Police commissioner Dame Cressida Dick

• WE can all learn from the report Decriminalise the Classroom: A Community Response to Police in Greater Manchester’s Schools, which says that policing in schools have “a detrimental impact upon BAME pupils” and “jeopardise a child’s education by criminalising them at a very young age”.

The report concludes “Nothing short of the abolition of school-based police officers (SBPOs) will do.” Some mothers, especially when we have children of colour, have long objected to SBPOs.

In 2006 an incident of police violence at Camden’s Hampstead secondary school, where our children were, crystalised the issues.

Following rumours of a possible altercation with children from another school, the headmaster asked for a protective police presence at the gates.

The rival children who appeared posed no threat but the Met’s Territorial Support Group (the riot police) did.

They heavy-handedly searched Hampstead children as they left school and, when the children objected, attacked them, including with batons, while making racist comments. A number of black boys and at least one father and a teacher who intervened were arrested.

The police officer based at our school was filmed helping with arrests and accused of punching a pupil. Children and staff were so upset that they held a demonstration demanding an apology. We never got one but some of those arrested won compensation.

We demanded the SBPO be sacked and not replaced but were outvoted by the headmaster and teachers unwilling or unable to stand up to police.

Met police commissioner Cressida Dick wants SBPOs “embedded in the DNA of schools” in poor neighbourhoods. Experiences like ours is what she is promoting.

We hope the Manchester report and recent protests exposing police racism and sexism and opposing the new powers proposed by the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill (see Cristel Amiss’s letter, What future for policing? March 18) will galvanise people everywhere to say: keep police out of our schools.

KAY CHAPMAN, NW6
& VIRGINIE FOUCRE, NW2