Police in Schools in BC: An Explainer

In spring 2021, Vancouver cancelled its school liaison officer program.

It was almost a year after George Floyd was murdered, and the school board was responding to community consultation feedback that 60 per cent of Black respondents and half of Indigenous respondents felt negatively about the program due to experiences with school liaison officers in particular and police in general.

Other districts — New Westminster, Greater Victoria — soon followed suit, cancelling their school liaison officer, or SLO, programs, too.

But many other districts continued their SLO programs, ignoring a call from BC Human Rights Commissioner Kasari Govender that programs should be cancelled unless districts could prove police were in schools doing a job no one else could do, and they were not causing students harm while they did it. The province also ignored Govender’s call for an evidence-based, efficacy-focused study of them.

“I find it mystifying that this research hasn’t occurred,” Govender said in a February interview with The Tyee. “It doesn’t need to be politicized research. It can support all of our interests as parents, as community members, as young people in this community.”

By September 2023, following the ABC party’s election to a majority of council seats, SLOs were back in schools in Vancouver.

And in January, Education Minister Lisa Beare fired the Greater Victoria School Board over concerns that trustees were not working with police or local First Nations to adequately address safety concerns related to youth gang activity after cancelling their SLO program.

The five-year pendulum swing has been dizzying.

So let’s take stock: what exactly is the school liaison officer program? Which districts have one? Who are the province’s SLOs? What rights do students have when they walk the halls with cops? And what does success for these programs look like?

What is a school liaison officer program?

How school liaison officer programs operate differs from district to district.

In Vancouver, 17 Vancouver Police Department officers work in 17 of the district’s 18 secondary schools. The 18th, University Hill, has a relationship with the University of British Columbia’s RCMP detachment.

The program’s stated purpose is to “build relationships between school communities and the VPD.”

In addition to regular “peace officer” duties, the VPD says this includes:

• making crime and safety presentations;
• providing guidance and support to students, parents and teachers;
• enhancing the safety and security of the school;
• acting as a resource for school staff;
• chaperoning field trips and working with a variety of school groups and clubs, by request;
• investigating crimes related to the school;
• and acting as a liaison between the school and the justice system.

Each officer also maintains a relationship with the elementary schools that feed into their assigned secondary school. But it is only at the secondary school where they have their own office.

Surrey, the largest school district in the province, operates a school resource officer program with the Surrey Police Force and the Surrey RCMP.

Officers aren’t stationed in the schools like they are in Vancouver. Avi Gill, communications manager at the Surrey district, told The Tyee via email that how often officers are in schools is “too random to count.”

However, the officers serve a similar function to their Vancouver counterparts.

This is similar to how other, smaller districts operate their SLO programs, where their presence in schools is regular but not near-constant.

Liaison officers like these will collaborate with school staff on safety planning, attend school events, chaperone field trips, direct traffic in school parking lots and roads, as well as deliver crime and safety presentations for students.

How many districts have school liaison officer programs?

That’s a tricky question to answer.

“We have 60 school districts, and all of them have a different relationship with police in their districts,” Beare told The Tyee in February.

Govender told The Tyee her office’s latest information came from 2023, when they found 25 districts had “some form of a program where officers liaise and support schools on an ad hoc basis.”

Using searches of district and local police websites, local news coverage, and by contacting over 30 school districts for confirmation, The Tyee determined 33 out of 60 B.C. public school districts do not have a school liaison officer program.

This includes the Greater Victoria School District, as their school police liaison officer program has not been reinstated.

Three districts did not respond to our inquiries about whether they have a program, and our internet search turned up inconclusive information about police presence in their schools.

That leaves 24 districts that do have a school liaison officer program, including the seven largest districts by student enrolment: Richmond, Central Okanagan, Langley, Burnaby, Coquitlam, Vancouver and Surrey.

Most of the smaller, rural school districts do not have SLO programs. However, there are outliers.

For example, Maple Ridge-Pitt Meadows, with just over 17,000 students enrolled, told The Tyee it does not have a school liaison officer program.

