In the aftermath of the school shooting in Robb Elementary School in Ulvade, Texas where 19 students and two teachers were killed, the conversation has turned to future prevention — with some Republicans inevitably ignoring gun control and arguing instead for more people on school premises to be armed.
During the latest episode of Last Week Tonight John Oliver tackles a part of this argument, diving into the effectiveness of police officers in schools — and he opens with some troubling statistics.
“This is happening even as vital resources for students have been starved,” Oliver says in the clip above. “A recent report found 14 million students go to a school with police, but without a counselor, nurse, psychologist, or social worker. That is 14 million kids who are in closer proximity to a pair of handcuffs than they are to a medical or mental health professional.”
After talking scale, Oliver moves onto effectiveness, citing a study of 179 shootings on school premises that “found no evidence that the presence of school resource officers lessened the severity of school shootings.” He then discusses some of the negative impacts that can come from having police officers on school grounds, including trivial arrests, an increased arrest rate of students with disabilities, and a lack of national training requirements.
“School police are not the answer to school shootings,” concludes Oliver. “The answer to that is gun control. And when we throw more cops into schools as an easy way out of that difficult and necessary conversation, we not only fail to keep our kids safe from gun violence; we condemn them to a system that criminalises the very essence of being a child.”
