This morning the BBC’s Community Affairs Correspondent Adina Campbell tweeted a news story about a rise in police officers present in schools, known as Safer Schools Officers. She said the BBC had “spent months working on this” with the Runnymede Trust, a racial equality charity. The news story is based on a Freedom of Information investigation by Runnymede, which found that there were 979 Safer Schools Officers (SSOs) in 2022, up from 683 in 2021.
The Safer Schools Partnership was launched in 2002 and is optional for schools. SSOs can offer assemblies, workshops, or provide drop in sessions for pupils. The article links this to the strip-search of Child Q, a 15-year-old black girl, at school by police officers; although this wasn’t conducted by SSOs. It also quotes Dr Shabna Begum, head of research at the Runnymede Trust, who says schools could be using police to sort out “quite trivial” behavioural problems; although she fails to provide evidence of this.
Unnamed “race equality activists” are quoted as saying that this could be the result of “adultification”, where black children are treated like adults. This was the central contention of a recent report by the Commission on Young Lives, which turned out to be based on dodgy data. Community advocate Imani Mclean is quoted as saying that many young people feel discriminated against and that the police aren’t fair. She appears to run an activist group called Awake Birmingham, which doesn’t seem to have a website or notable online presence.
To illustrate the issue, Campbell spoke to “Jorja”, a 14-year-old girl arrested at school on suspicion of causing grievous bodily harm, after she “tried to pull a girl away from a fight”. When allegations were made that she was part of the fight, police turned up and took her away in a police van. She was kept in the cells for ten hours, then was released on bail for four months. However, as part of the bail conditions, she wasn’t allowed back to where the fight had happened, meaning that she couldn’t go back to school, which led to her falling behind. In an associated podcast by Campbell, Jorja blames her treatment on her being black.
Although no further action was taken against Jorja, another girl was charged and then convicted of assault, which suggests that the fight was bad enough to warrant police involvement. Jorja’s bail conditions seem harsh but as no further details are provided it is hard to know the full context in which decisions were made. No comment from the police on the incident is included, nor details on the convicted girl.
This all links in with a new Runnymede Trust report, which calls for stripping police of the legal power to strip search children, withdrawing all SSOs from schools, and instead spending more on social workers. They point out that in London a majority of children strip-searched are black and cite a report from dubious activist group Kids of Colour which showed that SSOs were more likely to be present in areas with higher levels of minority students.
The problem with this is that while black children may be more likely to be searched or go to schools with SSOs, they are also much more likely to be involved in youth violence. The 2018 review of the Met’s Gang Matrix found that 75% of under-25 knife homicides had a black perpetrator, while 69% of under-25 knife homicide victims were black. Similarly, black people in London made up 70% of firearm discharges, 69% of habitual knife carriers, 52% of robberies, and 50% of serious youth violence, despite them making up only 16% of the population of London. Disproportionate levels of crime require disproportionate targeting by the police.
So when the Runnymede Trust complains that 95% of children strip-searched are boys and over half of those are black, this is proportionate (or even under-proportionate) to the level of crime. Nobody is concerned that 95% of the children targeted are boys due to sexism; males are more likely to be violent and therefore more likely to be targeted.
This story demonstrates well how ‘The Blob’ works: the media uncritically interview a range of activists, who all write reports which reinforce one another, in order to build a narrative pushing for change. No attempt is made by Campbell and the BBC to try and validate the reports; they are accepted at face value, even though Runnymede calls the riots and looting which followed the shooting of Mark Duggan “protests”. There’s no proof here that the police target black children disproportionate to their share of crime, nor that SSOs are a major problem. Efforts in America to shift away from the police have only led to increasing violence, ameliorated by the use of private security.