Patrolling and Controlling the Streets: The Origin of School Safety Patrols in New York City

A New Danger

School officials, particularly in urban areas, were quick to pick up on the dangers posed to children and adolescents by automobiles, voicing their concerns through articles and annual school reports. Automobiles in the United States had been produced beginning in the 1880s, but Henry Ford’s Model T was the first to be mass-produced and mass-marketed for the public. The first Model T was completed on August 12, 1908, and by 1927, 15 million Model Ts had been produced. This influx of automobiles on roads came about largely without many rules or regulations regarding driving. In the 1920s, street signs, street lights, and laws against drunk driving did not exist. Three-way street lights did not appear in the United States until 1930, and seat belts were first offered in cars in 1950. Unregulated automobile use on streets, along with inexperienced and untrained drivers, created a chaotic and dangerous experience for drivers and pedestrians alike. ⁷ Children were especially vulnerable, both in crossing and in playing in streets.

With the population size and density of New York City, school officials there certainly were cognizant of these dangers and provided means of addressing them through the school system. By 1923, a teaching license exam in the city asked prospective teachers to create a hypothetical presentation during a Safety Week assembly “to interest the pupils of the school in reducing the number of street accidents to children.” ⁸ Four years later, school officials advocated for more outdoor playgrounds for students to use during nonschool days and hours due to the “rapidly increasing motor vehicle traffic in city streets and the consequent increased danger to life and limb, particularly to children.” ⁹ This call was part of the larger Playground Movement in urban spaces that took hold during the Progressive Era, as “A wide coalition of child-saving reformers including social settlement house workers, progressive educators, and child psychologists urged municipal governments to construct playgrounds where the city’s youth could play under supervised and controlled conditions.” ¹⁰ Children in cities had few choices for locations to play, and the streets were one viable option. Once automobiles became more prominent in the 1920s and 1930s, these streets, especially in New York City, became much more dangerous for children to use as a play space. ¹¹ Playgrounds, in contrast to streets and in response to the dangers posed by automobiles, could provide “controlled conditions” in which children to play.

School officials’ focus on student health and safety permeated this era, as nurses, janitors, and lockers all entered schools for the purpose of protecting students, especially in urban centers. ¹² New York City schools were no exception of this newfound focus. However, although educational historians have conducted extensive work on the New York City public school system, coverage of the entry of safety patrols as a component of this health and safety focus in this era is lacking. In a recent study of Charles B. J. Snyder, the architect who oversaw the construction of more than four hundred New York City schools in the first two decades of the twentieth century, Jean Arrington documents his “innovative” approach “in using new construction techniques that promoted health and safety.” ¹³ These innovations included building with fireproof materials, constructing indoor bathrooms, and providing adjustable desks. ¹⁴ Although these innovations fundamentally changed the structures and operations of New York City schools, the focus of Snyder’s work appears to have remained largely within the buildings themselves. As a result, school administrators took on the onus of finding the means of protecting students on their walks to and from school each day. The primary advocate for finding a solution to this student safety crisis was William J. O’Shea, who served as the superintendent of New York City schools from 1924 to 1934. Beginning his career as a teacher at P. S. 75 in Manhattan in 1886, O’Shea worked his way into administration in the city’s schools. ¹⁵ By the time he began his term as the city’s superintendent, America’s schools, particularly in cities, were going through tremendous change, resulting largely from mass immigration and the move to a more industrialized economy. ¹⁶ Born in 1863, O’Shea also experienced the profound change in transportation practices and vehicle types within New York City. His superintendency was marked by the city’s, and the district’s, response to the rise of pedestrian injuries and fatalities due to the increasing number of automobiles on the city’s streets.

Throughout his annual reports to the city’s Board of Education, O’Shea consistently advocated for, and championed, the creation and use of school safety patrols in New York City. For the 1926-1927 school year, he explained that in one month in 1926, forty-two children were killed and 1,124 injured in street accidents. His report categorized and disaggregated the child fatalities and injuries by incident for the year, and the highest incident rates occurred during street crossings: “Crossing not at the crossing” was first and “Crossing at the crossing” was second. ¹⁷ Three years later, O’Shea bluntly reflected on the state of affairs regarding automobiles and the dangers posed to the city’s children:

Thirty years after its invention, the automobile has become a dreadful menace to our children of the streets. The toll of its destruction reads like a war bulletin. [. . .] In the course of a year, due to the hazards of the city, every child in 8 such classes is killed off, and every child in each of 35 classes is involved in street accidents resulting in injuries that mean anguish to parents, prolonged illness and possibly crippling, and medical and hospital expenses that most families can ill afford. ¹⁸

