the system.
At the board workshop, Islas called for more training to help all safety personnel on campus appropriately interact with students with disabilities.
The trustee also cited parallels between trends in the SRO data and the district’s suspension and expulsion rates.
An Ed Lab analysis of last year’s suspension data indicated that Fresno Unified suspended Black students, students with disabilities, and foster and homeless students at an above-average rate in the 2021-22 school year.
Fresno Unified’s suspension rate – as well as the rates at several of Fresno County’s largest districts – also exceeded the state average.
FUSD’s suspension rate is currently on track to be higher this year, although that’s “tentative data,” district spokesperson Nikki Henry said in a March 20 email to the Ed Lab.
