Montgomery County Lawmakers Fund School Police — But Say They Won’t Be On Campus
Montgomery County MD May 15 2021 The Montgomery County Council unanimously approved a police budget on Thursday that continues to fund the positions of 23 police officers who previously worked as school resource officers — but with the understanding that County Executive Marc Elrich will work with the county’s public schools to assign those officers to yet-to-be-determined posts in the surrounding community rather than on school grounds.
Their vote comes after more than a year of debate over removing police from Montgomery County schools, which began to intensify in early 2020 and accelerated after the murder of George Floyd led to nationwide protests against police violence and racism.
“I just want all of our residents to realize that this budget doesn’t reflect … any belief that we’re done in this area,” Council President Tom Hucker said.
Councilmembers said Thursday that Elrich and the school system must now meet to formally codify the appropriate relationship between police officers and schools. Elrich has created a steering committee comprised of police, social workers, school staff, and students for this purpose. The county has also created several task forces — including one co-chaired by councilmembers Will Jawando and Craig Rice — to come up with recommendations related to policing, schools, and mental health.
Elrich has previously expressed support for reimagining police officers’ presence on school grounds — and when he released his proposed budget in March, he came out in support of removing officers from school grounds completely, only allowing them to enter the premises in emergencies. The committee Elrich assembled will now meet to come up with an implementation plan and formal agreement for how police should interact with schools and how schools can boost mental health support for students.
The police budget approved by Montgomery County councilmembers on Thursday adopts Elrich’s recommended budget, though it includes an amendment introduced by Jawando that asks Elrich to work with the school system to delineate exactly when police officers can enter into school buildings. The amendment, Jawando said, also emphasizes the belief that police should only enter schools under the most urgent circumstances.
Jawando and Councilmember Hans Riemer have sponsored separate legislation that would prohibit the county police department from deploying school resource officers to schools. The Council hasn’t yet voted on it — and Jawando said that the bill has become less urgent since Elrich announced his support for taking police officers out of schools.
“Once it became clear that the county executive came on board and said that he agreed that there shouldn’t be police in schools and wanted to … propose this other model, it changed the dynamic,” Jawando told WAMU/DCist. “Now we know police won’t be in schools.”
The Council has also added $750,000 to the county budget to train middle school staff and administrators in restorative justice.
Still, Jawando says he currently is “not supportive” of the proposal Elrich and his staff have put forward in recent months around school policing, which would turn the 23 officers previously deployed to schools into “community resource officers” who would still maintain a presence in the areas surrounding schools. He adds that even if the council refused to fund those positions, Elrich could still set up his community resource officer program with existing officers. Jawando says his bill prohibiting school resource officers could still “be brought forward at any point,” and that it might be appropriate to legislatively codify the proper relationship between the police department and the school system in the future — but he wants to wait and see what his task force and Elrich’s steering committee end up recommending.
Rice, who for years supported the presence of police in schools but recently switched his position on the matter, also supported Elrich’s version of the budget with the Council’s amendment.
“We’re working to change, but let’s make sure we get the process right,” he said.
But youth activists who want police completely removed from school settings say this approach leaves the door open for continued — and in many cases unwelcome — police interaction with students, particularly Black and Brown students. Nearly half of student arrests in the county over the past four years have involved Black children, even though Black students make up only one-fifth of students in the county’s schools.
Elrich’s school safety initiative “seems designed to build a case for the Community Resource Officer (CRO) model— which simply repurposes School Resource Officers into another harmful role,” said an April letter from a group of community organizations called the Montgomery County Defund Policing & Invest In Communities Coalition.
The coalition, which includes eleven student and youth organizations and a dozen additional community organizations in the county, insists that this plan “is not removing police from schools. It is just moving them outside the buildings.”
Instead, the coalition wanted to see the funding for those school resource officer positions completely eliminated. (The coalition also has other demands for increased mental health support, social workers, and restorative justice practices at schools.)
During the Council’s debate on Thursday, Riemer expressed similar concerns that the budget, as it stands, keeps police officers’ relationship with schools intact.
“What has been proposed in this budget, what we have seen, is that these 23 positions, while not being stationed in the building, will continue to do more or less the same work,” said Riemer. “They’ll be active in the school, they’ll be on patrol, patrolling students. And how can we be confident that’s not going to happen? The only way, I think … is to not have those positions.”
Following the vote, Riemer, who ultimately voted in favor of the budget, said he had planned to introduce a motion to not fund the 23 positions — but ultimately decided to just move on.
Overall, the police budget approved by the council adds $1.69 million to the police budget — a 0.6% increase from last year. It includes what county legislative analyst Susan Farag called a number of “puts and takes”: For example, it adds $9 million in previously negotiated compensation for officers, while it compensates for those increases with other reductions.
Farag also said Thursday that the budget eliminates 27 sworn officer positions. Most of those positions are vacant and officers who currently occupy positions that are set to be cut will be redeployed to other areas of the department. The budget adds two positions to the department’s Internal Affairs unit, which has been struggling to close investigations in a timely manner.
Still, the head of the police union has called the cuts to several positions “totally irresponsible,” claiming the reductions would “push the many [officers] that are already contemplating resignation/retirement to their breaking point.”