The influx of automobiles on streets that were largely unregulated was considered a health crisis for many school officials in New York City and other cities. For example, as early as 1916, school officials in nearby Newark reported 26 child fatalities in road accidents for that year. ¹⁹ In publicizing these tragic numbers, O’Shea and other school officials were eager to create solutions to save children’s lives and preserve their health, particularly as nearly all students had to cross streets as they walked to and from school each day. The NYPD likewise documented these dangers, to both children and their officers. In 1921, the NYPD reported that one officer was killed and one critically injured in separate incidents involving runaway horses. Both officers, serving at schools, ran into the street to try to stop the horses as students were attempting to cross. ²⁰ This public health crisis necessitated solutions; as a result, various organizations offered ways in which to protect children in this new world of the automobile.

The New York Automobile Club’s Founding Role

The creation and growth of safety patrols were ultimately a collaborative effort, as attempting to solve this public health crisis required support and resources beyond the schools themselves. School districts, though, were on their own in finding partners, as federal guidance on school safety patrol regulations was lacking. ²¹ In the pre–New Deal period, federal infrastructure was lacking, along with the federal government’s ability to intervene in problems afflicting urban centers. As a result, the creation of the first school safety patrols was achieved in a piecemeal fashion. Across the country, school districts had to rely on local community and civic organizations for partners, including local safety councils, police departments, automobile clubs/associations, Parent–Teacher Associations, the American Legion, and the Boy Scouts of America. ²² The first school safety patrols were beset with a lack of standardization and uniformity, as even by 1935 only one state had a law in place for their operations and functions. ²³ This lack of uniformity and guidance, seemingly, prompted school administrators to enter into partnerships with these different entities, along with navigating the limits school safety patrol members had in regulating traffic. ²⁴ Eventually, though, automobile clubs/associations and police departments became the most prominent members of this partnership with schools across the nation. New York City’s move to a standardized school safety patrol system provides a map of how automobile clubs/associations and police departments ultimately served as the most viable members of this partnership with the city’s school administrators.

New York City’s first safety patrols, similar to others around the country, were not created in a universal, systematic fashion within the city’s schools. It was not until 1926 that school administrators were able to begin the process of standardizing the creation and operations of school safety patrols. O’Shea, in his report over the 1926-1927 school year, explained that “For some years many schools have maintained organized pupil patrol systems about school premises and adjacent street crossings to regulate and safeguard the coming and going of pupils.” ²⁵ Not all schools, seemingly, provided school safety patrols for students, and regulations were not in place districtwide. This lack of standardization, along with the lack of school safety patrols in some schools, prompted the New York Automobile Club to intervene. In fall 1926, the New York Automobile Club, an affiliate of the AAA, initiated a “definite program for organizing and maintaining pupil patrol systems and offered to distribute to the schools copies of its printed plan of organization and to furnish brassards to be worn by the pupils while engaged in such service.” ²⁶ Copies were subsequently circulated to superintendents and principals in each district.

New York City’s district superintendents discussed the Automobile Club’s plan with the principals serving in their districts. These school officials generally approved the plan, with the only significant stipulation “that the members of the patrol be restrained from serving in the roadways or in any way going counter to the efforts of the police officer at a crossing.” ²⁷ This particular concern was prevalent across the nation, as school officials faced challenges in keeping safety patrol members safe themselves, along with questions regarding liability. ²⁸ School officials across the nation adopted the mantra that “The safety patrol is designed to hold up children, not traffic.” ²⁹ These concerns were present for New York City’s school administrators too, and the Board of Education accepted their revision. In November 1926, the Board of Education “approved the plan of the New York Automobile Club with the suggested modification and accepted its offer for the distribution of leaflets and brassards.” ³⁰ School safety patrols, at this point, began operating within a “definite program” in New York City schools. Frederick H. Elliott, the Director of Public Safety for the New York Automobile Club, lauded the relationship the Club had with “Dr. William O’Shea, Superintendent of Schools, the twenty-four District Superintendents, Principals and teachers,” as the Club “furnish[ed] the patrols with booklets as well as brassards to be worn on the left arm of each boy and girl assigned to the task of directing children in safety across the street.” ³¹

