The People’s Plan for Police-Free Schools | OUSD Implementation Proposal

Oakland’s racist legacy of school police. Police presence in Oakland schools has a racist past that needs to be shed and undone. Historians have documented how, in the 1940s and 1950s, Black students and Black families migrating to Oakland from the South were framed in a racist rhetoric of “black delinquency” and “black dysfunction” which led to school and police collaboration. In the 1960s, policing in school and zero-tolerance policies were at the heart of containment strategies and rhetoric used against the Black Power movement and the Black Panther Party. In the 1980s, Oakland was a testing ground for the state’s first attempts by right-wing legal advocates and pro-prison “tough on crime” proponents to impose police in schools through the passage of Proposition 8 “Victims’ Bill of Rights.” In the three decades since then, policing, punishment and criminalization have invaded every facet of Black life, driving the Black community out of Oakland. The state and city budgets have sacrificed education and social service programs to ever-growing policing and incarceration budgets. OUSD is openly participating in continuing this racist legacy. 

The People’s Plan for Police-free Schools by 2020. Police don’t belong in our schools and our students and families deserve a chance to remain, learn and thrive in Oakland.  We call on OUSD to adopt this implementation plan to reinvest the school police budget into supports for the whole child and students with disabilities. We call on OUSD to join a growing list of school districts—from Toronto to Pomona—who are actively implementing solutions like these to achieve authentic student safety.