🎙Interview: Emily Reeves
🎙Interview: Emily Reeves
9/4/24
Emily Reeves (she/her) is an award-winning audio producer, podcaster, and storyteller based in Brooklyn, NY. Emily brings her experiences as a former performer and theater artist to craft sound-rich and engaging audio pieces about big ideas. Her work can be heard on the LinkedIn News’ Podcasts, Queens Memory Project, The Vital Voices Podcast, and Aisha, the Tribeca Festival’s 2023 Independent Audio Fiction Award Winner.
Emily is a graduate of the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, where she produced a documentary about a Moby Dick-inspired blues opera about heroin addiction. The piece won a Silver Award, the highest for the category, for Best Student Documentary at the 2023 New York Festivals Radio Awards.
Follow Emily on LinkedIn and Instagram. You can also keep up with her work through her website.
In East Lansing, Michigan, an outburst of violence at the local high school, and the discovery of a gun, leads to a community reckoning over school safety, racial equity, and the role of police in schools.
This four-part documentary series asks big questions about school safety, policing, racial equity, and what it’s like to be a teenager in an era of school shootings.
Your podcast, Violence Week, takes us to your old high school in East Lansing, Michigan. What was high school Emily most worried about when she attended high school?
Oh my god… If you could meet High School Me, I would probably be stressing about meeting our yearbook deadlines. I was Editor in Chief my senior year and took it far too seriously. My high school friends (who were also all on staff) and I all laugh about it now, but I often wish I could go back in time and scream at myself to go have some fun.
One upside of creating Violence Week was that it encouraged me to pick up my old yearbook, and you know what? It was pretty good! So at least there’s that…
And for current students and more recent graduates–what are the things they told you they are most worried about as a high schooler in America?
The students I talked to were in 8th or 9th grade when COVID hit, so their formative years were really defined by isolation and social unrest. As these students are thinking about their futures, they’re surrounded by this sense that the country is just falling apart around them.
And of course, as this story has to deal with gun violence, the fact that the fear of school shootings is such a part of their lives struck me. When I was in school, we had lockdown drills, but I almost never thought about school shootings. These students told me that even before a gun was seen at their school, they always thought about what they’d do if a shooting started. It’s a really potent fear for them and it was really heartbreaking to me.
You just mentioned global COVID-19 pandemic, and there was also the George Floyd / Black Lives Matter protests during this time. Both of these cultural moments come up throughout the podcast, but can you summarize the ways in which these events have impacted school violence and safety conversations?
We’ve all seen the ways that these events have heightened America’s polarization. In turn, that polarization has impacted school policy through debates over book bans or critical race theory. Often, we’re hearing about how conservative fears are impacting policy, but this story was interesting to me because it was almost like the other side of that coin.
Here’s what happened in East Lansing that I think highlights some tensions that are happening in schools across the country: two weeks after George Floyd’s murder, administrators of East Lansing’s schools announced a series of equity commitments. These included a commitment to using restorative justice sessions instead of expulsions and suspensions whenever possible, and most importantly, the decision to no longer employ a School Resource Officer (a School Resource Officer, or SRO, is a police officer who is stationed within a school). East Lansing is just one of dozens of schools across the country that decided to remove SROs around this time.
But then, when students finally returned from lockdowns, teachers and administrators started to notice a rise in violence in student misbehavior. This post-pandemic rise in violence was happening across the country but in East Lansing, it all centered around these two groups of boys who were consistently getting into really violent fights; teachers kept having to intervene, sometimes getting injured in the process. Some people felt frustrated with the new disciplinary policies, which they felt like weren’t tough enough to deter the fighting.
But everything boiled over when, after an evening basketball game, a fight broke out in the school’s parking lot and a teacher saw a gun fall out of a student’s backpack.
The community absolutely loses their mind and for the first time, the decision the school made two and half years before to remove police suddenly gets thrown into the spotlight. Some people feel like not having police in the schools put kids at greater risk of gun violence while others feel like bringing police back would harm students of color.
So the school is trying to improve racial equity by eliminating police and changing disciplinary policies, but these efforts clash with this post-Covid rise in violence and the sheer terror that the threat of a school shooting evokes in people. It’s so crazy complicated and completely fascinating to me.
From a racial equity perspective, conversations about the school-to-prison pipeline preceded the events of 2020, but seemed to have gotten greater attention in 2020, and then have waned again as there has been a backlash to DEI. You took great care to provide a lot of historical context about how we got to racial inequity in school policing, and I think the most surprising analysis was sharing how George W. Bush’s ‘No Child Left Behind’ policy factors into all of this. What were your thoughts when you came across this finding?
When you hear the history of policing in schools, it’s so unsurprising that it’s depressing: police were first put into schools to oversee desegregation and their presence was justified throughout the decades since with moral panics over youth drug use and ‘superpredators.’ Then, of course, there was a huge boom in SROs after Columbine as people wanted to prevent school shootings.
But policing in schools also connects to how we fundamentally think about discipline and No Child Left Behind was a big part of this. Basically, the last era of education in America was defined in large part by ‘Zero Tolerance’: you break the rules, you’re out. And No Child Left Behind encouraged this because it emphasized standardized test scores and punished schools if they failed to meet certain standards. So when a student misbehaves, if they’re not performing well academically, there becomes this sneaky incentive to expel or suspend them instead of keeping them in school and finding ways to support them.
