Abstract
In 2008, fully armed and uniformed police officers (called School Resource Officers, or SROs) were deployed to 30 public high schools in Toronto to patrol the hallways on a full-time basis. Situated from within the ongoing community-based struggle to remove the permanent presence of police from schools, Madan argues that the race-absent discourse of “relationship building” used by policing and educational institutions to legitimize the program obscures the more insidious functions of SRO policing. These include: the criminalization of racialized, particularly Black, Indigenous, and undocumented students, and the entrenchment of the school-to-prison pipeline; the naturalization of police presence in the school spaces of racialized youth; and the surveillance and disciplinary enforcement activities of SROs. As such, this chapter critically interrogates how the relationship-building approach works to humanize individual officers while decontextualizing SROs from the ongoing structural violence that racialized communities experience at the hands of the police.
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Madan, G.R. (2019). “I’m Just a Friend Now”: Community Policing in Toronto Schools. In: Villegas, F.J., Brady, J. (eds) Critical Schooling. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00716-4_2
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