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After students have been murdered, shot, assaulted, and robbed, Seattle Public Schools (SPS) says it’s ready to bring Seattle police back onto campus. But they’re still dragging their feet and not taking responsibility for the violence that ensued.

reported that both SPS and the Seattle Police Department (SPD) want to return School Resource Officers (SROs) to campuses across the district. The program should have already started, but due to little urgency and a budget crisis, the program is behind schedule.

Timeline aside, there was an immediate surge of violence after SPS leaned into the Black Lives Matter movement to kick officers off campus and embraced a curriculum that demonized cops. The district has blood on its hands, and they should apologize.

Seattle Public Schools tries to walk back anti-cop decision

During the height of the Black Lives Matter movement’s power, SPS announced it was booting officers from campus. They amplified false claims of racist cops targeting black and Hispanic students, and affirmed contrived feelings of “discomfort” from anti-cop students.

Then-SPS Superintendent Denise Juneau announced the district would be ending the SRO program.

“In light of the current national events: the perpetuation of systemic racism, the murders of Black people by police officers across our country, the violence displayed by some law enforcement officers here in Seattle, a resolution will be put forth by the School Board to reevaluate our relationship with the Seattle Police Department and to enact a district-wide one-year suspension of placing SEOs and the SRO in our schools,” a statement claimed.

But despite the clear uptick in violence that followed, SPS continued to keep SROs off campus.

After Seattle Public Schools booted cops, students started to die

A 17-year-old student named Amarr Murphy-Paine was after bravely trying to break up a fight in a Garfield High School parking lot. Students are still mourning 15-year-old Mobarak Adam after he was near campus at a community center bathroom. Teens across the street from Rainier Beach High School, with one of the teen suspects discovered with a no-bail felony warrant for possession of a stolen vehicle.

Rather than do the right thing and restore order with SROs, SPS leadership listened to fringe activist-students who said that cops were a bigger danger than the student criminals accused of murdering classmates.

In November 2022, after a student who shot dead at Ingraham High School, there was a district-wide debate on returning SROs to campus. Nothing came of it.

SRO programs work

It’s impossible to say how many crimes would have occurred if there were an SRO program fully funded and promoted. But we know criminals tend not to commit crimes in front of cops. And we know SRO programs work.

Back in 2017, Emily Owens reviewed the DOJ’s COPS in Schools that schools with funded officers saw about a 1–2% drop in on-campus mischief and actually caught more kids with drugs and weapons—proof that having sworn officers around can genuinely boost safety and sniff out trouble before it escalates.

Fast-forward to 2023, and Lucy Sorensen’s University at Albany research team dove into massive Education Department that schools with SROs had roughly 30% fewer non-gun fights and were confiscating weapons at a rate 1.5 times higher than schools without them—so yes, officers make teens think twice before brawling and help pull hidden weapons off campus, even if they haven’t really moved the needle on the super-rare school shootings.

You’re owed an apology

SPS shouldn’t merely restore an SRO program. That’s a given.

But SPS should also apologize for the pain and suffering the district’s decision caused. Had it not been for their politically motivated decision to boot and villainize cops, we’d likely have seen less bloodshed. We certainly wouldn’t have seen the culture of lawlessness develop so intensely on campuses.

Will SPS apologize? Of course not. SPS has a toxic mix of politicians and ideologues who never accept fault and often have on such significant blinders that they choose not to see the consequences of their actions, even if they’re decisions led to dead children.

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