As students enter classrooms in the days after a widely publicized , experts say educators have a responsibility to acknowledge their anger, grief and sadness — particularly as more than ever before experience symptoms of depression and anxiety. 

Nichols, who grew up in Sacramento enmeshed in and with a love for , was father to a 4-year-old son. On Jan. 7, he was pulled over in a traffic stop and severely beaten for three minutes by five police officers on since-released body camera footage. The officers were part of a since-disbanded special unit that policed his Memphis neighborhood. Nichols was unarmed and minutes from home. Three days later, he died in the hospital at age 29. The officers will appear for an arraignment on Feb. 17, charged with second-degree murder.

But Dimitry Anselme, executive program director with the global nonprofit , said it is now critical to explore Nichols’s life and humanity with young people.

“We don’t want to stay only in death. We’ve lost Tyre. What you want to begin to help [young people] think is, what’s our response? What are the ways by which we want to engage with one another to move to justice?” said Anselme, who oversees workshops and training with educators and staff internationally, guiding constructive and psychologically safe ways to discuss violence and injustice with young learners. 

Paramount in this immediate aftermath, according to Anselme, is to offer ways for students to reflect on their emotions like journaling, and emphasize the message: It’s OK not to watch. 

While graphic images, including photos of Emmett Till’s open casket and Nichols’s hospital bed shared by family, have forced Americans to contend with extreme anti-Black violence, exposure to such imagery can trigger psychological and physical reactions, such as disrupted eating, sleeping and bed-wetting in children. This is particularly for Black children who may identify with Tyre, experts . 

In conversation with ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, Anselme explains how Nichols’s life can be explored alongside critical moments in American history, why inviting young people to reflect is critical in this political moment and best practices gleaned from teaching violent history and genocide.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ: What have you been hearing from educators and students in the wake of Tyre Nichols’s death and the recent release of body camera footage? 

Anselme: Emotions. A lot of students and teachers are sad. They are frustrated. For many of them, this will not be the first time that they have to have a conversation in the classroom around an episode of police violence or police brutality, particularly targeted toward the loss of a life of a young Black man. So there is a sense of dĂ©jĂ  vu and people are really exhausted. Episodes like this contribute to the sense of sadness and powerlessness, like, ‘Oh my God, how many more lessons can I possibly do on gun violence, or the loss of life of a young black man, or another police brutality incident?’ It feels like it is nonstop. 

The other thing we’re hearing is, ‘I don’t want to keep my young people mired in grief, anger.’ It’s not that they’re looking for ‘give me something positive’, but it’s what can I give to young people that does not keep them in a sense of powerlessness, especially in the moment? The kind of national dialogue that’s going on in the country, the incessant fights around racial justice, give young people a sense of change does not happen. 

Teachers are looking for ways — I call it teaching for democracy. That is to say, democracies are not perfect. They require that we remain vigilant, that we don’t tire out, that we don’t lose hope, optimism and a sense of engagement. So a lot of our resources are around how do you bring students back to core democratic values? We always select a moment of fracture, usually brought on by violence, with examples of how to repair, rebuild, and what we call choosing to participate. So you don’t just stay in that moment of history that is sad, but you are looking at ways that ordinary people repair. That’s how we teach the civil rights movement, the Reconstruction period, the Holocaust, Armenian Genocide. Here’s the moment of fracture, here are the range of responses that human beings have taken on, look at all the ways by which accountability happens, attempts to have national conversation about memory and legacies, and how to rebuild.

I think a lot of teachers at Facing History know that the work is really around inspiring young people. To say, channel your grief, your sadness, into participation. It’s not to minimize the loss of Tyre. But, increasingly, our sense is we need to provide resources so young people can think about themselves, their rights and responsibilities when they live in a democracy and how they can sustain civic agency.

How might educators foster discussion in a way that it doesn’t feel, as you said, like another moment of hopelessness?

First, you move to history. So let’s use a moment that is not in the here and now, because it’s going to give us emotional distance. You don’t necessarily need to use a police brutality moment — I might say, let’s talk about the murder of Emmett Till. It’s an act of injustice, and it raises all the conversations that we want to have about the value of Black life, around the way that violence is being used to circumvent or to prevent coexistence, our ability to live. It keeps them focused on the larger themes: democracy, civic engagement, civic participation. 

