USC Rossier Equity Research Talk Series

In his forthcoming talk, “Police in Schools: The Hidden Data of School Policing in Los Angeles,” Professor Terry Allen joins us from USC Gould School of Law and revises the conventional story of school policing. Drawing on administrative records, school police “mass threat” reports, service-call data, and hundreds of interviews with students and police officers, Professor Allen reveals that law enforcement in schools, far from being driven solely by rare acts of violence, is shaped by everyday practices that both construct perceived threats and routinize police presence. Schools do not simply respond to danger or violence; they participate in defining it, while also embedding policing into ordinary systems of governance that operate independent of actual misconduct.

Professor Allen’s account, which centers the daily experiences of students in Los Angeles public schools, challenges familiar narratives that frame school policing as a response to crisis. He puts students at the center of the story -- their fear and frustration, their efforts to make sense of constant surveillance, their encounters with discipline and care, their perceptions of fairness and safety. By shifting attention from both threat construction and administrative infrastructure, the talk recovers a broader vision of school policing as a form of governance embedded in everyday school life -- one that makes police presence appear normal, even inevitable, while distributing its consequences along deeply racial and spatial lines.