This founding role, while celebrated by both parties, was not without complications. As historian Clay McShane documents, members of automobile clubs/associations in urban areas were largely affluent as the expense of the first fuel-powered automobiles restricted who could purchase them. This often led to class conflict in cities, including New York. As McShane notes, “Gotham’s poorer neighborhoods, which lacked parks and playgrounds, provided most of the victims of the new status symbols.” ³² Many of these accidents were well publicized, with newspaper coverage bemoaning the dangers posed by automobiles. Violence often ensued between drivers and residents after accidents. McShane argues that ultimately “anti-auto incidents had overtones of class warfare.” ³³ Eventually, state and local governments, supported by newspapers, began writing and passing laws and regulations on automobiles and drivers, particularly regarding speed and reckless driving. Affluent automobile owners found themselves targeted and, as McShane details, “car owners fought almost any regulation.” ³⁴ The automobile offered drivers a new and faster avenue of freedom, and any restrictions on this were generally met with resistance, especially from this largely affluent population. Drivers responded by forming local automobile clubs to fight traffic laws and regulations. Often these clubs garnered the support of the automobile industry, such as dealerships, who considered traffic regulations as bad for business. McShane illustrates the power of “elite” automobile clubs/associations in cities, whose members included many individuals from the professional class, including doctors, attorneys, and executives. ³⁵

Already facing backlash from members of other social classes and newspapers, local automobile clubs had to be careful in the approach they took in fighting against traffic regulations, particularly around schools. Opposing speed limit laws could easily be perceived as an attitude of not caring about the health and safety of a city’s children. The politically savvy approach taken by these early automobile clubs was to instead focus on pedestrian education and safety. If children, particularly those going to and leaving school each day, were better educated in crossing streets, then state laws would not be necessary. Drivers could keep their freedom in operating automobiles as school safety patrols helped ensure the health and safety of children. These automobile clubs, and subsequent safety groups, according to McShane, “typically focused on driver or pedestrian education, not issues of regulation or car design.” ³⁶ Schools, then, became the arena in which to provide this education to children as drivers could demonstrate their concern for the health and safety of children while avoiding more regulations and restrictions on their automobile use.

Affluent drivers, particularly within local automobile clubs, could use schools to their advantage. These automobile clubs “financed educational campaigns to change the street behavior of children,” and members in New York City “even resorted to the foreign language press to publicize the dangers of school-age children.” ³⁷ The New York Automobile Club was the impetus of systematically implementing school safety patrols across all schools in the city, but, similar to elite automobile clubs/associations in other large cities, the motives behind the work are problematic. Ultimately, though, the New York Automobile Club was instrumental in helping to systematize the first school safety patrols across schools. This support was relatively short-lived, as local automobile clubs/associations largely became consumed by the national AAA. Although the AAA promoted and supported school-based programs through education program in schools throughout the twentieth century, the influence of both the AAA and local automobile clubs and associations within schools gradually declined. In New York City, this pattern is evident: whereas NYPD officers were an integral component of the first school safety patrols, their roles strengthened and expanded as the New York Automobile Club’s presence gradually waned.

Police Presence

At the turn of the century, the relationship between police departments and youth were manifested in a couple of forms. With concerns about juvenile delinquency, court systems emerged in cities, which specifically focused on children and adolescents. The first children’s court was established in Chicago in 1899, and New York City opened its first session in 1902. On the first day of New York City’s children’s court, cases included “theft, gambling, being out late at night, playing ball in the street, and throwing sticks and stones.” ³⁸ In 1914, the Police Athletic League (PAL) of New York City was founded by the NYPD. Within the PAL, police officers set up athletic activities, such as basketball and stickball, in different sites around the city for children’s participation. These structured activities allowed for police officers and children and adolescents to interact, with the hopes of building relationships and providing mentoring. The first formal attempt at a relationship between police departments and youth comprised these two forms, with children’s courts providing discipline and punishment, whereas athletic leagues and activities promoted mentoring and connection. While these two forms took on fundamentally different approaches in supervising and disciplining youth, both ultimately operated outside of schools, although the PAL did host events in schoolyards along with other sites around the city, including parks. The sponsorship of safety patrols, then, brought police officers onto school grounds to work in direct partnership with schools for the first time.

Police officers supervised streets around schools before safety patrols became universal in the district in 1926. As detailed above, district superintendents and principals at that time specified that safety patrol members were not to interfere with the work of police officers at these crossings. As school safety patrols became more systematized and fuel-powered automobiles became more prevalent, the collaboration between New York school officials and the NYPD increased and strengthened. In 1926, this collaborative effort led to the “School Campaign for Safety of Children.” As a part of this movement, Superintendent O’Shea explained that he received monthly reports from the NYPD listing the number of children hurt and killed in street accidents, broken down by each school district, and including the cause of each accident. These NYPD reports served to increase the urgency for school administrators and teachers in providing more safety instruction and guidance to students regarding their walks to and from school each day. This burgeoning relationship between the schools and the NYPD worked the other direction as well. O’Shea detailed how “The Commissioner accepted and adopted many of the suggestions for the protection of additional school crossings and for extending the hours of assignment at certain crossings adjacent to double session schools.” ³⁹ The NYPD stationed officers at additional school crossings, including officers for schools that held two separate sessions a day.