One of the things that we get from looking at Emmett Till is the way that his mother responds to his death, the way that she will inspire a civil rights movement that was already taking place. That’s the lesson you want kids to take. We don’t want to stay only in death. We’ve lost Tyre. What you want to begin to help them think is, what’s our response? What are the ways by which we want to engage with one another to move to justice? 

On Wednesday, we witnessed Tyre being laid to rest in Memphis. How can educators today, tomorrow next week, acknowledge that grief?

We train a lot around the use of journals so that young people can capture, ‘what do I think before I speak?’ These are moments where I would call educators to look at our or a because I would be inviting kids to be writing, journaling, reflecting on the emotions they are feeling. What’s in their mind? Reflect on the multiple identities of Tyre Nichols that we’ve learned about him: a young Black man who was also a skater, a young father. I would be inviting young people to think about him and reflect on his humanity. Rather than again, focusing on the pain, honor him. Recognize him as a human, and let’s celebrate the loss of the human life that we’ve lost.

What I’m telling you is also the way we’ve learned to teach around genocide. We use survivor testimonies to give you a sense of the individual. Who was this person? Where do they live? What kind of relationships do they have? I keep you centered on the human person that is lost. So it’s not just a number, 6 million. No, it’s about the story of Greta. It’s the story of Rena. It’s a story of this one person living in just one moment in time. I would honor Tyre in that way. Write about his identities, his multiple ones. Do you have friends who are skaters? 

Could we spend a moment reflecting on the technology aspect of this? The images of his killing can be somewhat unescapable. You might be at a restaurant with your family as CNN plays the footage on loop. How has your guidance adapted to that reality?

It’s really, really difficult. I went on a news blackout last Friday. I’m raising two young Black men and I said to all my colleagues and friends: news blackout. I definitely don’t want to see the video. I don’t want to overwhelm ourselves with images just because of the media environment we all live in. At Facing History, in all of our work for the last 47 years, when we teach about genocide, we always invite teachers not to overfocus on the images of death camps, of dead bodies. We don’t encourage that kind of teaching. Usually there’s a desire like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna show them these awful images and bang it on the head so they can understand what happened.’ We say it’s not going to be effective. And the reason why we don’t think that’s effective is because that really traumatizes kids and it leaves them in a space in the space of pain.

In this current social media environment, we would encourage teachers to encourage students not to be watching those videos, to avoid them or empower yourself. You can write a statement on your Instagram or your Facebook: tell your friends and colleagues that you’ve chosen not to watch the video, that you would love it if they could avoid sharing it with you or putting it up themselves. Give them tools where they themselves can be empowered to sort of communicate that. It’s OK not to watch the video to relive the images. It’s OK to change the channel, shut the TV off. It’s not like you’re minimizing or you’re running away from what happened. No, you’re fully aware of what happened. What you’re doing is self-care. Protect yourself. 

We cannot use the classroom and materials to cheapen, to use violence and death to get students’ engagement or attention. As an educator, I would say you should feel free never to utilize those videos and images. A lot of entertainment is centered on abuse and violence of Black bodies. We have it in sports, music, movies, law, literature or history. I like to think we have a responsibility as educators not to participate in this. 

Students and educators, particularly Black families, have felt this kind of vicarious trauma many times in recent history. Why does the conversation have to be continued, not a one-off lesson, particularly as we are amid a youth mental health crisis?

We are social beings, but we also have emotional lives that need to be recognized, realized and affirmed. I don’t think one does an educational service if you’re working with people of color, in particular Black students, to not acknowledge the emotional toll, the trauma that the content that we look at in classrooms will bring. It has to be something that’s perpetual, but you don’t want to do this in a way that is re-traumatizing or deepening the trauma. 

You want to end lessons by bringing attention to issues of identity, to collective identity, group membership, legacies and then the civic participation piece. You are trying to balance giving space for the emotion to be recognized, but also engage a larger conversation about human behavior. As young Black men, they are human beings, they have empathy for the struggle and emotion and injustice of other groups. So that moment when they are engaging with their own trauma and frustration, it is also a moment to help them see: you have experienced this, other groups have experienced this. So what kind of human societies do we want to create? What does coexistence mean? When you do that, you provide them with the vocabulary and mitigate the pain — I’m not alone, there’s something larger about the way human societies operate. There are larger dynamics. 