Of the 28 districts with fewer than 6,000 students, six have school liaison officer programs: qathet, Qualicum, Peace River North, Peace River South, Nechako Lakes and Nicola Similkameen.

Some districts have formalized programs, while others simply have “ongoing proactive relationships with officers,” Beare told The Tyee.

Further complicating things, whether a district identifies as having a program or not can be a matter of semantics.

Some districts with SLO programs and others without them can have very similar relationships with local police.

For example, while the Prince George School District doesn’t have an SLO program, they do regularly interact with the Prince George RCMP’s Youth Resource Officers.

That includes the district inviting officers to visit schools to give safety presentations, participate in student leadership opportunities and school events like the bike rodeo and liaise between the police and district.

This is very similar to the description Saanich superintendent Dave Eberwein gave The Tyee of that district’s school liaison officer program, which is run jointly between the district and officers with the Saanich police, North Saanich RCMP and Central Saanich police forces.

Who are the province’s SLOs?

In December 2023, The Tyee asked the Vancouver Police Department via a freedom of information request for the names of the 17 officers working in Vancouver’s public schools.

Despite some schools publishing their school liaison officers’ names online, and the district’s previous publication of officers’ names and school assignments, the Vancouver Police Department declined, citing officers’ safety.

However, The Tyee did learn that one school liaison officer was present at the police-involved homicide of Myles Gray in 2015. Subsequent investigations found Const. Hardeep Sahota failed to take notes at the scene and took five months to submit her report from that day.

Last spring the Vancouver Police Department declined to confirm whether Sahota had or was potentially facing disciplinary measures for her actions that day.

The Tyee has filed a complaint with the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for B.C. about the police department’s refusal to release officers’ names, a process that remains ongoing.

However, the Vancouver School Board told The Tyee last year that school liaison officers’ names and badge numbers are available “to anyone interacting with them.”

What does success look like for an SLO program?

Among the 32 school districts The Tyee emailed to inquire about the existence of an SLO program, several responded similarly when asked what success looked like for them.

Common responses included forming relationships with students and preventing or intervening in harm to students, whether it’s self-inflicted or external.

Districts also brought up officers talking to individual students who are engaged in certain behaviours about their actions or life choices, and how they could impact them as adults, as well as being available for at-risk families and students who need help.

Police involvement with the school’s extracurricular clubs and activities, especially related to sports and leadership programs, was another popular response.

“Safety of our students at school and in the community is the priority,” Gillian Robinson, executive director of communications, privacy and community engagement at the Nanaimo Ladysmith School District told The Tyee via email.

“We want youth first and foremost to understand how to prioritize their safety and the safety of others. A successful partnership involves students and staff working collaboratively with RCMP to prioritize everyone’s safety.”

But BC Human Rights Commissioner Govender, whose office has already completed a report documenting racist and sexist bias in policing in B.C. and is currently working on another about police use of force in the province, is most concerned about programs where the emphasis is not on crime prevention but building relationships between officers and young people.

“And that they play a role outside of what would typically be a police role, so like coaching teams or acting as school counsellors,” Govender said. It is possible that expertise could be provided by people who are trained in those areas and who are not police, Govender added.

What rights do students have?

While a school liaison or resource officer’s duties may include being involved in police investigations in schools, the majority of districts told us officers cannot interview a student without the school at least attempting to contact their parents first.

“An officer would not have access to students at the school without parent permission, though in practice, they might go straight to someone’s house if there were a serious matter that needed attention,” Peter Jory, superintendent of the Qualicum School District, told The Tyee via email.

Last year the BC Civil Liberties Association released a free online Know Your Rights pocketbook for students interacting with school liaison officers.

The pocketbook notes that any verbal interaction with a police officer, no matter how benign, could be used against a student.

“You can say: ‘I want to remain silent,’” the pocketbook reads, adding if a student is unclear if they are being detained by police, they can ask if they are free to go.

The only time a student has to provide any personal information to an officer, according to the pocketbook, is if they are under arrest, driving a car or have been given a ticket or document requiring them to appear in court.

In part two of The Tyee’s SLO explainer, publishing early next week, we’ll go into detail about why both having SLO programs and cancelling them has been so controversial in B.C.