Tucked into Minnesota’s Education Finance bill this year is a provision that restricts the means by which school resource officers (SROs) can restrain students who are out of control.
SROs are police officers specifically trained to de-escalate potentially violent situations in public schools, and many school districts contract with local police forces to put officers in the schools to ensure the safety of students from threats external and internal to the schools.
The provision in the law was put in because the leftists in the legislature, who took control in the 2022 elections, firmly believe that police are the problem and not the solution to violence that plagues our communities. While not banning SROs, the law was changed to prevent techniques used to restrain students.
Police departments looked at the language and decided that it would be unwise to put officers in legal peril, and many decided that it would be unwise to renew the contracts.
Gov. Tim Walz told MPR News Friday that he won’t call a special session at this time to address the issue as he prepares to jet off to Japan Sunday for a business trip. https://t.co/GqUvnVwr9A
— Alpha News (@AlphaNewsMN) September 9, 2023
Their decision to stay out of the schools wasn’t retaliation; it was a simple decision of prudence. After looking at the law the departments worried that officers could face jail time if they tried to do their jobs as SROs. They would respond to calls as needed, but any preventive measures they took to de-escalate some situations would likely be illegal.
The result has been predictable. School violence has increased. Ironically, once things get bad enough the police can intervene legally, but not before.
Mankato East High School went on lockdown for about 30 minutes Friday morning as police responded to a “huge fight” on campus, according to reports.
This comes as a new state law restricting the types of restraints that can be used on students who are acting illegally prompted numerous police agencies to remove their school resource officers (SROs) from districts across the state, including the Mankato Department of Public Safety. Police say the ambiguous language in the law could open them up to legal ramifications.
Mankato Area Public Schools Superintendent Paul Peterson told families in a Sept. 1 email that SROs “will not be physically located at MAPS schools but will be available on an ‘on call’ basis to assist school staff.”
Last week violence broke out at a High School in Mankato, a modest-sized city in southwest Minnesota. As with many regional centers in America, it has grown quickly, and the claim that “diversity is our strength” has not quite proven to be quite as obviously true as its proponents predicted. Unsurprisingly, a High School where students don’t have deep roots in the community and with a large transient population is less stable than one where everybody has known everybody else for decades.
Video 2 pic.twitter.com/FBqALeQDkM
— Alpha News (@AlphaNewsMN) September 10, 2023
Mankato is one of the places where the police department declined to renew the contract for SROs, resulting not just in a nasty bout of violence but an actual lockdown of the school.
Lots of districts want the legislature to come back and clarify the law, so they can bring cops back into the schools. Unfortunately, the majority of Democrats in the House of Representatives oppose doing so, insisting that police in the schools make things worse.
You know, the whole school-to-prison pipeline and all that. It is law enforcement, not law-breaking, that makes society worse.
A group of 44 Minnesota DFL legislators released a statement Thursday opposing calls for a special legislative session to fix a new law impacting school resource officers. https://t.co/6j8d49g7bG
— Alpha News (@AlphaNewsMN) September 7, 2023
These legislators think that the SROs should go back to work in the schools despite the risk that they could wind up in jail themselves if they intervene in a potentially violent situation. They believe that restraining students in a way that may conceivably result in injury to the students should absolutely be prohibited, which sounds nice until you watch that video.
Failing to restrain out-of-control students will definitely result in injuries to students, many of whom are simply victims of violent peers.
It seems unlikely that the lawmakers actually want to see more violence in the schools; they simply can’t conceive of a world where the choices people on the ground face are between bad and worse. They fantasize that they have the magic power to see things more clearly than everyone else and to navigate to a place where only good things happen.
Would that it were so. I would love to live in a world powered by unicorn farts and where everybody behaves perfectly if only you ask them to. That is not this one.
SROs exist precisely because we don’t live in that world. There are bad kids who do bad things, and somebody has to protect the rest of the students. Leftists have systematically carved out a world that gets more lenient every year for the violent, disruptive, and in some cases, unsalvageable kids and that harms every other student.
If you design a society around catering to such people, you shouldn’t be surprised when they are the ones who wind up thriving while everybody else is much worse off.
And here we are.
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