At an emotional meeting this week, members of the Baltimore City Board of School Commissioners found themselves struggling to explain their recent initiative to allow the city's School Police Force, which is separate from the Baltimore City Police Department, to carry weapons inside school buildings as well as on the grounds outside. But despite all the uproar, guns aren't really the issue.
For years the system's 141 school police officers have been barred from bringing guns into the schools they protect. The result has been a rather curious arrangement that requires school police to leave their weapons outside when they enter the building but leaves them free to wear them everywhere else — a restriction that applies to no other police department in the state, including Baltimore's.
Yet many parents, students and youth advocates were alarmed to hear that could change under a bill sponsored by Del. Curt Anderson and Sen. Joan Carter Conway and supported by the city school board. Opponents say allowing officers to carry guns inside school buildings will make everyone less safe and will only add to the threat of violence many students experience every day on the streets outside.
We suspect, however, that what is going on here has less to do with safety than with the well-documented lack of trust between community residents and police officers in general, a relationship that has been particularly strained over the last year amid allegations of serious police misconduct against citizens both here and around the country. That's seems to be what's driving this dispute, and board members erred badly in not taking it into account when they backed what they should have realized could become a contentious piece of legislation.
Instead of advising parents and students of what it intended to accomplish by the change, board members sprung the idea on the public without any warning, practically guaranteeing it would meet a cold reception.
Board officials acknowledged they voted for the change in December as part of the school system's legislative package in Annapolis, but when they later published their goals for this year's General Assembly session, they failed to mention it. School board vice chair David Stone apologized for the oversight at the meeting Tuesday night, but by then the damage was done.
That said, the real issue at stake here isn't police carrying guns in the schools, since anecdotal reports indicate that already happens, whether intentionally or as a result of officers forgetting to store their weapons in a secure location every time they go into a school. Technically they are breaking the law when that happens, but as a practical matter they aren't doing anything police in every other jurisdiction aren't doing as well.
Baltimore's is the only Maryland district that has a separate police force for schools, a distinction whose origins go back to an era when school violence was perceived as on the rise and the regular city police department as stretched too thin. The School Police Force was originally envisioned as a corps of security guards who could intervene in an emergency until regular police units arrived on the scene.
In 1991 the school police's status was upgraded from a "security division'" of the city school department to a sworn force whose training met the same standards and expectations as Baltimore City police and other law enforcement agencies. But perhaps as a vestige of their origin as security guards, their mandate didn't include the carrying of weapons in school buildings.
At Tuesday night's meeting the school board did not spell out why they want to change that policy now. Is there some evidence that schools are less safe than before or that the role of school police has changed in some fundamental way? (If the only rationale is preventing another Columbine or Newtown-type school shooting that seems needlessly alarmist; horrible as such incidents were, they are extremely rare.) If the board had a good reason to make the change the public deserves to hear it.
Meanwhile, it must be said that the current policy of making officers put on and take off their weapons every time they walk in or out of a building makes little sense; it seems silly and unrealistic to think students will somehow be safer because of it, especially since many officers already find themselves (intentionally or unintentionally) ignoring the restriction anyway.
So far no one has complained that their safety has been compromised by that. Absent more compelling evidence that a change in policy would increase the danger of violence to students and teachers, we see no reason to treat school police differently than police anywhere else in the state. The real problem is a matter of trust, and that's a message the school board should by now understand.