Through their own annual reports, the NYPD documented its efforts in partnering with Superintendent O’Shea and the city’s schools in helping to support student safety. Besides supplying accident reports to O’Shea, the NYPD’s Bureau of Public Safety took on additional initiatives involving teachers and students. In explaining that the “educators of the city are especially enjoined to instruct the children in habits of caution,” the Bureau, in 1923, implemented “Safety Hour” throughout the city. At 3:00 p.m. each day, teachers engaged in “the practice of devoting the last minute of the school day to instruction in every classroom, with particular attention directed toward inculcating habits of care in crossing streets.” ⁴⁰ At the same time, manufacturing plants blew their whistles to remind motorists that students were leaving schools and subsequently crossing streets. To supplement “Safety Hour,” the Bureau prepared monthly “Safety stories” that were “furnished to the Board of Education for teachers to read to children in the public and parochial schools. They are designed to appeal to children, and each carries a safety lesson.” ⁴¹ The Bureau also took direct action on the streets surrounding schools. In 1923, the Bureau added 614 “white lines indicating the proper crossing at street intersections adjacent to schools.” ⁴² Two years later, the Bureau designated six thoroughfares in Manhattan and in the Bronx as “School Streets” as they were closed to vehicular traffic during the times students were walking to and from school each day. ⁴³

The “School Campaign for Safety of Children” brought about positive results. In 1929, Emmanuel F. Van Dam, the superintendent of Districts 25 and 27, noted that although within his “districts run the main traffic arteries to the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, the intensive safety campaign has resulted in a very marked reduction in the number of children under 16 years of age killed or injured through vehicular accidents.” ⁴⁴ By 1928, the NYPD could celebrate the results of this collaboration:

Measures to make the city streets safer, not only through the regulation of traffic but also by educational work, has been one of the chief functions of the Department during the year. The scope of the educational work in the public and parochial schools, made possible through the co-operation of the school officials, has been extended, and various other plans for the promotion of safety have been adopted. ⁴⁵

The education focus brought into schools by the NYPD continued into the 1930s, as police officers offered safety education courses to teachers, along with holding meetings, in school buildings, with parents before the summer vacation to increase safety awareness in avoiding traffic accidents. ⁴⁶ Even with the success of this partnership, school officials continued to advocate for a stronger relationship between the NYPD and the New York City schools. William E. Grady, the superintendent of school Districts 38 and 39, which included Brooklyn, detailed the critical need for more protection of students at school crossings. In 1930, he asked, “Would not a representative civic committee, organized through the initiative of the Police Commissioner and the Superintendent of Schools, render valuable service in the further study of this urgent problem?” ⁴⁷

The growing relationship between the New York City schools and the NYPD, often in the form of direct communication between the Superintendent and the Police Commissioner, was lauded by school officials, including calls for an even stronger partnership in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The NYPD consistently detailed and promoted its efforts in bringing educational initiatives and programs into the schools. These efforts unquestionably improved the protection of students on their walks to and from school each day. As calls for a stronger partnership between the New York City schools and the NYPD increased, the role of school safety patrols expanded in turn. School safety patrols entered into New York City schools through protecting the lives and health of the city’s children and adolescents. Much like the complicated relationship between the New York Automobile Club and the city’s schools, the expanded role of school safety patrols in New York City brought about unexpected complexities too. The particular complexities that arose from this expanding role of policing children and adolescents can ultimately serve as a caution for policy makers and reformers today.

