City residents gathered in West Philadelphia in October to protest the murder of Walter Wallace, Jr. by Philadelphia police officers. Image credit: New York Daily News

In Philadelphia—which operates a large, urban school district with a majority-BIPOC student population—the changes in the school security program before and after the protests during the summer of 2020 provide an example of a microcosm of a nation-wide debate between reforming and defunding the police. Mezzacappa (2020) covered a Philadelphia petition for police-free schools in the summer of 2020, and she noted that the School District of Philadelphia operates a security force of 350 people who are not armed but who do carry handcuffs and wear uniforms. In an article later that month, Graham (2020) wrote that the District had chosen to change these officials’ title to “‘school safety officers’” and give them  “less severe uniforms” and “different job descriptions.” District personnel interviewed in the article expressed satisfaction with the reforms, but students still reported feeling criminalized by the officers, and one school board member said he saw it as “‘pretty much the same thing, just repackaged.’”