If only it were as simple as the guns. Think a moment how police often treat minorities on the street. Nothing changes just walking past a school gate for the day. And yet they are there to protect.

Amy Guerrero said she started getting randomly searched at her Koreatown middle school, Young Oak Kim Academy, when she was 12 years old.
“I got searched all the time, but I never saw the nurse, not once,” said Amy, who is 15 and a sophomore at UCLA Community School, which also is in Koreatown. “Whenever I felt sick or had a cut they said the nurse wasn’t there that day, but I saw the officers all the time.”

In back-to-back events, Los Angeles students and teachers landed on starkly different sides in a debate over security measures at schools.
On Friday in the west San Fernando Valley, teachers and students gave school police — and even random searches of students — a resounding vote of confidence.
The next day, in a gathering south of downtown, participants criticized an approach to security that they said criminalized students, victimizing them more than protecting them. They want to end random searches of students; some activists called for an end to police officers on campus.

End police officers on Campus? Why? Because Campus police with no real crimes at hand start to enforce rules. In fact some worry it’s part of the school to prison sequence…

In theory, so-called school resource officers are supposed to foster exactly what many civil rights groups are campaigning for: better relations between law enforcement and citizens, particularly minorities and lower-income families. In practice, some say, they are worsening the situation, facilitating the “school-to-prison pipeline” rather than curbing it. Thanks to inconsistent training models and a lack of clear standards, critics contend school officers are introducing children to the criminal justice system unnecessarily by doling out harsh punishments for classroom misbehavior.

“Is this is an effective intervention strategy? It’s really not having the impact we want to have,” says Emily Morgan, a senior policy analyst at The Council of State Governments Justice Center, a nonprofit that works to strengthen public safety and communities.