Expanding Roles in Social Control

The New York Automobile Club was integral in founding the first school safety patrols in a systematic fashion, but the influence of the Club gradually waned. As a result, the NYPD had the responsibility to sustain more of the work of these first school safety patrols, particularly by the early 1930s. Along with the NYPD’s expanded role in safety education, particularly through the Bureau of Public Safety, their influence on the role of school safety patrols expanded as well. The first school safety patrols focused entirely on the safety of students. Safety patrol members in New York City were to stay out of the roadways and to never counter the work of the police officer on duty at the crossing. They were there to let their classmates know when it was safe to cross the street and to serve as a visual reminder for motorists to drive carefully at the crossings. As the partnership between New York City schools and the NYPD strengthened, school safety patrol members increasingly took on another, more ambiguous, role: supplying surveillance for school officials. Superintendent O’ Shea, in his report from 1933, explained that safety patrol members were a “great assistance after school hours in the detection of boys known to them to be in the habit of stealing rides” on the backends or sides of automobiles. ⁴⁸ A member of the safety patrol, “knowing the children of the school, can make a note of the ‘ride-stealer’ and report it to his superior officer at the proper time.” ⁴⁹ This surveillance could take place from a safe and shielded distance as the “Safety Patrol member does not have to leave the sidewalk in order to perform that part of his duty.” ⁵⁰ In at least some cases, then, safety patrol members seemed to take on an additional role beyond helping and protecting students crossing the street. This surveillance role asked safety patrol members to provide information to the school about students’ misbehavior, and members gradually took on more of a policing function in discipline. Although this surveillance role certainly involved protection, such as alerting administrators about students who dangerously stole rides, it fundamentally altered the relationship between safety patrol members and their classmates.

How these differing roles were reconciled merits more consideration. For example, even by 1923, school administrators in nearby Newark noted that “the work of safety patrols has gradually broadened since their installation.” ⁵¹ Beyond “providing for the safety of children at dangerous crossings,” safety patrol members were increasingly being asked to “try to keep pupils from gambling, from breaking windows and street lamps, from defacing buildings and sidewalks, from using profanity, and from placing obstructions on fire-escapes, or any other violation of safety.” ⁵² Along with the surveillance of classmates engaging in these activities, safety patrol members were to expand their watch to institutions too as they were to “secure evidence against those selling cigarettes to children or permitting the unlawful attendance of children at theatres.” ⁵³ Not only were safety patrol members to protect their classmates’ physical health, but they were also charged in protecting their classmates’ morality as well.

School officials’ characterizations of streets were marked by the same conservatism as those in practice by the NYPD. ⁵⁴ Streets were dangerous. Some students, more than others, needed lessons and guidance in order and discipline regarding their use. For example, in the 1933 New York City Superintendent of School’s report, Oswald Schlockow, superintendent of the Harlem school districts, explained that “Where poverty stricken homes chill enterprise and ambition, health ideals find poor soil in which to thrive.” ⁵⁵ As a result, direct focus was required to provide instruction to students in Harlem on the proper relationship with streets. He explained that

Personal health and hygiene are closely related to safety training as this applies to self-control at play on the street and elsewhere during and after school hours. In the congested homes of these sections of Harlem, which are often merely meeting places for eating and sleeping, offering few opportunities for recreation and social intercourse, these are naturally sought outside. The street, despite its rapidly moving traffic, thus becomes the natural, convenient, place to play. ⁵⁶

Self-control, within this working-class neighborhood hit especially hard by the Great Depression and populated mostly by black citizens, was a principal concern of school officials. This disorderly space, at least for some children, served as the “natural” place to play. According to Schlockow, to help students develop this self-control, “The school must therefore assume the duty of cautioning against the temptation to use the roadway for diversion and moving vehicles as accessories for play.” ⁵⁷ While streets posed a physical danger to children, school officials utilized moralistic language in both describing the threat and proposing a solution. Temptation was to be alleviated through self-control.

Safety Patrol Selection

Student members of the safety patrols ultimately supported the moral guidance and surveillance provided by the NYPD’s educational initiatives, especially through inculcating self-control in some students. While New York City school officials were largely quiet about the selection process for school safety patrol members, as these safety patrols spread across the nation in the 1920s, school officials were consistent in recommending selection of members based on their loyalty, obedience, and honesty. In an article entitled “Best Pupils Lead Others in Traffic,” one school official mentioned that “High grades are one of the requisites” for selection, and the “failure to maintain scholarship spells dismissal” from the patrol. ⁵⁸ But beyond grades, specifics regarding finding the “best pupils” remained, perhaps intentionally, vague and open to interpretation. School officials in a 1923 report explained that this “selection is based on the principal’s knowledge of the pupils’ ability to perform the duties required.” ⁵⁹ According to Thomas F. Power, an assistant superintendent of the Worcester (MA) school district, this knowledge should be based on the students’ “alertness of mind and body, obedience, honesty, loyalty, sympathy, promptness, and, in general, good conduct.” ⁶⁰ Members were to be chosen from the “best pupils.” These personal qualities held by the “best pupils” mirrored, of course, those qualities inculcated through schools and their curricula. Demographic data for safety patrols during their inception would now be difficult to collect; however, based on school officials’ prescriptions regarding selection, we can question how representative members were in relation to the rest of the student body. In serving as moral agents of the school, these members often displayed the self-control that schools found imperative. The policing roots of safety patrols, particularly pronounced through their uniforms, provided the basis of order and discipline that school officials sought in this era. As safety patrol members’ duties expanded from helping their schoolmates cross streets before and after school to providing surveillance for immoral and disorderly behavior, this peer-policing mechanism helped school officials in ensuring orderly and disciplined behavior in students.

