Denver School Board Ends Police Contract After 22 Years Despite Disapproval From Educators

Board members of the Denver Public Schools (DPS) made a unanimous vote Thursday (June 11) to end its contract with the Denver Police Department, which has monitored the campus and its students for the last 22 years.

Tay Anderson from the city's Board of Education filed the resolution citing that four police officers will be gone by the end of the year, while 13 other school resource officers will remain until June 4, 2021.

In a post on Facebook, Anderson said that the decision stemmed from "dismantling a system that has held children of color down for far too long."

"We now must dismantle white supremacy in our educators, curriculum, and our budget. This is the first step in a process to redefine our priorities as a district," Anderson said.

DPS also said in its statement that it is "deeply committed to affirming the lives of our students and has been changing our institutional culture to align with that commitment and undo the normalization of inferiority and bias."

It comes as the school resource officers reportedly ticketed or arrested mostly African American or Latino students, between the ages of 10 to 15, from 2014 to 2019. The DPS said that majority of the 4,540 cases could have been managed without the involvement of the police.

DPS' contract with the police department covered 18 schools at the cost of $720,000 in 2019. Once its end, the board will hire 100 private security officers in place of the police. Part of the funds will also be redirected to programs for social workers, psychologists, and other mental or behavioral health professionals.

The move, however, was opposed by some educators and members of the police. Jason Murdock, the dean at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Early College, said police officers in his school are actually helping the students. Some educators also said that the school board had not consulted them about the issue, while others accused the board of politicizing school safety.

"I’m ashamed to work for a district that has people who accept and tolerate known racism while capitalizing on society’s valid pain with racist law enforcement,” Murdock said.