Denver discovers that removing school resource officers was a ‘mistake’
Zachary Faria
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After two high school staff members were shot in Denver, the city’s mayor is calling the removal of school resource officers from schools a mistake. Who could have possibly seen this coming?
The shooting prompted Mayor Michael Hancock to take the typical Democratic gun control line and call for the same “common sense proposals” that are either never defined or are ineffective, but Hancock went a step further. “It’s also time to return School Resource Officers in our schools,” Hancock said in a statement. “Removing them was a mistake and we must move swiftly to correct it.”
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So why did Denver, and other school districts and cities, remove school resource officers in the first place? Denver voted to remove those officers, and end the district’s contract with the Denver Police Department, in June 2020. Can you think of anything going on in June 2020 that would lead a liberal school board to terminate a contract with a police department?
Yes, the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the subsequent demonization of all police officers pushed Denver to remove police officers from its schools. It did the same in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., among other places. Here is what one school board member said at the time: “Our students shouldn’t be greeted by law enforcement officers, they need to be greeted by mental health support, school counselors and full-time nurses in our schools.”
The Denver Public Schools superintendent said at the time that this was about the “absolute need to end the school-to-prison pipeline,” a popular refrain among the liberals who either didn’t know or didn’t care that removing officers from schools would make them less safe. According to Denver’s liberal decision-makers at the time, police were only in schools to punish children and prepare them for prison. Evidently, it took two corpses to disabuse them of that notion.
The liberal hysteria that was unleashed on the very concept of policing in 2020 was grim, and it had even grimmer consequences. That is what happens when you allow talking points based on myths to dictate your governance. Removing school resource officers was, in fact, a mistake. So is electing liberals who are foolish enough to make that decision in the first place.