This selection process in finding the “best students” was largely driven by the school principal. The relationship between the principal and the selected safety patrol members was, naturally, close. In fact, reacting against this strong bond, children in the Meriden, Mississippi, school district even labeled school safety patrol members as the “Principal’s Pets.” ⁶¹ As educational historians have documented, school administrators in the Progressive Era often saw schools as “museums of virtue,” as administrators focused on shaping the morals and character of students. ⁶² Of course, administrators’ value systems were not neutral. School administrators in this period were mostly white, male, middle class, and many were sons of Protestant ministers. ⁶³ The language invoked by principals utilized moralistic and religious undertones. Gender was influential too, as boys were much more represented on school safety patrols than girls. In fact, in 1929, the AAA published a guidebook for school safety patrols entitled School Boy Safety Patrols. Scholars in this period often added “boy” in labeling school safety patrols. ⁶⁴ A survey conducted in 1942 with 155 schools found that 110 of them utilized boys only as patrol members, with forty-three using both genders, and two using only girls. ⁶⁵ School safety patrols members largely represented the interests of school principals and mirrored them in many respects too. Power, the assistant superintendent in the Worcester (MA) school district, summarized that principals who have utilized safety patrols in their schools have been “unanimous in testifying to the beneficial effects on manners, morals, and good citizenship evident in the whole atmosphere of the school.” ⁶⁶

With moral development driving the selection and practices of school safety patrols, self-policing among students remained largely unquestioned by school officials in this era, but George S. Goodell, the superintendent of the Hartford (VT) schools, did provide a sharp critique of this practice in 1928. Goodell celebrated how well school safety patrols helped protect children crossing streets to and from school during the past decade, but he questioned the educative value of having students police their schoolmates. In raising this question, he made the comparison that “Police officers provide social control largely through force; not through education.” ⁶⁷ Were such duties appropriate for students? “Pupils on duty,” he explained, “often assume authority which would not be tolerated in adults, as shown by their treatment of children who resent their orders and insults.” ⁶⁸ Many safety patrol members “like to be in authority but are not sufficiently mature to use good judgment.” ⁶⁹ Of course, safety patrol members were faultless in this regard. Goodell was clear that “The school should not attempt to equip children for adult life by imposing upon them adult functions.” ⁷⁰ Goodell’s concerns around these adult functions were largely ignored, though. Peer policing was seen as a moral good, especially in using school safety patrols to help control students’ interactions with the disorder and danger of both the adjoining street and the wider, dynamically changing world. Contemporary scholars have documented the racist, classist, and sexist impulses of urban police departments in this era, and police-sponsored school safety patrols appear to have adopted, at least implicitly, these same impulses. While the first school safety patrols undoubtedly protected the health and lives of children and adolescents in this era, their entry into this void also brought about problems of policing this population that continue to persist in the United States.

School Safety Patrols’ Place in Police History

The case study of the origin of school safety patrols in New York City schools provides a framework in which to consider how policing first came into schools across the nation. Police officers arrived on school grounds to train and supervise safety patrol members, and this relationship between police officers and schools has continued to expand and intensify. At present, many schools, particularly in urban areas, employ police officers as school resource officers. Police departments conduct locker and car searches, especially with their use of drug-sniffing dogs. The Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program, founded in 1983, brings police officers into schools to teach students skills to avoid drugs and violence. The presence of police officers in many schools today is largely standard practice. In fact, the negative, though popular, phrase “school to prison pipeline” denotes schools’ formative policing powers in the life of children and adolescents, particularly regarding urban schools. This initial partnership between police departments and schools in creating and implementing school safety patrols in the 1920s ultimately set the foundation for a closer relationship between schools and police departments. The framework of the field of police history, though, asks us to consider the messages that were conveyed in the process.

