Testimony of the New York County Defender Services Before the Committee on Public Safety and Committee on Education Int. 788-2026 (Dinowitz) April 28, 2026
Testimony of the
New York County Defender Services
Before the
Committee on Public Safety and Committee on Education
Int. 788-2026 (Dinowitz)
April 28, 2026
Background and Overview
New York County Defender Services (“NYCDS”) is a public defense office that represents New
Yorkers in thousands of cases in Manhattan’s Criminal Court, Supreme Court, and Family Courts
every year. Our Youth Advocacy Unit represents children in felony “Raise the Age” cases in both
Supreme Court and Family Court.
The bill before this body would require reporting on school safety agent retention, resignation,
and termination. The stated purpose of this proposed legislation is to understand and respond to
widespread attrition. There are approximately 3,600 police officials stationed in New York City
schools, a figure that has fallen 28% over the last six years.1 To backfill these positions, the
Police Department has deployed 114 school safety aides as young as 18 into our schools.2
1 Elsen-Rooney, Michael, and Alex Zimmerman.
“NYC School Safety Force Drops by Almost a Third.
” THE CITY,
11 Mar. 2025, https://www.thecity.nyc/2025/03/11/school-safety-agents-nypd-principals/
2 Zimmerman, Alex.
“NYC Hires Assistant School Safety Agents as Young as 18 to Help Fill NYPD Shortage.
”
Chalkbeat New York, 26 Mar. 2026,
https://www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2026/03/26/nyc-school-assistant-school-safety-agent-help-fill-nypd-shortage/
New York County Defender Services
100 William St, 20th Floor, New York, New York 10038 | t: 212.803.1500 | f: 212.571.6035 | nycds.org2
We urge this body to take a different view of the problem. These positions should not be filled.
As we explain below, the evidence is clear: school safety agents do not make students safer, they
cause particular harm to Black and Brown students, and the resources now devoted to school
policing would do more good if they were redirected to counselors, clinicians, and restorative
practices.
School Policing Is a Recent and Unproven Experiment
The idea that police officers belong in schools is a recent development, not a longstanding
feature of American education. In 1975, only 1% of public high schools had their own police
officers.3 The first major expansion came with the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement
Act of 1994, which created the federal Community Oriented Policing Services office to oversee
funds for hiring police in schools.4 Numbers grew dramatically after the Columbine massacre of
1999.5
The driver has been fear of school violence, especially school shootings. But research shows that
arming schools does little to stop this kind of violence.6 School safety agents were not designed
for, and do not effectively prevent, mass shootings. In practice, they spend their time on
disciplinary infractions and mental health crises, which they route into the carceral system rather
than letting schools handle thus feeding the school-to-prison pipeline. To the extent that people
want school safety agents at school to promote safety, there is little evidence that school safety
agents prevent student crime at all.7
School Safety Agents Disproportionately Harm Black and Brown Students
The harms of school policing fall heavily on Black and Brown children. Black students are three
times more likely to attend a school with more security staff than mental health personnel.8 Once
officers are present, Black and Brown students face more punishment, and more severe
punishment, than their white peers.9 Research has found that school safety agents perceive
3 Behnken, Monic.
“Why School Police Officers May Not Be the Most Effective Way to Prevent Violence.
” Iowa
State University Research, 19 Nov. 2024,
https://research.iastate.edu/2024/11/19/why-school-police-officers-may-not-be-the-most-effective-way-to-prevent-vi
olence/.
4 Id.
5 Id.
6 “Association of School-Based Police Presence With Student Discipline and Academic Outcomes.
” JAMA Network
Open, vol. 4, no. 2, 2021, https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2776515/.
7 Fisher, Benjamin W., et al.
“Protecting the Flock or Policing the Sheep? Differences in School Resource Officers’
Perceptions of Threats by School Racial Composition.
” Social Problems, vol. 69, no. 2, May 2022, pp. 316–334,
https://academic.oup.com/socpro/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/socpro/spaa062/5939812.
8 Whittenberg, Tyler, and Maria Fernandez.
“Ending Student Criminalization and the School-to-Prison Pipeline.
”
NYU Steinhardt Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools, Advancement
Project, https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/metrocenter/ejroc/ending-student-criminalization-and-school-prison-pipeline.
9 Thompson, Elena.
“School Resource Officers Exacerbate the School-To-Prison Pipeline for Students of Color.
”
ACLU of Ohio, 18 Feb. 2021,
https://www.acluohio.org/news/school-resource-officers-exacerbate-school-prison-pipeline-students-color/.
New York County Defender Services
100 William St, 20th Floor, New York, New York 10038 | t: 212.803.1500 | f: 212.571.6035 | nycds.org3
threats to be external in predominantly white schools and to come from the students themselves
in majority-Black schools.10 That perception shapes who is stopped, searched, disciplined, and
arrested.
Officers Are Not Equipped to Respond to Mental Health Crises
School safety officers are increasingly first responders to students in mental distress, a role they
are not trained to fill. The consequences can be severe. Studies of combined police and school
resource officer responses to what is termed "children in crisis" show that responders handcuff
the child nearly one out of every ten times.11
The racial pattern is stark. In a 2021 brief by Advocates for Children, Black boys accounted for
more than a quarter of these interventions in 2018 to 2019 and 2019 to 2020, despite making up
13% of enrollment.12 Black girls represented 20% of interventions while making up 12% of
enrollment.13 In 92% of handcuffing cases, the student was Black or Latino.14 All 33 handcuffed
children between the ages of five and seven across the four-year study period were students of
color.
