Summary
In 2008, fully armed and uniformed police officers were deployed to thirty public high schools in Toronto to patrol the hallways on a full-time basis. The permanent assignment of police to the city’s schools represents an unprecedented turn toward a disciplinary strategy rooted in a paradigm of security and surveillance. This institutional ethnography traces the chronology of the program, exploring how race-absent official discourses of safety and relationship building are used not only to legitimize the program but also to conceal how it works to produce and sustain social inequalities in schools. The author argues that racial power is constitutive of the SRO program itself—that it is not simply an effect or consequence of the program’s existence but the very instrument through which it operates. As such, a framework for school discipline that is rooted in equity and justice would require the complete removal of police officers from school spaces.