As seen through New York City’s experience, school safety patrols were formed with the primary purpose of providing for students’ health and safety in crossing streets while coming to and returning from school. This purpose seemingly garnered widespread public support as children were being injured and killed trying to navigate nearly lawless streets used by inexperienced drivers. Safety patrol members were charged with helping their schoolmates with this navigation. Quickly, though, safety patrol members added the additional roles of surveillance to help control student behavior. This surveillance was critical to keep students safe while crossing streets, but this surveillance role gradually expanded beyond the streets directly connected to the school and into the neighborhood and community. The line between safety and surveillance was markedly ambiguous, and moveable, with the original school safety patrols. What messages did students receive by experiencing school safety patrols in these two roles? School safety patrol members not only looked out for the health and safety of their fellow students, but they performed disciplinary surveillance too. We must consider how students perceived and subsequently navigated the dual roles played by their schoolmates serving as safety patrol members. How was safety patrol members’ authority to be perceived, as supportive or punitive? Were safety patrol members serving the school as protectors or as disciplinary agents? This dualism, often working at cross-purposes as seen in New York City, presented students with an early mapping of the different roles filled by police officers. Although school safety patrols members did not hold the authority, or force, held by police officers, their surveilling role brought policing practices onto school grounds for the first time.

The selection and subsequent separation of the original school safety patrols demands careful attention too within the framework of police history. The selection practice of school safety members from the “best pupils” asks us to consider the messages conveyed to other students in this process. Those best pupils often displayed the characteristics of “alertness of mind and body, obedience, honesty, loyalty, sympathy, promptness, and, in general, good conduct.” These characteristics were sought out by school administrators to ensure that safety patrol members could most effectively protect students crossing streets. Alertness and promptness are critical characteristics for school safety patrol members. However, as the roles of school safety patrol members expanded to roles in surveillance and discipline, other desirable personal characteristics become more complex. As school officials sought to create a controlled and disciplined environment within schools, characteristics such as obedience and loyalty appear to be crucial. School safety patrol members served as representatives of school officials in their surveillance roles and wore military-based uniforms for demarcation. Ultimately, then, we must question how and why these “best pupils” were chosen. Were they representative of the student body at large in urban schools, including in New York City? What were the motives of school administrators in the selection process? Progressive reformers focused intensely on social control in urban eras and, in choosing a policing force to help ensure this control on surrounding streets and into neighborhoods, school administrators were intentional in their selections.

These questions, though, may overshadow a much bigger question for school administrators: who needed to be controlled? Scholars and school officials in this era were quite vague, at least in official documents, concerning which students needed to be watched and patrolled, and why. As detailed above, New York City school officials noted the need for schools to provide instruction to children in Harlem in “self-control at play on the street.” One scholar, A. R. Lauer, compiled a summary report of school safety patrols in 1941, exploring surveillance roles that spread across the nation. He offered an example of the school safety patrol in Hollywood, California, where the Sheriff “trained a group of boys, in what was once a rowdy district, to act as deputies. While they carry no guns or weapons, their methods have proved most effective in reducing neighborhood disturbances.” ⁷¹ He additionally pointed to the school safety patrol in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, who was sponsored by the police department. Safety patrol members were given the title of “police cadets,” and fellow students “who violate or disregard directions given by the cadets are reported to the school authorities.” After explaining the overall satisfaction with the operation of this system, Lauer noted that “the term cadet carries military implications and might be very appropriate as a motivating device for high school boys whose older brothers may soon be wearing the uniform.” ⁷² Safety patrol members, in these examples, were to focus on and engage with peers who were “rowdy,” needed assistance in “self-control,” and who “disregard[ed] directions.” While school safety patrol members were not armed, often their uniforms conveyed a military-based authority.

The explicit mention of race is missing from the official record of school safety patrols from scholars and school officials in New York City and elsewhere, but the language utilized masks, perhaps, something deeper. In her detailed work on racialized criminalization of black children in the Progressive Era, Tera Eva Agyepong argues that “Racially biased interpretations of children’s behavior in school functioned as an antecedent to the late twentieth-century ‘school to prison pipeline.’” ⁷³ In focusing on Chicago’s juvenile justice system in the early decades of the twentieth century, she describes ways in which black children were perceived and labeled, by largely white administrators, as methods to criminalize their existence. Black boys, in particular, were characterized as those who “bred chaos and danger.” ⁷⁴ For Agyepong, a black boy in the juvenile justice system often “represented a recognizable and dangerous archetype of young black masculinity that could be subdued only through brute strength.” ⁷⁵ The language utilized in describing the surveillance and policing component of the first school safety patrols likely serves as an example of how students, particularly black students, were represented by progressive administrators and scholars; New York City school administrators utilized similar language regarding students in Harlem. Agyepong’s work centers on the juvenile justice system in this era, and it appears that this language, and subsequent representations, extend to the initial school safety patrols as well.

