Birmingham police are fighting against a court ruling that’s seeking to reduce the use of pepper spray in schools.
A federal judge ruled that Birmingham police should give school resource officers updated training on the use of pepper spray, among other changes, with the ultimate goal of avoiding spraying students for minor non-violent incidents. But the police appealed the order.
The U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments from lawyers representing the police on Wednesday, according to AL.com. The Southern Poverty Law Center represented the students in the case.
U.S. District Court Judge Abdul Kallon ruled that an officer’s use of pepper spray in situations where students pose no threat and are non-violent is unconstitutional, though he agreed that officers should be allowed to carry pepper spray in case violence does erupt at school.
The SPLC said officers have little guidance on how to use pepper spray and that officers are often too hasty to use it on students, using it to disperse crowds. But attorneys for police argued that the spray is a better approach than other options for addressing student misbehavior and said their policies and training are fine the way they are.
On Wednesday, the biggest point of contention appeared to be whether there are grounds for an appeal — given the fact that at this stage, the judge has only ordered the police and SPLC to meet and figure out how to improve training, come up with a better decontamination process, and reduce incidents of pepper-spraying students for things like verbal threats. One of the judges on the three-judge panel challenged whether or not the number of pepper spray incidents where students were sprayed after verbal threats were enough to warrant calling the reaction a “theme,” as Judge Kallon claimed.
School districts are closely watching cases like these, especially as school discipline issues gain more media attention across the country.
Videos of school resource officers treating kids harshly —including a video of a South Carolina officer pulling a student out of her desk and a video of a Texas student being slammed to the ground — have grabbed national headlines. In most of these incidents of harsh student discipline, the students are kids of color, which closely mirrors what the national data shows: Students of color are much more likely to receive suspensions and expulsions compared to white students, and are more likely to have law enforcement officers involved in discipline at school.
The pattern starts as early as preschool. Just last week, a Chicago mother decided to sue the Chicago Board of Education and a security guard after her 6-year-old daughter was accused by other students of taking candy from a teacher and was subsequently handcuffed and made to sit under a stairwell for an extended period of time.
And she isn’t the only parent resisting harsh student discipline policies. A group of parents recently filed a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education against Success Academy, a charter school network based in New York City, claiming that students with disabilities were discriminated against. The parents cited numerous incidents of what they call over-discipline that were meant to push out students with disabilities. Groups like Dignity in Schools are also mobilizing parents to speak out on issues of harsh student discipline and racial bias.
One of the chief concerns parents and advocacy groups have about student discipline practices is whether school resource officers — whose presence in schools has grown considerably in the past 15 years or so — are using developmentally appropriate practices, ensuring the way they address the misbehavior of children in schools is different than the way they address criminal activity from adults in other situations. When Birmingham Police Chief A.C. Roper defended the policies on pepper spray last year, he stated that he doesn’t know of other instances in which police departments have different policies for use of force for schools than they do outside of schools.