When they voted earlier this year to let police officers use a dangerous form of restraint on students in schools, Minnesota Democratic lawmakers said they did so because they had brokered a compromise. A task force made up of law enforcement agencies, disability advocates and others would create a model policy aimed at minimizing the use of prone restraint — the face-down hold Minneapolis police officers used to immobilize George Floyd as he suffocated.

Now, however, some advocates say they fear that the task force’s law enforcement majority wants to shut down discussion of the issues at the core of the raging debate over the perils of stationing cops in schools.

At the task force’s first meeting, in June, the executive director of the Minnesota Board of Peace Officer Standards and Training announced that the group would not discuss prone restraints or use of force, says Khulia Pringle, the task force member who represents Solutions Not Suspensions. Her coalition consists of community groups including disability and racial equity advocates.

“He said, ‘This is not a philosophical debate and we are not going to go beyond the substance of the statute,’ ” Pringle quoted Erik Misselt as saying. “I thought for sure we would get into the weeds of what we were there for.”

The board, which licenses law enforcement officers, is responsible for overseeing development of the model policy.

The compromise legislation, Pringle and other advocates say, requires the committee to address a number of issues pertaining to the use of school resource officers, whose campus presence dramatically increases student arrests. They believed the model policy — to be adopted by law enforcement agencies whose officers work in schools — would specify when police can act in schools and lay out alternatives to the use of force.

The task force is scheduled to hold the second of four planned meetings July 18 and to agree on a finished model policy in mid-September. So far, members of the group have been given little research on policies guiding police presence in schools, causing some advocates to fear the end product won’t reflect best practices.

Read the full article about police guidelines in schools by Beth Hawkins at The 74.