Chicago Public Schools to Eliminate Police Presence

Chicago Public Schools (CPS) to eliminate police officers and replace them with civilians, at the same pay rate, as CPS union agrees. 

By Eileen Griffin

Chicago Public Schools are planning to eliminate requirements for security personnel in schools so civilians rather than police will fill those positions.

At the start of the 2024-25 school year, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) intends to change its School Resource Officer program, the Chicago Tribune reports. If implemented, the change means that security positions now held by police officers will be filled by civilians.

Service Employees International Union Local 73, which represents school resource officers, said they will waive the current contract requirement that security staff must be police officers. The wage for the role will not change, but the requirements will be reduced. The schools currently employ 62 police officers who serve as part-time security staff. Full-time security staff do not have to be police officers.

“By lifting this requirement, we believe CPS will be better able to fill part-time security roles and improve safety in our schools,” union spokesperson Eric Bailey told the Chicago Tribune. Currently 55 part-time security positions remain open.

During the George Floyd riots in 2020, CPS students demonstrated against the police presence. Although blacks made up only 36 percent of students, they represented 73 percent of all students arrested that year. The administration ceded to the teenagers, reducing police presence by half.

Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, told CBS that removing police officers from schools severs the connection between law enforcement and the students.

“When they’re carefully selected, specifically trained, and properly equipped, [they’re] a huge asset to a school campus,” Canady said.

School Resource Officers are trained to work in schools and with students. An officer responding to a scene at a school will not have that same level of training.

Retired SWAT Officer Steve Rodriguez told Heartland Daily News that a law enforcement officer cannot be replaced by a civilian.

“Law enforcement by definition means that the person sworn to those duties is working towards preventing, investigating, and when necessary, arresting persons for criminal acts,” said Rodriguez. “While active school shooters are a possible but rare duty, we run into the low probability, high consequence matrix. No civilian would be able to influence any violent situation that occurs in their presence.”

Some school principals have expressed concern about losing the police presence. Troy LaRaviere, the head of the Chicago Principals and Administrators Association, told WBEZ FM Radio that many of the principals believe “it is better to have police in the schools who know their students and have been trained to respond to situations.”

Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) supports removing police officers from schools, WBEZ reports. While he was running for Mayor, Johnson advocated for removing officers from schools.

“Armed officers have no place in schools in communities already struggling with over-incarceration, criminalization, profiling and mistrust,” Johnson said at the time.

As an organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union, Johnson lobbied for the cancellation of the school board’s contract with the police, WBEZ reports. Once elected, he said he would allow the Local School Councils to make those decisions but now the Local School Councils may be losing the authority to make those decisions.

“Chicago Public Schools officials told principals the Board wants to strip Local School Councils of decision-making power for keeping resource officers and then may remove the officers,” Sarah Karp writes for WBEZ.

Hostility towards the police is not new to the Chicago public school system, the Illinois Policy Institute reported in August 2023. The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) are major supporters of the anti-police and defund the police movements, the report states.

CTU members have participated in demonstrations against the police, and they pressure local school councils to remove police officers from schools. This attitude has resulted in the demonization of the police along with rising youth crime rates.

“CTU’s radical leadership, along with the mayor, are simultaneously undermining the two social levers to reduce crime: Education and the criminal justice system,” writes Paul Vallas, Policy Advisor for the Illinois Policy Institute.

“In the process they are demonstrating a callous indifference to wrenching daily tragedies in the city’s Black communities. Almost 80 percent of those murdered in Chicago are Black. Meanwhile the explanation for murders, shootings, carjacking, auto thefts, retail theft, and armed robbery is ‘inequity.’ Until outcomes can be equalized, violence will reign.”

“To take police officers out of the Chicago Public Schools at a time when Chicago continues to be one of the highest-crime cities in this nation is frankly ludicrous and his decision is inexplicable,” Betsy Smith, National Police Association spokesperson said.

“Taking police officers out of the schools is going to do two things. First and foremost, it’s going to increase response time for any incident in those schools where a police officer is required. Secondarily, what it is going to do is take away those positive role models that police officers in the schools give to young students.”

“It appears, that the city of Chicago leadership has made the determination that they are willing to run the risk of allowing unimpeded criminal activity to occur on school grounds,” Rodriguez says.

For more great content from School Reform News.