The growing surveillance function of the initial school safety patrols was ultimately part of a larger movement of police departments to monitor youth, particularly in urban centers. Carl Suddler argues that this increased attention on surveillance harmed black children and adolescents in particular in New York City. He explains that “Heightened surveillance of city spaces led to an increase in youth encounters with law enforcement officials that, naturally, inflated crime rates.” ⁷⁶ Many of these encounters “triggered racial antagonisms in their respective communities and, consequently, caused many black youths to view the police as a repressive, untrustworthy authority.” ⁷⁷ The initial school safety patrols contributed to this growing surveillance function in this era, but it did so in a quiet fashion. After all, police departments sponsored the first school safety patrols to protect the health and well-being of children and adolescents. Students themselves provided the services. Suddler sees the heightened relationship between police departments and youth, particularly black youth, as a subversive growth in power. He explains that the PAL, “combined with the shift to appeal to youths through recreation, with an undercurrent of treatment directed toward potential delinquents and delinquents alike, propelled New York City through a rapid expansion of youngsters under surveillance in the late 1930s.” ⁷⁸ The first school safety patrols contributed to this “rapid expansion” of surveillance of youth in this era. The creation of police-sponsored athletic and recreation leagues allowed police officers access to the lives and activities of youth in cities, but this function operated under the surface of the primary purpose of relating to youth and providing mentoring. School safety patrols operated in a similar fashion. With the rise of automobile use came a new threat to student safety; school safety patrols quickly filled this void, but, ultimately, added other functions of student-performed surveillance and policing of their schoolmates. As scholars contend with the increasing surveillance of youth in cities in the early decades of the twentieth century, particularly in criminalizing black youth, analyzing and reflecting upon the creation and subsequent operations of school safety patrols have much to contribute to this conversation.

Implications for Today

Legal historian Sarah Seo makes the case that the modernized police state in the United States began with the rise of the automobile. ⁷⁹ Automobiles first brought the police into direct contact with the public at large; automobiles also first brought the police into direct contact with the nation’s schools and their students. This relationship has subsequently grown in both scope and influence, with effects that scholars continue to explore and caution against today. The origin story of school safety patrols, illustrated through New York City, ultimately centers on the alliance between schools, local automobile clubs and associations, and police departments. School officials were happy to have the sponsorship of safety patrols as these first patrols unquestionably contributed significantly to the health and protection of children, particularly in cities.

However, as the New York City case study illustrates, complications arose out of this partnership, complications that can, though, provide perspectives and areas of further study regarding school safety, carceral history, and police practices in the United States today. The New York Automobile Club was eager to provide more organization and more support for school safety patrols across the city. Supporting student safety was the club’s priority, but as has been documented, ulterior motives complicated this aim. By providing safety measures through the school patrols, the reasoning went, then the creation and implementation of state and federal traffic laws and regulations would be unnecessary. This reasoning mirrors, in many regards, one side of today’s debate about gun regulation and keeping students in schools safe: adults can keep their guns if children and adolescents are better protected in schools, such as by limiting the number of doors into school buildings. As this debate intensifies with even more gun violence and killings of students at schools, this particular history may be useful for scholars and policy makers in thinking about, illustrating, and questioning motives of gun lobbies and politicians. A century apart, the parallels are striking.

Moreover, as the study of police and carceral history continues to burgeon, critically examining the creation of school safety patrols, and the gradual expansion of their roles, can illuminate these early experiences of youth and their interactions with police, particularly in cities. Within the operation of these first school safety patrols, such as seen in New York City, safety was coupled rapidly with surveillance. For scholars examining police and carceral history, case studies of the origins of school safety patrols in other cities can shed further light on the relationship between schools, youth, and local police departments. As the United States continues to face its complex and harmful past of policing, racialized criminalization, and incarceration, the origin story of school safety patrols provides an additional lens in which to investigate this account. A century ago, under the sponsorship of police departments, the “best students” of a school, who were almost always uniformed, helped their classmates navigating crossing the streets to and from school. Quickly this role expanded to “secur[ing] evidence” while surveilling their classmates who were “rowdy,” “disregard[ed] directions,” and lacked “self-control.” As we intensify our explorations and investigations of police and carceral history in the United States, particularly involving black youth in urban centers, the origin story of school safety patrols has much to say about controlling and patrolling the nation’s streets and beyond.