We have a lot of this conversation on staff at Facing History. I do not think it is fair for us as educators to teach young Black kids, you were victimized in 1619 and you are victimized today in 2023. If that is the only way we teach American history to Black kids, we’re doing them a disservice. Because if you teach it that way, you don’t teach them Fannie Lou Hamer. You don’t teach them Frederick Douglass. You don’t teach Harriet Tubman. 

Because in fact, throughout the history of violent oppression and marginalization, many Black folks chose to respond to the pain they were having by engaging. Harriet Tubman comes up with a way to help free other enslaved people; Frederick Douglass plays a key role in the key constitutional amendment that everyone in America today enjoys. That’s the amendment that gives you immigration laws that we have today that a variety of other people are using and enjoying. So I want African American kids to know the America that we have today comes directly out of the Black experience, pain and trauma. We’ve created this society of democracy and freedom, not only for ourselves, but for other groups. That’s where you help balance the pain and fracture. I don’t think it’s fair to just keep Black students in this idea of perpetual victimhood because in fact, the history tells something else. We do not do a good job in history education of helping kids see that.

We could think for a moment about the challenge and changes to the AP African American Studies curriculum, book bans removing Toni Morrison and other historic Black authors’ work. How does that context impact your recommendations and how you speak with educators? 

The reality is teachers are already finding ways to resist this on a daily basis. What I would say to educators is to continue to focus on the work that they’re doing, identifying resources and moments that are important for students. We have some shared democratic values, I think if we hold on to these, we will survive this particular political movement. There have been efforts at other moments where, for example, you couldn’t teach about LGBT experiences in the classroom. With the work of activism, we were able to create the space. We created the Black Studies movement, an ethnic studies movement, an Asian Studies movement in the country.

It’s very scary what’s happening. I used to be a teacher and a principal. I feel so much for folks who are in the classroom today, or for school principals who are just overwhelmed. I’m hearing things in Florida about doing a book review at every school. You can imagine the amount of human time and labor it’s going to take to do this. I was born in Haiti and I grew up in the Congo. My formative years were in two societies shaped by dictatorship. This is not democratic behavior. I’m very comfortable saying that; I have lived in non-democratic societies. 

This comes back to the civic agency piece. If we lose hope if we think somehow, oh, well, that’s it, this political movement doing all this book banning has won. No, they have not won and are in violation of the American spirit and democratic values. So what does that mean? We redouble our effort and our commitment to democratic values to believe that we have a freedom of conscience, that young people have freedom of conscience, they should have access to a wide range of ideas, that we are all as educators going to defend a marketplace of ideas. The idea of a marketplace of ideas is as American as apple pie. Use that as an inspiration to students. None of these bills prevent me from teaching about the Declaration of Independence; use those moments to highlight key American values. How do we preserve them today?

Viral videos of the incident show disturbing interactions between police and students, one of whom appeared to be a Black male teen who was and as he lay unresponsive on the ground. Some students as the pepper spray filled a school hallway. Another video appeared to show an officer pulling a girl across the hallway by her hair.

The incident at Little Elm High School unfolded during a Friday morning protest after a student claimed on Snapchat that she was sexually harassed by another student on a bus and disciplined for coming forward. On social media, teens at the 8,300-student district accused administrators of mishandling sexual misconduct complaints. A city spokesperson that police mobilized after students acted “aggressively” toward an administrator. 

School resource officers and how they interact with students, particularly students of color, have been under fierce scrutiny since George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020. Amid national Black Lives Matter protests, dozens of districts ended longstanding ties with school-based officers, although several districts have recently reversed course, citing student safety concerns. 

Andrew Hairston, director of the Education Justice Project at Texas Appleseed, an advocacy group, called the viral videos “such a harrowing thing to witness,” and accused police of preventing students from checking to see if their classmate was OK as he laid on the floor after getting tasered. 

“The police officers are the violence,” Hairston said. “They are the threat in that video.” 

Two students were arrested for assaulting police officers, Little Elm Mayor Curtis Cornelious . 

