Families send their children to Chicago Public Schools (CPS) so they can graduate with a diploma and be prepared for success, but some students are leaving with more than they bargained for: a place in Chicago’s gang database. The Chicago Police Department (CPD) has a system in place, known as the Gang Database, that allows police officers to track and find out if a person has ever been identified as being part of a particular gang.
In April 2019, WBEZ wrote about a mother, Carolina, who suspected that her son, Nico, was wrongly added to Chicago’s gang database by the school resource officer (SRO) stationed in his high school. Nico’s only interaction with the SRO occurred in his sophomore year when he showed up to school late. During his senior year, CPD arrested Nico for aggravated battery with a firearm for allegedly shooting a member of the Latin Kings gang.
After the arrest, the family discovered from the police report that CPD identified Nico as a member of the Two-Six gang, a thought that was laughable to the family because Nico, who lived in an area dominated by Latin Kings, would never have survived in his neighborhood as a Two-Six gang member. But Nico went to high school in a Two-Six neighborhood, and the family suspects the SRO entered Nico into the gang database as a Two-Six member.
Scrutiny of Chicago SRO Practices
The lack of accountability of the Chicago SRO program and CPD’s gang database leaves many more students across the city vulnerable to police misconduct, particularly when these two systems are intertwined. In the United States today, between 14,000 and 20,000 police officers walk the halls of public schools, and they make an estimated 70,000 arrests each year nationwide. Alarmingly, between 2012 and 2016, SROs assigned to Chicago schools amassed $2,030,652 in misconduct settlements for their harmful conduct on and off school grounds.
Stories of SRO misconduct have brought attention to the lack of accountability and regulation in Chicago’s SRO program, but stories like Nico’s, although widespread, have not garnered the same attention. The more than 200 police officers working in CPS schools, until recently, had not been required to have any formalized or specialized training. Nor did CPD and CPS have any formalized agreement that defined the roles and responsibilities of police officers working in schools.
Chicago’s gang database has also received much scrutiny and has been a point of contention throughout the community due to its rampant inaccuracies, lack of oversight, and racist outcomes. Additionally, over 500 agencies have access to the database, and CPD currently has no restrictions on how the information is used and no way for a person to remove their name from the list.
Recently, CPD announced they would be revamping the gang database to develop stricter regulations on how names can be added to the database, and implement an appeals process that would allow citizens to remove their names from the list.
Despite the overhaul, critics believe that the gang database remains a harmful tool for discriminatory policing that has no proven impact on reducing crime.
The New Agreement between CPS and CPD
In December 2019, after much scrutiny and pressure from the community and the Office of the Inspector General, CPS and CPD finalized a $33 million agreement that created a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that established some ground rules for SROs working in CPS schools. The new agreement made clear that SROs should not be involved in day-to-day school discipline but will still have a visible presence in the schools and will be allowed to make arrests if they believe a crime has been committed.
The MOU also requires SROs to have three years of experience and undergo training that will teach officers about building relationships with kids; de-escalation; implicit bias; and working with students with disabilities, LGBTQ+ youth, homeless students, and immigrants. Additionally, the MOU creates a vetting and reporting system that will give school officials a say regarding what officer will be stationed at the school and a way to file complaints to CPD about their SRO.
Although SROs had access to computer terminals and the CPD CLEAR system (the CPD investigative tool) prior to the new agreement, the MOU guarantees all SROs personal and secured computer terminals with access to the private CPD network.
The MOU Fails to Address Concerns that SROs Collect Information for the Gang Database
If you accept the unfounded premise that police officers have to be in our public schools to ensure safety, then this new MOU, by removing SROs from school discipline and including training and reporting systems, would seem like a step in the right direction. But in reality, any effort that continues to give police officers a place and role in schools is a step in the wrong direction.
The mere presence of police officers in schools puts these officers in immediate contact with populations already susceptible to entering the school-to-prison pipeline. Schools with an SRO have five times more school-based arrests than schools without SROs, and overall, black students make up 33% of school arrests despite only accounting for 16% of the overall school population.
This agreement does not go far enough to protect these vulnerable students. Although many people support SRO programs because they believe SROs make schools safer, especially in light of recent school shootings, the research on this is mixed and may even suggest that SRO programs do more harm than good.
Particularly troubling are these unanswered questions:
Are SROs collecting information on students based on what they see and hear in the schools?
And if so, what are they doing with that information?
Community organizations and advocates around Chicago, including Nico’s family, have alleged that SROs stationed throughout CPS schools are using what they see and hear in the school hallways to collect information and to identify students as gang members. This is especially significant now that the new agreement guarantees SROs secured office space with CPD-installed computer terminals connected to the CPD network. There is nothing in the new agreement that would prevent SROs from collecting data on students or maintaining that data in their CPD-installed computer terminals.
Notably, Vanesa del Valle, an attorney with the MacArthur Justice Center, believes it is possible that SROs are using things they learn at their schools to enter students into the gang database. It is equally possible that SROs are also using their terminals to put student information into the CLEAR database and to search CPD’s controversial gang database for students at their schools.
In a review of Chicago’s gang database, the City of Chicago Officer of Inspector General found that CPS ran over 87,000 gang database inquiries over the past 10 years, roughly 2% of the total database inquiries in that time period. Of all the external agencies with access 
to the gang database, CPS ranked #3, behind the Cook County Sheriff and the Illinois Department of Corrections. CPS did not give a clear reason as to why so many gang database inquiries were run from their system, but it is possible that these inquiries are being conducted by SROs from their computer terminals.
And as with Nico’s story above, there is little accountability and transparency in Chicago’s gang database program that leaves students with no way of knowing if they are in the gang database or how they got on it. Yet, having your name end up on the database can lead to serious implications, such as preventing people from getting jobs, licenses, housing, and immigration relief, and receiving harsher outcomes in criminal court.
Despite a New Agreement, Many Questions Remain
These are only a sliver of the unanswered questions this new agreement raises. Time will tell if the provisions in the MOU will achieve their intended purposes of school safety, accountability, and curbing the school-to-prison pipeline. For example: Will the new reporting system have any actual impact given that complaints are made directly to CPD? Can transparency and accountability be achieved when CPS and CPD redacted all the names of officers and schools involved in the SRO program? And will participating schools actually feel empowered to report and/or remove an SRO from their school under the provisions of the new MOU?
With renewed public pressure after the killing of George Floyd, the CPS Board of Education held a vote on June 24, 2020 on whether to terminate their $33 million SRO contract with CPD. In a narrow 4-3 vote, the CPS Board of Education voted to maintain the current contract and keep police in CPS schools. However, CPS has given the seventy-plus Local School Councils the opportunity to vote on whether to retain the police in their individual schools. The Local School Councils have until August 15 to vote. As of July 28, 2020, the Benito Juarez Community Academy in Pilsen, the Roberto Clemente Community Academy in Humboldt Park, and Northside College Prep councils have voted to remove the SROs from their school communities.
The bottom line for Local School Councils going into these important votes: although SROs under the new agreement will not be involved in routine school discipline, their very presence will continue to have a harmful effect on students throughout the city, particularly for students of color who attend schools in communities that are already over-policed.
Andy Froelich is a law student at Loyola University Chicago and wrote this blog post as part of the Education Law Practicum.
