Activists feel hoodwinked as police groups dictate model policy for school cops

Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images.

Activists opposed to allowing school police to hold students facedown on the ground say their concerns are being ignored by regulators drafting a model policy that will govern how police can restrain students in Minnesota schools.

“What we were told by legislators is not happening,” said Khulia Pringle of the group Solutions Not Suspensions.

Earlier this year, lawmakers passed a law reversing a 2023 law banning adults — including school police — from putting students in the prone position, e.g., facedown, or using any kind of hold that inhibits a student’s ability to breathe or communicate distress. The 2023 ban included an exception for prone holds to prevent bodily harm or death.

The 2024 law allows school police officers to use the hold but mandates new training.  The law, which came after a contentious political fight, also requires the Minnesota Board of Peace Officer Standards and Training, or POST board, to consult with educators and police groups to develop a model policy that law enforcement agencies with school officers will be required to adopt, with the goal of minimizing the use of prone restraints.

Some law enforcement groups expressed concern that the POST board would craft a policy reverting back to the 2023 ban.

But activist groups opposed to prone restraints say the opposite has happened.

Solutions Not Suspensions, a coalition that supports anti-racist education, is one of the advocacy groups named in the legislation to help come up with a model policy. Manager Erin Sandsmark said they were promised they’d be allowed to share their concerns about prone restraints, but never got the opportunity.

“The POST Board shut down the conversation before we were allowed to have it,” Sandsmark said in an email. Instead, POST board officials have said school police would adhere to the use-of-force statute — which allows prone restraints — that applies to all Minnesota police officers.

POST board Executive Director Erik Misselt acknowledged in an email that he did tell the group there would be no discussion of “banning prone restraints” and that prone restraints could only be discussed within the parameters of the state law on officers’ use-of-force. He accused the activists of trying to do an “end run” and ban prone restraints.

“The whole reason the state ended up in this mess was because two different standards for officers were legislated in the previous session and the intent of the new ‘fix-it’ legislation was to correct that mistake,” he wrote in an email after being asked for an interview.

The law requires that the model policy include “considerations for the proper use of force on school grounds” and response tactics and strategies that minimize the use and duration of prone restraints and other physical holds.

Pringle, of Solutions Not Suspensions, said that’s not happening during the discussions. “It doesn’t seem like we’re creating anything new; just recreating the status quo.”

Sandsmark said the bill author, Rep. Cedrick Frazier, DFL-New Hope, told activists they’d be able to talk about prone restraints and potentially create restrictions on them. “We were not looking for an ‘end run’ as Erik puts it, but rather pushing for changes in use of prone restraints as told to us by the bill author,” she said. Frazier did not respond to a request for comment.

The group is scheduled to continue working on the model policy at its next meeting on Aug. 22, but Sandsmark doesn’t expect activists’ arguments to get far because they’re outnumbered by law enforcement groups.

The law mandated that the group include representatives from the Department of Public Safety’s School Safety Center, Minnesota School Boards Association, Minnesota Association of Secondary School Principals, Education Minnesota, Minnesota Sheriffs’ Association, Minnesota Chiefs of Police Association, Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association, Minnesota Juvenile Officers Association, National Association of School Resource Officers, Solutions Not Suspensions, Minnesota Youth Council, Minnesota Council on Disability, and one community organization supporting special education students’ rights.

Matt Shaver, policy director for EdAllies , which works to help historically underserved students, said activists were repeatedly told during the legislative debate that their concerns would be addressed by the model policy.

That’s not happening, he said.

“This has been a pretty troubling process,” Shaver said. “There are ways to make it a much more inclusive and fair process for the folks who aren’t carrying sidearms to the table.”

Pringle got involved with Solutions Not Suspensions after starting a campaign to get police out of schools.

“In general, as a Black person, I don’t feel comfortable with police officers in schools around kids that look like me, just because I know what they do in the community,” Pringle said.

A former student of hers, Darion Bell, was thrown to the ground by a school resource officer when he tried to enter Central High School in St. Paul in 2016.

George Floyd was being held prone when he was killed by Minneapolis police in 2020.