As police shootings take the national spotlight, sparking reflection and discussion about racial equity, one researcher has released a study showing how the effects of those shootings seep into nearby schools and affect students鈥� learning. The report shows that police shootings, particularly when victims are unarmed, lower black and Latino students鈥� grades and the chances they鈥檒l graduate from high school.
In a , Desmond Ang, an assistant professor of public policy at Harvard鈥檚 Kennedy School of Government, tracked students鈥� emotional well-being and college-enrollment rates along with their grades and graduation rates. He found that white and Asian students were unaffected by police shootings; the effects were borne by black and Latino students.
Ang tracked the effects of 627 officer-involved killings on 700,000 high school students in a large urban school district in the southwest. Using a database that contains students鈥� addresses and achievement data with data tracking officer-involved shootings in the surrounding county between July 2002 to June 2016, he was able to compare the effects on students who lived within a half-mile of a police shooting to the effects on those who lived in the same neighborhood, but a little farther away.
鈥淲hile white and Asian students are unaffected by exposure to police killings, black and Hispanic students are strongly and negatively impacted by these events, particularly when they involve unarmed minorities,鈥� Ang wrote .
He estimated that each police shooting in the county he studied caused three students of color to drop out of high school. Ninth grade students who lived near officer-involved shootings were about 3.5 percent less likely to graduate from high school and 2.5 percent less likely to enroll in college, Ang found.
A shooting鈥檚 effects on students can last several semesters, according to Ang鈥檚 paper. The grade point averages of students who lived near a police shooting, for instance, dropped significantly right afterward, and even more the following semester, bouncing back only five semesters later.
The effects on students of police killings are small when the victim was armed, Ang wrote. When a victim was unarmed, however, the negative effects on students were twice as large. Those findings suggest, he wrote, that students鈥� reactions are deeply influenced by their experiences of injustice and discrimination.
鈥淎s we鈥檝e witnessed in the wake of George Floyd, Michael Brown and countless other incidents before, police killings of unarmed minorities may be particularly traumatic because they arouse longstanding concerns about police misconduct and institutional racism,鈥� Ang wrote in Education Next.
To assess the impact of police shootings on students鈥� mental health, Ang examined a portion of the district database that showed when students had been designated as 鈥渆motionally disturbed鈥� or having a learning disability that can鈥檛 be explained by intellectual, sensory, or health factors. He also used students鈥� responses from a district survey administered in 2014-15 and 2015-16, which asked students about their feeling of safety in their schools and neighborhoods.
He found that students living near fatal police shootings were 15 percent more likely to be classified as having a chronic learning disability associated with post-traumatic stress disorder and depression, and twice as likely to report feeling unsafe in their neighborhoods the following year.
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