15
Children in psychological distress need trained clinicians, not handcuffs.
School Policing Changes the Culture of School
An armed law enforcement presence transforms a school into a site of social control. Students of
color in particular interact with metal detectors, school safety agents, handcuffs, sweeps, and
drug-sniffing dogs as part of an ordinary school day.
NYCDS recently represented a young girl who was stopped by an officer on school grounds,
shown a wanted picture of her boyfriend, and repeatedly asked "isn't this your man?" as a tactic
to intimidate her. This is what school policing looks like in practice.
The presence of school safety agents on campus also drives measurable increases in
out-of-school suspension and expulsion. Missed school days matter. They increase the likelihood
10 Thompson, Elena.
“School Resource Officers Exacerbate the School-To-Prison Pipeline for Students of Color.
”
ACLU of Ohio, 18 Feb. 2021,
https://www.acluohio.org/news/school-resource-officers-exacerbate-school-prison-pipeline-students-color/.
11 Advocates for Children of New York. Police Response to Students in Emotional Crisis: A Call for Comprehensive
Mental Health and Social-Emotional Support for Students in Police-Free Schools. 3 June 2021,
https://advocatesforchildren.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/police
_
response
students
in
_
_
_
crisis.pdf.
12 Id.
13 Id.
14 Id.
15 Id.
New York County Defender Services
100 William St, 20th Floor, New York, New York 10038 | t: 212.803.1500 | f: 212.571.6035 | nycds.org4
that students will drop out, and failure to complete high school is associated with worse health,
employment, and legal outcomes into adulthood.16
School Policing Feeds the School-to-Prison Pipeline
School safety agents criminalize general misconduct that would ordinarily be handled by a
principal, a dean, or a counselor. Officers can conduct searches without meeting the probable
cause standard, enabling aggressive searches and seizures inside school buildings. The
downstream punishments compound the harm. Students who are suspended or expelled are three
times more likely to come into contact with the juvenile justice system within a year.
17 They are
often left unsupervised and fall behind in coursework, which increases disengagement, dropout,
and further justice system involvement.18 School safety agents also arrest and summons students
at high rates, often for ordinary juvenile behavior that an administrator could handle or that a
restorative approach could de-escalate.19 For many young people, their first contact with the
criminal legal system happens not on the street but in a school hallway. That is the pipeline.
In New York City schools, Black and Latino students represent 90% of those arrested while
making up only two thirds of the student body.
20
The Alternative: Counselors, Clinicians, and Restorative Justice
We know what works. Investment should be directed to meeting and exceeding the American
School Counselor Association recommendation of a 250:1 student-to-counselor ratio.21
Counselors are trained in mental health, can de-escalate psychological distress, and build the
ongoing relationships with students that lead to better outcomes.
For behavior that might otherwise be routed to law enforcement, schools should use restorative
justice practices: peer mediation, conflict resolution, and other classroom-based models that
repair harm rather than punish. These are not aspirational. Des Moines is an example of a
jurisdiction that has removed sworn officers from its campuses and retained non-sworn staff
16 Policing Project, School Safety Issue Brief. Safety Reimagined, 2023,
https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/622ba34c0b752e795eb9334b/6464f4532233c33b531e702b
Issue%20Brief%20-
_
%20School%20Safety%20.pdf.
17 Lynch, Caitlin Grace. School Resource Officers and the School-to-Prison Pipeline: A Mixed Methods Application
of the Behavior of Law in Schools. Old Dominion University, 2017,
https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1013&context=sociology_
criminaljustice
etds
_
18 Id.
19 New York City Council Data Team.
“Law Enforcement in NYC Public Schools.
” New York City Council,
https://council.nyc.gov/data/nypd-activity-in-public-schools/.
20 New York Civil Liberties Union.
“New Data: Police Disproportionately Target Black and Latino Students in NYC
Schools.
” NYCLU, 27 Apr. 2018,
https://www.nyclu.org/press-release/new-data-police-disproportionately-target-black-and-latino-students-nyc-school
s.
21 “School Counselor Roles & Ratios.
” American School Counselor Association,
https://www.schoolcounselor.org/about-school-counseling/school-counselor-roles-ratios.
New York County Defender Services
100 William St, 20th Floor, New York, New York 10038 | t: 212.803.1500 | f: 212.571.6035 | nycds.org5
trained in restorative practices. Arrests fell from 538 to 98 after one year of implementation. At
one profiled high school, students reported significant increases in physical safety and in the
quality of peer relationships.22
Conclusion
A report on why school safety officers are leaving, being terminated, or resigning may produce
useful information. But the underlying question this city should be asking is not how to retain or
replace these officers. It is whether we should be staffing our schools with police at all. The
evidence says we should not. We urge the Council to treat the current attrition as an opportunity
to invest in the approaches that actually keep children safe and in school.
22 Policing Project, School Safety Issue Brief. Safety Reimagined, 2023,
https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/622ba34c0b752e795eb9334b/6464f4532233c33b531e702b
_
%20School%20Safety%20.pdf.
Issue%20Brief%20-