“When a third student attempted to interfere with the arrest, the officer was forced to use pepper spray, and then a taser when the student would not stop advancing toward the officer,” he said. “A fourth student spit on an officer, which Texas law deems as an assault.”

In an initial statement on Facebook that was deleted but later reposted, the school district said a student demonstration caused “some students to behave in a way that caused a major disruption.” 

“The demonstration was a result of a social media post the day before that contained inaccurate information regarding an incident that happened a month ago,” the district said in the statement. 

Superintendent Daniel Gallagher said Monday the events leading to Friday’s student demonstration “hits us at the core of who we are and we have to find a way to restore the trust you need in order for all of us to move forward.” In a statement, Gallagher said the district “immediately launched an investigation” after a student made an allegation against a classmate. 

Though no students faced discipline for reporting sexual misconduct, misinformation that claimed otherwise proliferated on social media, he said. 

School and police officials were prepared “to accommodate a peaceful walkout,” but the protest “was not peaceful and caused a major disruption,” Gallagher said. “In one incident — not currently being shown on social media — a large group of students attempted to break into an administrator’s office in pursuit of targeted individuals who were in genuine fear for their safety.” 

Gallagher said school officials will hold a “listening session” on Nov. 30 to allow parents “an opportunity to voice their concerns, thoughts and provide suggestions to the district administration.” He also announced plans to create a committee to review the district’s sexual harassment reporting and investigation process, an “after-action review” of Friday’s clash between students and police and “an independent investigation” into the sexual harassment allegation that led to the student protest. 

Cornelious said the city will review the incident to ensure the officers followed proper police department procedures, but maintained that social media videos often lack necessary content to understand the full situation. 

“Whenever an officer arrests someone who’s acting aggressively or resisting, it’s hard to watch,” Cornelious said. “But Texas law gives police the right to take steps necessary to make an arrest. Those steps include the use of tasers and pepper spray as safe, non-lethal methods of subduing someone who is being aggressive and refusing to respond to requests.” 

Meanwhile, Hairston said the incident should reenergize national efforts to remove police from schools and encouraged Little Elm administrators to display “political courage.” 

“Dozens of districts have taken significant steps toward police divestment but so much more work needs to be done to get police out of schools,” he said. “More and more people are understanding that it’s an irredeemable institution. School policing can’t be reformed.” 

As a talent show came to a close in the winter of 2007, hundreds of children and parents poured out of a Minneapolis high school only to be met by the piercing blast of gunfire. 

North High School students and their parents rushed back inside and police raced to investigate the commotion. But the guns and bullet shells were nowhere to be found. A campus security guard who helped in the search, they’d soon learn, had already stashed them in his pockets and, later, his wife’s purse. 

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ Newsletter

The weapons turned up that evening outside a gas station a few blocks from the school where the security guard, Kelly Woods, got into a heated altercation with his ex-girlfriend. Police, who observed witnesses screaming “They’ve got a gun,” arrested Woods at gunpoint.

For Woods, the arrest added to a lengthy criminal record, including drug trafficking, auto theft, armed robbery and a federal firearms conviction, which didn’t stop him from becoming a security guard in charge of protecting students. For police officer Charles Adams III, the security guard’s colleague at North High, the ordeal became part of his internal disciplinary record. When officials pursued fresh criminal charges against Woods, Adams pressed them to “go easy” on a man he described as a “good guy,” according to police records obtained by ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. The move infuriated the lead prosecutor on the case. Assistant County Attorney Diane Krenz said it was the first time in her decades-long career an officer had pressured her to go lenient on a suspect, according to the records. The last thing the community needed, she said, were “more guns on the North Side.” 

The incident linked to Adams — the and now-former cop — is included among dozens of allegations and disciplinary findings against campus police officers recently stationed inside Minneapolis public schools that include claims of police brutality, racial discrimination and domestic violence. 

In one incident, officers were accused of beating and arresting a man for carrying a handgun despite having a concealed carry permit. In another, police were accused of pounding in a man’s face because he littered the crust from a slice of pizza. Both incidents ended with court settlements, against Minneapolis officers that has cost taxpayers millions of dollars. The city after a man said at least six officers punched, kicked and tasered him during a traffic stop. One of the accused officers became a school-based cop, a position he held until last year.

