how students led a historic $25m divestment from la school police

March 11, 2024. Originally published in NBCU.

Maleeyah Frazier, now 18, remembers when campus police officers used to roam Hamilton High School in the Castle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. Their presence made her feel uneasy and scared, an extension of the high-speed police chases she witnessed on residential streets and the police pointing guns in her neighborhood. 

Jailynn Butler-Thomas, who attended Dorsey High School in nearby Crenshaw, also remembers police trying to de-escalate fights on campus, only to sometimes make them worse. During one fight in 2019, police began pepper-spraying students who were walking to class, she said. “Students were running to the nurse’s office to try and get help, but there was no one there,” she said. “We had money being spent on school police, but we didn’t even have a full-time nurse to take care of us.”   

Butler-Thomas and Frazier are part of Students Deserve, an organization of around 250 students who advocate ending school policing and student criminalization in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The youth-led group has been fighting to remove police presence on campuses since 2013, arguing that police disproportionately surveil and harass Black and brown youth — and has had great success.