In Minneapolis, schools have been trending away from zero-tolerance policies and toward restorative justice since 2008. Critically, in the short amount of time since Minneapolis schools began to shift toward restorative justice–meaning building community between the offender, victim, and the school to recognize common goals around justice–schools have seen attendance rates sharply increase and involvement in serious behavioral incidents decrease (McMorris et al. 2013). However, despite these gains for students in Minneapolis schools, the state of Minnesota issued a 2018 warning to 43 districts, including Minneapolis, that zero-tolerance and other punishment-based policies enforced by SROs and School Liaison Officers (SLOs) are disproportionately affecting Native Americans, Black students, and students with disabilities (Hinrichs and Kaul, 2018). 

Still, many Minneapolis schools use SROs or SLOs. While an SRO may only be a security guard with the power to refer students to the local police, SLOs always have a direct affiliation with a local police department where they have the discretion to refer students for any misconduct. Moreover, schools often choose to fund SROs and SLOs at the expense of funding many critical school support staff, such as guidance counselors and school psychologists (Davidson et. al, 2016). While a few Minneapolis schools retain zero-tolerance policies, discretionary referrals by SROs and SLOs account for the vast majority of nearly 37,000 referrals made to the criminal justice system in 2015, the last year from which data is available (Davidson et. al, 2016). When administered by SROs and SLOs within Minneapolis schools these referrals occur at disproportionate rates for Native Americans, Black students, and students with disabilities, and the most common intervention used is expulsion, which leads to an increase in the school-to-prison pipeline (Davidson et. al, 2016). In June 2020 after the murder of George Floyd, students exerted renewed pressure on school boards to re-evaluate their relationship with the police, and thus SROs and SLOs  (Retta, 2020). In response to the renewed protests, Minneapolis Public Schools terminated their contract with the Minneapolis police department that same month, which will hopefully significantly curtail the school-to-prison pipeline present in the Minneapolis public schooling system (Olivier, 2020).