After George Floyd was murdered in 2020 at the hands of a Minneapolis officer, the city school board was quick to end its longstanding contract with the police department for campus cops, a move that some critics said was politically motivated. Floyd’s death put a national spotlight on police brutality and excessive force. ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ obtained public officer misconduct records and court files to explore whether similar interactions between police and students had transpired in Minneapolis classrooms — and if such incidents may have contributed to the school board’s decision to cut ties with the department. Ultimately, few of the records involved on-campus incidents or youth, but the lengthy list of allegations and disciplinary findings — many alleging violence on the part of police — raised separate questions about how the officers wound up inside schools in the first place. They also offer new context for an ongoing national debate about the role police should play in schools and whether they’re best equipped to ensure students are safe. 

Ben Fisher, an assistant criminal justice professor at Florida State University whose research focuses on the efficacy of school-based police, said the Minneapolis officers’ disciplinary and court records “seemed quite problematic.”

“Schools contain some of our most vulnerable people in society,” Fisher said. “If we are putting officers in there who have abused their power in some way outside of the school, it’s a very scary proposition to imagine that track record following them into schools.”

Minneapolis Police Department spokesman Garrett Parten said officers’ disciplinary records were considered before they were stationed inside schools, but he declined to comment on specific allegations or findings against officers. School resource officers took the job to build trust between youth and police, serve as positive role models and ensure children could learn in a safe environment, he said in an email. Effects of the school board’s decision to end the school resource officer program, he said, “will become evident over time.”

Dozens of school districts across the country severed their ties with police after Floyd’s murder, but broader police reform efforts have so far faltered. In Washington, legislation that sought to improve transparency around officer misconduct and make it easier to prosecute bad cops, among other changes, failed as bipartisan negotiations broke down. 

Locally, Minneapolis voters will consider a ballot question next week that could remove from the city charter a police department that’s long been . As the school district navigates its first year without a full-time police presence in classrooms, the ballot measure would create instead a city Department of Public Safety that would use a “comprehensive public health approach” and employ police officers only “if necessary.”

National industry recommend collaboration between police and education leaders when stationing officers inside schools, but researchers who study the efficacy of school resource officers said that little evidence exists about how such selection processes actually work. Anecdotally, the job is highly regarded in some districts and officers compete for the position, Fisher said. In other places, being stationed in schools is “a punishment where police are put there if they can’t cut it on the streets.”

‘Completely out of control’

ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ obtained Minneapolis Police Department misconduct records for the 24 officers assigned to public schools for the five years prior to Floyd’s murder. Of those, 21 officers faced 105 internal complaints, 11 of which resulted in discipline of varying severity. Those records span the duration of officers’ employment with the department. Separately, the officers stationed in schools were named in federal lawsuits on at least two dozen occasions, according to an analysis of court records. 

The police disciplinary issues range in seriousness. One officer who worked in the schools was cited in 2019 for unintentionally firing his service rifle while responding to a call about a man with a gun, and another was given a letter of reprimand after getting arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol. In two of the 11 cases which resulted in official department action, officers were disciplined for using excessive force. 

About half of the Minneapolis officers who were sued or disciplined remain on the force, according to a department spokesperson. 

Among them is Mukhtar Abdulkadir, who has faced 11 internal complaints — two that resulted in discipline — and two federal lawsuits. He reported to work as a school resource officer as recently as 2017, district records show. Records suggest the officer has a tendency to respond violently when under stress. 

In 2010, a young Ethiopian immigrant accused Abdulkadir of choking and punching him and calling him a racial slur after he was pulled over and cited for riding a bike at night without a light, a citation the man called “stupid.” A federal lawsuit following the incident . Abdulkadir and his attorneys couldn’t be reached for comment. 

In 2011, Abdulkadir was arrested on assault and terroristic threat charges after his then-wife accused him of punching her in the ribs, smothering her face with a pillow and hitting her in the face with the butt of his service pistol. Abdulkadir was but was rehired with back pay after his former wife retracted her allegations. Yet according to his disciplinary file, internal investigators believed her decision to recant was obvious: “Only if he is reinstated will she obtain child support when they divorce.” Additionally, internal records note that domestic abuse victims often “take the blame” because their abusers maintain control over them. 

