UCLA

School policing practices disproportionately affects Black students across U.S. public schools. Less visible is the way these persistent racial inequalities have transformed the landscape of America’s neighborhoods. In response to calls for policy reform, districts have clarified the roles of school police officers aimed at preventing the use of citations and arrests, namely for minor offenses of the law that would more appropriately be handled by the school administration. This dissertation examines how discipline policy reform interacts with race and geographical place to influence student arrest patterns and disciplinary infractions. Also important are the challenges that the seeming intractability of reform pose, yet with so little change in racial disparities, present to Black students and entire neighborhoods. In this dissertation, a multilevel root-cause theoretical framework is applied to clarify extant understandings of the structural conditions, political economic processes, and bioecological factors underlying racial disparities in school policing at the neighborhood level. This study reveals neighborhood contextual contradictions between school police officers’ enforcement of the law (with respect to school safety) and the unique, multifaceted responsibilities of working in educational settings with students. Drawing on school police student data in the years after the reform, combined with in-depth interviews conducted with 120 Black students, this study finds that school policing of students is more often concentrated in urban neighborhoods in Los Angeles that are characterized by poverty and social disadvantage. Qualitative findings help explain these patterns by describing students’ (indirect and direct) contact with school police officers’ citation and arrest-driven enforcement methods, and the routine nature of school policing as counter to not only reform, but also to larger goals of building community, instilling safety, and maximizing students' academic engagement. Participation in community-based, social justice organizations helps to buffer these effects for some Black students. My analysis suggests contention within the efficacy of LASPD policy reform, framing a contest that takes place not just across a racial divide, but literally across the modernization of urban space in Los Angeles.