Justice
Why Disabled Students Suffer at the Hands of Classroom Cops
Special-needs students are disproportionately referred to police in schools, and officers themselves say they need better training.
Back before the era of classroom cops, a student who didn’t follow her teacher’s instructions would have been disciplined by a vice principal. For refusing to leave her seat, the student might have been handed detention, Saturday school, a suspension—or worse, a phone with a parent on the line.
That’s not what happened at Spring Valley High School in South Carolina, however. A viral video from the Columbia school showed a sheriff’s deputy violently assaulting a black girl sitting in her desk. She may have been behaving obstinately, but she was not lashing out. Her treatment was both unconscionable and routine: As The Atlantic’s David Graham notes, black students are disproportionately subjected to corporal punishment and school suspensions.