From ‘Police Out of School’ to solidarity with Child Q: local mobilisations, wider challenges

This chapters starts with the analysis of the Child Q case, made public in 2022, to explore the issues of police in schools, strip searches of children and policing of racialised youth. While discussing both national and local data and academic literature from the UK and the US, it pays a specific attention to the London Borough of Hackney and its history of policing and community activism. Based on archival research, it shows that despite growing public discourse supporting police in schools to prevent serious violence, communities, teachers and activists have long challenged and resisted officers’ presence in schools, pointing to the over-criminalisation and under-protection of racialised youth. The chapter questions the appropriateness and effectiveness of police interventions in schools, their differential impacts, and ultimately engages with wider questions about discriminatory policing, languages and practices of carcerality in education and community responses and alternatives. It concludes by drawing upon the concept of the ‘unfinished’ to link the 1980s teachers’ calls for ‘police of out schools’ to contemporary movements for justice and accountability and the ‘unfinished’ project of abolition.