END ZERO TOLERANCE

As part of our work to reduce unnecessary student contact with police, we challenge the harmful practice of permitting police to issue tickets to students for alleged minor infractions in schools. In Pennsylvania, these tickets are known as “summary citations.” Black students and students with disabilities are disproportionately punished this way. 

 

The goals of our project are to get Pennsylvania schools and police to discontinue the use of this practice and increase the use of school-based alternatives to juvenile and criminal justice system involvement. 

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Police, including those based in schools, issue summary citations to students for minor alleged infractions such as disorderly conduct, obscene language or gestures, possession of alcohol, or vaping. Students are ordered to appear before a judge in the adult criminal justice system where a conviction usually results in a fine. 

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However, this adult conviction can have major, lasting consequences. It must be disclosed on applications for jobs, college, or the military that ask whether the applicant has ever been convicted of a crime. Failure to pay these fines results in a referral to the juvenile system. 

 

In Pittsburgh Public Schools, Black students were issued summary citations at much higher rates than other students, a pattern that parallels arrest trends. One out of every 70 Black students was issued a summary citation, compared with 1 out of every 400 white students. A study commissioned by the district found that “over three-fourths of the incidents leading to a citation involved an African American/Black student during 2013/14 through 2019/20, higher than the proportion of these students in the district.”

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