Lawmakers walk back ban on prone restraints on students after police departments pull SROs from schools

CATHY WURZER: Our top story-- Minnesota lawmakers are moving forward quickly on a bill that walks back a 2023 ban on school resource officers using prone restraints on some students. The bill passed the House Education Policy Committee last night. It will be in another house committee tonight. DFL leaders in the House say it will reach the floor next week.

The new bill is a response to several police departments pulling their SROs out of schools amid concerns they could be held liable for subduing students in a prone restraint. This new bill requires a statewide policy outlining school resource officer responsibilities and requires officers to take training before starting work in a school. But it walks back language passed last year that imposed a ban on school resource officers using prone restraints. DFL Representative Cedrick Frazier of New Hope is sponsoring the bill.

CEDRICK FRAZIER: This is a critical point to understand for our SRO discussion. So currently, peace officers are not allowed to use chokeholds or compressive holds in the regional force continuum. To put it simply, prior to 2023, and currently, if an SRO puts a pupil in a prone position and applied pressure in a manner that restricts breathing, that officer would be in violation of the law.

CATHY WURZER: The new bill is facing opposition from Solutions Not Suspensions. That's the coalition of students, community members, and organizations committed to ending racial disparities in discipline. Erin Sandsmark is the Coalition Programs Manager of Solutions Not Suspensions. Erin is on the line right now. Welcome to the program.

ERIN SANDSMARK: Hello. Thank you so much for letting me be here.

CATHY WURZER: Sure. Well, thanks for your time too. So you heard what Representative Frazier had to say. When you look at this new bill, what are some of your main concerns with it?

ERIN SANDSMARK: Number one, our main concern and our biggest stipulation on this bill is that we do not want to see prone restraints used on children. Point blank, that's what we care about. And what this bill does is it retracts SROs and other personnel security personnel for being compliant to that law. So we just don't think that's enough.

SROs should be held to the same high standard of care as other adults in the school building. And that's our main line item on that. And we don't think that this law appropriately protects our children from those types of restraints.

CATHY WURZER: Really? Because if you listen to Representative Frazier, it sounds as though that not a bunch is going to change with this law-- that it sounds like students would still be protected.

ERIN SANDSMARK: Yes. I was there at the hearing last night. And when Frazier said that, we took a pause as a coalition, because from what we know from 609, prone restraint is not explicitly lined out in that law. 609 does a great job of banning chokeholds and holds that are neck up.

However, what the bill last year proposed that allowed or prevented SROs, adults, and other adults in the school building from using more air compressive holds-- it talks more about lower back, on the ground. It explicitly states what a prone position hold is.

And what 609 doesn't do, it does not ban prone restraint. It bans chokeholds, which is true. But we are talking about prone restrictive holds.

CATHY WURZER: Say, do you know how many kids in schools might have been restrained in a prone position? Do you have any numbers on this at all?

ERIN SANDSMARK: That's a great question. We don't as a state have the exact cases for SRO incidents or prone restraint incidents overall. We have numbers on restraints in general.

But the state has not been collecting that data. Until the bill passed last year, it was spelled out explicitly that prone restraints and cases when SROs were using these types of restraints on children would be actually documented by state mandate. But until last year, it was not mandated by the state to do so.

So we have data on, more broadly, just different types of holds that had to be used on children. And that data is available through MBE. And so I've been there. But we have not as a state been able to collect prone restraint holds.

CATHY WURZER: Of course, you were at the committee hearing last night. I bet you're going to probably be at the hearing again tonight too. And you probably heard supporters of the bill, which includes law enforcement organizations, saying that they believe prone restraints are sometimes necessary to keep students safe. If you buy into that argument, which I'm sensing you don't, without that ability, will schools still be a safe environment?

ERIN SANDSMARK: I think schools can be an extremely safe environment if our kids can feel safe that the adults in our schools are not going to be using air compressive holds on them. I think schools need to feel safe for our children first. They have to be in our schools.

And what this law does, it's causing a lot of anxiety for our students. And there's a lot of teens at the hearing last night, and there will be a lot of teens speaking at a press conference later today to talk about how this rollback to allow more protections for SROs to use these types of holds is causing them distress and causing the fear that these holds could be used against them. So I guess what I say to teachers and admin worrying about the safety of our schools, I wonder if there's better ways that we can think about children's behavior instead of criminalizing it so quickly.

What are the ways that we can de-escalate situations without putting a child in a prone restraint hold? I know there are cases where restraint is necessary. However, the law passed last year does not restrict officers from using reasonable force, especially in the cases of imminent death or imminent case of serious bodily harm. That was stipulated in the bill.

And what this new bill does is it strips away a lot of those protections from students. And the word "imminent" has been removed as well. So now, the barrier for when these holds can be used is weakened. And we fear that because they haven't been documented very much in the past and now they're just starting to, we are worried that our Black, Brown, Indigenous, and disabled youth will be most vulnerable to these holds by police officers in our schools.

CATHY WURZER: As they attempt to mete out some kind of discipline or control, right? You mentioned this, which is interesting too-- as you know, gosh, there are still fights happening in schools, right? You mentioned de-escalation, trying to head off conflict before it blows up into something bigger. How might that look, do you think, moving forward?

ERIN SANDSMARK: To de-escalate a situation before it were to--

CATHY WURZER: Yes.

ERIN SANDSMARK: Yes. So I think what it comes down to is our teachers and our administrators really listening to our students' needs and thinking about when an incident happens or when a restraint needs to happen-- and not prone, obviously-- but when something needs to happen on a redirect, there needs to be a conversation about restorative practices with our students. What did that student need in that moment?

What were the feelings happening? What are the next steps that we can take to make sure this doesn't happen again? And what we're seeing with this bill, it feels like we are assuming a lot from these students, that they are behaving in a way that are somehow out of control.

And I just think that we're not doing enough on the before end. We're not doing enough beforehand to prevent distress from happening. And the law right now allows for a reasonable use of force when there is a threat of imminent death or harm. So we think that the rollback to not hold SROs to the same high standard of care as other adults in the school building doesn't feel right.

They can do their job while being able to hold a high standard of care. And it just feels like we are not taking into consideration the needs of our children and not prioritizing the trauma that would be caused by a prone restraint.

CATHY WURZER: Erin, I appreciate your time. I know you're going to be at the hearing tonight. Thank you so much.

ERIN SANDSMARK: Yes, I will be. Thank you so much, Cathy. And have a good day.

CATHY WURZER: You. Too Erin Sandsmark is the coalition programs manager of the group called Solutions Not Suspensions. That's a community coalition committed to ending racial disparities in school discipline. By the way, the Public Safety Finance and Policy Committee in the House is hearing this bill tonight at 6:30.