Guest: Maryam Ahranjani, professor of law at the William S. Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she teaches and writes in the areas of criminal law and procedure and constitutional law.

Host: David Riedman, creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database

Paper: Unarresting School Safety, Nevada Law Journal

American public schools continue to utilize and expand harsh policing policies and practices, including, inter alia, on-site school resource officers, restraint and seclusion, zero tolerance, threat assessments, cameras, metal detectors, and use of student data to predict criminality. This expansion of “safety” measures continues despite experts’ serious concerns that the costs—physical, emotional, educational, and constitutional—often outweigh the benefits, especially for Black and Brown children and children with disabilities. This Article treads new ground by bringing an important voice—school psychologists—to the forefront of the school policing conversation. It builds on existing scholarship, both on the normative question of whether armed police with arrest power belong in schools in the first place, as well as the significant body of research questioning and documenting actual harms caused by school police by positing that there are other school professionals better situated.

David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my weekly podcast—Back to School Shootings—or my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and my article on CNN about AI and school security.

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