Abdulkadir was also accused of repeatedly punching a man outside a car wash in 2013. The man honked at the officer because he was next in line at the automatic car wash but hadn’t moved forward, according to a complaint in a federal lawsuit. In response, Abdulkadir was accused of punching the man repeatedly before charging him with disorderly conduct, according to the lawsuit that also . 

Then, in 2014, Abdulkadir was reprimanded for becoming irate after he failed firearms training. Officers who witnessed the outburst reported feeling afraid because he “was completely out of control” and had easy access to a gun. 

“That night I truly believed that at any time he could grab his weapon, load it and use it against officers,” a police sergeant told internal investigators. In a less controlled environment, the sergeant said he could see a situation where Abdulkadir would “completely lose control of everything and harm himself, other officers or the public.” 

District records show Abdulkadir was assigned to Minneapolis campuses a year later, including Andersen United Middle School and Seward Montessori School. 

When officers protect their own

The disciplinary findings against Adams put the storied coach and second-generation Minneapolis cop on defense, a position he isn’t used to playing. After the school board voted to break with the police department, some students at North High School, the predominantly Black school where Adams worked as a school resource officer, So did the school’s principal. 

On after reinvigorated the Black Lives Matter movement, The New York Times examined how his roles as a football coach and a Black police officer placed him on both ends of the debate on policing in America. As Adams , “I wear blue, but I’m Black.”

The records suggest that Adams, who left the police department last year and is now head of team security for the Minnesota Twins, was willing to go to great lengths for a colleague accused of a serious crime, a reality he acknowledged in an interview with ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. Woods, the North High School security guard, and his attorney couldn’t be reached for comment. 

“I stood up for him as a character,” Adams said. “I never said that it was OK for what he did.”

North High School Principal Mauri Friestleben, who has been outspoken against the school board’s decision to cut ties with the police, similarly stood behind Adams. With officers in schools, she said she witnessed a “healthy discourse about what real protecting and serving looked like,” including situations where campus cops helped students avoid arrests. “I have no reservations about my public support” of Adams, she wrote in an email, and called the officer “a protector” who came to the job “with multiple dimensions and this may be just one of them.” 

Adams sought to downplay his own disciplinary record, arguing that police leaders and prosecutors overreacted to his intervening in Woods’s criminal case. Prior to becoming a school security guard, Woods was convicted of armed robbery in 1992 and became ineligible to possess a firearm. Six years later, police arrested Woods with a gun outside a Minneapolis Greyhound bus station. Woods, who is Black, unsuccessfully accused the officers of racial discrimination when they stopped him while investigating drug and gun trafficking, according to court records. 

Adams said that Woods was a positive force in the community and shouldn’t be defined by the years he spent in prison. After the shooting outside North High, Woods wasn’t trying to keep the guns for himself, Adams maintained. Instead, Woods knew the students involved in the shooting and didn’t want them to get arrested. Woods recognized them as gang members, according to court documents.

“I took it as him looking out for those two kids,” said Adams, who added that he didn’t observe the shooting himself. “He took [the guns] from them and said ‘Get out of here,’ one of those types of deals because that’s just the type of person that he is.” 

Adams scoffed at the suggestion from Krenz, the prosecutor, that his defense of Woods conflicted with his role in keeping the community safe. Krenz declined to comment for this article. Adams said she wouldn’t know where North High was if it “smacked her in her face.” 

“I don’t want to hear that,” Adams said. “I hear so many people talk about what should be good for our community. They have never stepped one foot inside of it.” 

‘Good ol’ boy network’

Internal police records obtained by ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ likely offer a significant undercount of officer misconduct. Just 2.7 percent of complaints resulted in discipline between 2013 and 2019, according to a nonprofit news outlet. After lengthy investigations, disciplined officers often received letters of reprimand or brief suspensions. 

A pattern of officers protecting their peers allowed abuses to remain under the radar until it went to court, the investigation found. Three years before he murdered Floyd, for example, Derek Chauvin and pinned him to the ground for 17 minutes. The incident, which could be seen as a precursor to Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck, from his public records. 

ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ sought comments from Minneapolis officers previously stationed inside schools, school board members, the city and state police unions, an attorney who represents many officers in misconduct litigation, the city and the county attorney’s office. Each declined to comment or didn’t respond to interview requests. 

