Police officers assigned to Texas schools since the Robb Elementary shootings in Uvalde have restrained, pepper-sprayed and tased students, sometimes in response to routine disciplinary issues.
An investigation by The New York Times and San Antonio Express-News found more than 2,600 cases of police physically intervening on school campuses.
Clare Amari covers law enforcement in Texas schools for the Times. Liz Teitz is a reporter for the San Antonio Express-News. Listen to the interview in the player above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Your story includes several videos that capture the kinds of incidents you reported on, and one example involves a 14-year-old caught with a vape at his school in Mesquite. Either of you recall what happened there? Could you describe it?
Clare Amari: I’m happy to. This was a 14-year-old who, again, as you said, had been caught with a vape. He was being led down a hallway in restraints when the officer slams him face-first against a wall.
Why did he slam the 14-year-old against the wall?
Amari: Honestly, it’s unclear. It’s possible that the teenager may have pulled away slightly, but the officer, apparently, almost out of nowhere, slams this young man against the wall. And when the kid kind of collapses, the officer says, “do it again.”
I’m sort of struck by that image that you described there, and I think a lot of listeners would say, “surely that’s not happening with any degree of frequency.”
Amari: Well, what I can tell you is that officers in Texas schools do use physical force, do put hands on kids with some degree of regularity. Ultimately, there is really a lack of good data on this subject. Reporting is incomplete. There’s no statewide centralized database of how often officers in schools put hands on/use force on kids.
We have been able to tally about 2,600 individual use-of-force incidents between January of 2022 and December 2025.
I want to be clear that not all of those involved an officer slamming a restrained student against a wall. Sometimes officers are breaking up fights. Sometimes they are restraining kids who are trying to hurt themselves or others. But they do involve a range of different kinds of force being used.
Who’s authorizing the use of these tactics?
Amari: Well, that’s a great question. Several people really are responsible. Often it’s the police chief and sometimes that is a school district police chief, sometimes that as a municipal police chief or a sheriff. So the officers are acting in accordance with whatever policy their department has in place.
And the other entity that is responsible for this really is the school board and the administrators at the school.
Most police chiefs who work for a school district report to the superintendent. So they’ll talk to the superintendents about what they do and their actions on campus. And the school board is also responsible for putting in place responsibilities for these officers and setting up guard rails, if any, to what they are allowed to do on campus
So, just to be clear, Texas now requires an officer on every campus, right?
Amari: That is correct. After Uvalde, the state’s response was to pass a law — this went into effect in late 2023 — requiring that there be a licensed police officer on every campus. And I want to be clear, that does mean a licensed police officer with arrest powers.
Now, I would say only about half of the school districts in Texas have been able to comply with that. But we’ve still seen an enormous jump in the number of officers trained to work in Texas schools.
Liz, you spoke with students, parents and educators. How are they weighing the trade off between safety, especially post-Uvalde, and the risk of over-policing without oversight?
Liz Teitz: I think that’s something we found in our reporting — that a lot of folks, especially after Uvalde, do want police officers on campus. They appreciate having visible law enforcement.
We were talking to superintendents and police chiefs when we asked them, “how do you know your police department is making the district safer?” That was often what they talked about, was sort of outward-facing security, safety, intruders.
But those conversations often don’t cover the part of the reporting that Clare has been talking about, which is how they’re actually interacting with students inside school walls.
So in some cases it feels like the narrative around having police on campus has really focused on stopping people from coming in while what’s going on day to day on campuses is sort of overlooked, especially because as Clare said there’s just not a lot of reporting and formal tracking of it.
Have there been a lot of lawsuits over police activity with regard to students?
Amari: There have been some lawsuits. We don’t have an authoritative number.
I will say that it is very difficult. Texas is an interesting place in that it’s actually very difficult to win a lawsuit against a school police officer for excessive force in a school. That’s because the federal appellate court that governs Texas and a couple other states has a very unique interpretation of school-based use of force and basically says that it’s similar to corporal punishment, which is of course legal here.
There was a sad case out of the Houston area about 10 years ago where a young man, 17-year-old, was tased because he was trying to leave campus. This young man had had special needs and his family sued. It went all the way up to the federal appellate court and it was thrown out in 2023 with, again, this reasoning that use of force in schools is similar to corporal punishment.