Among the lawsuits against officers placed in schools, civil rights attorney Zorislav Leyderman represented the plaintiffs in six. Police misconduct incidents that occur outside schools, he said, should influence whether those involved are assigned as school resource officers. Leyderman cited the allegations as contributing to a larger culture in the city where many Minneapolis residents fear the police. 

“They don’t want to interact with law enforcement because they’re worried that if they do, they’re going to get injured,” he said. The allegations against the officers stationed in schools “should have been looked into, both the lawsuits and these internal complaints.” 

Oftentimes, he said police misconduct remains outside the public eye because officers are “coached” following incidents, a practice the department has maintained isn’t a form of official discipline. The department was sued and , including in cases of serious wrongdoing. In , investigators found that Minneapolis police used coaching to resolve more than a quarter of complaints over a six-year period.

Local parent advocate Khulia Pringle, who helped the school district hire security staff to replace sworn police last year, said that officers’ disciplinary records should be a major factor when placing them inside schools. However, that history only reinforced her belief that police have no place walking hallways. 

“In any other situation, when we need the cops, we call them,” said Pringle, a Minnesota-based representative of the . If they’re going to be there, there “should have been more protocols in place as to which officers are in schools,” she said. 

Adams said he was surprised to see the allegations against other police officers who worked in the schools, and although negative interactions between cops and youth have occurred, he couldn’t recall any recent instances that could’ve motivated the school board’s decision to end its police contract. Yet Adams, who said he can “speak freely” now because he’s no longer a cop, portrayed his former department as one where officer misconduct is routine. 

“It’s the good ol’ boy network,” he said. “You’ve got guys who are in the police department that treat people wrong on purpose and you can see it.” 

‘Part of the game’

As communities across the country grapple with the role police play in schools, new research serves to highlight the issue’s complexities. On one hand, the officers reduce some forms of violent crimes like fights, according to the research. At the same time, their presence prompts a dramatic uptick in suspensions and arrests — especially for students who are Black. Little academic research explores the types of officers who are more effective than others in schools.

But being named in a federal lawsuit shouldn’t be automatically disqualifying, said school safety consultant Kenneth Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services in Cleveland. Filing civil rights lawsuits against an arresting officer is all “part of the game,” he said. Police misconduct suits often end in settlements, yet Trump said the final results should become part of the equation when making school resource officer assignments.

“If you’re a police officer and you’re doing your job on the streets, there’s a really good chance you’re going to get sued somewhere in your career,” said Trump, a proponent of school-based policing. “But there should be some sort of baseline criteria and screening set by your police administration before that pool of officers is ever presented at that next step to your school people.”

Parten, the Minneapolis police spokesman, said that all officers were eligible to apply for the school resource officer program and were interviewed by a panel of police department and school district officials. The police chief had the final say in hiring decisions. Parten said he collaborated with education officials when crafting a statement for this article, but Minneapolis school district spokeswoman Julie Schultz Brown didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. 

“Candidates were presented with scenario-based questions designed to evaluate critical thinking skills necessary for a school setting and further examined each individual’s understanding of the challenges and rewards associated with the position,” he said. 

Policing in Minneapolis remains contentious in the larger community, and voters will soon decide whether to go in a completely new direction. Ahead of next week’s election, suggests the question of whether to dismantle the traditional police department will be close. Black voters were less likely than white voters to support the idea. 

A similar course change — to remove cops from Minneapolis schools and replace them with district security staff — was ultimately detrimental, Adams maintains. “Crime is outrageous” at North High School, he said, and the security team hired to replace sworn officers is “stretched thin.” 

And even though he defended a security guard who he said sought to keep kids out of the criminal justice system, the former cop said stationing police in schools was an effective strategy to catch suspected criminals.

“A lot of kids would obviously show up to school and investigators and a lot of police knew the kid would be there,” Adams said. “That was a good way to get bad guys.” 

Lead Image: Former police officer Charles Adams III’s actions to intervene on behalf of a school security guard arrested on gun charges are among dozens of disciplinary findings and misconduct allegations involving campus police officers recently stationed inside Minneapolis public schools. (Andrea Ellen Reed / The New York Times / Redux)