This also felt surprising to me because I went to school in this era and it never occurred to me that schools could operate in a different way. Like, I remember thinking that it was weird that someone who was, let’s say, skipping class would get suspended. Like, the punishment for missing class is to miss more class? But I never thought about what schools could do instead.
In a lot of ways, Violence Week is about the messy middle of shifting away from the Zero Tolerance era. We know why Zero Tolerance was harmful but we haven’t figured out exactly how to move forward.
Taking a step back from the historical context, can you lay out who currently are the primary stakeholders in determining school safety policy and action?
Every school district is going to have different safety policies and ways that their school boards and superintendents determine what those policies are. However, many of those decisions are going to be determined by state law (for example, how many safety drills they have to do each year and which types) and then schools can often apply for school safety grants from their state.
Decisions around policing in schools are made by the administration and local school boards, but the position of an SRO is typically created in collaboration between the local police department and the school. But, we are seeing examples of this decision being taken away from schools—after the Uvalde shooting, Texas passed a law that requires each school to have an armed security officer. Then of course, a lot of schools also hire security guards through third-party contractors.
Parents and students heavily blamed the East Lansing school board for not doing enough on school violence prevention. What power do school boards actually have to make the changes regarding school safety?
There’s really two camps when it comes to violence prevention: pay for more security measures or pay for more support systems. When it comes to security measures, school boards and administrators have the power to do things like make kids use clear backpacks or bring in metal detectors or hire security guards or make new policies about locked doors and safety drills.
One of things I was curious about in my reporting was whether or not any policy can actually prevent school shootings. I met with a school safety expert who told me about how some schools are even getting gun sniffing dogs or buying bullet proof blinds for every classroom. There’s so many tradeoffs with school funding and there’s only so much to go around—does it make sense to devote so many resources to this when school shootings are so statistically rare?
I was also curious if this was a reasonable expectation to put on a school board. Like, in the world’s most heavily-armed country, is it reasonable to expect a school board to be able to prevent something this chaotic and statistically rare? It’s a heavy burden to put on them.
Another thing that I was surprised by, is that the National Association of School Resource Officers (NASRO) positions SROs as informal counselors and educators. I went to schools in Florida with SROs and although I didn’t see too many issues with them personally, I don’t ever think I would’ve gone to them for “counseling”. In fact, one of the things you noted is that the role of police in schools varies by state, even by district.
Can you talk a bit more about this “informal counselor” narrative and how it may or may not be reshaping conversations around school safety in some places?
Yeah, the informal counselor thing is perhaps a strange positioning, but it makes sense from a PR standpoint if school policing is under threat because of concerns about the School-to-Prison Pipeline. This framing positions officers as not just being there to react to crime, but instead to prevent it through connecting with students.
But of course, it raises concerns when so many schools don’t have an adequate number of counselors or social workers. And there are also privacy concerns here that may not be obvious to students—police aren’t bound by the same ethical standards as counselors. There have been instances where school police officers reported undocumented students to immigration agencies or shared private information about ‘troubled’ students with their departments.
When it comes to the School-to-Prison Pipeline, people will often say the solution is to have the “right” officer in a school—an officer who cares about kids and wants to make a difference in their lives. And I’m sure there are a lot of SROs who genuinely feel like that.
An aspect of this that I wish we had more time to get into in the podcast though was that this is inherently contradictory to the justification that SROs need to be in schools to stop school shootings. There’s an interesting Atlantic article about the trial of the Parkland SRO that was one of the only other recent longform reporting on this topic that I could find. The article makes the argument that the “right” officer to prevent the School-to-Prison Pipeline isn’t also going to be the officer who can stop a school shooting on their own—that’s like a highly trained SWAT team member. The officer who has a counselor mindset and loves kids probably isn’t also going to be a ruthless sniper/action hero who can keep their cool in the most stressful situation you can imagine and take down a school shooter with just their handgun.
I guess at the end of all of this, is what now? Violence Week did a great job of talking about differing approaches to school safety throughout communities, such as employing restorative justice and conflict resolution techniques, the efficacy of SROs in preventing mass shootings, as well as talking through the tensions with some of those approaches. Where does the community of East Lansing plan to go from here, and where do you think we need to restart conversations on school violence as a country?
Even though this is a conversation and a tension that is playing out all over the country, I really focused it on East Lansing because ultimately, this decision around policing became connected with their identity as a community: what did they want to prioritize most and what did that say about who they are? Luckily, things in East Lansing have calmed down and I think this crisis was a moment for the community to reflect on their priorities.
There’s always going to be this fundamental tension between punishment and offering support; between putting resources into reacting to crime versus preventing it. I mean, we’ve seen this same conversation in prison reform and so many other social issues, so I think that whenever we can engage with and critically think about this, that will have ripple effects throughout all sorts of policy.
The big thing that I ultimately have taken away from my reporting is what happens when fear gets involved with decision-making. I’ve had some people say to me that the parents in this story were being hysterical, and yes, they totally are being hysterical. But I’m not a parent and I can still imagine all the feelings that would come up if a gun was found at my kid’s school. Even though they’re so statistically rare, a school shooting is just so, so scary. But I’ve also learned how a lot of schools set their safety policies right after they see a big school shooting like Uvalde or Newtown or Parkland—parents come to school boards and demand something be done to prevent it happening in their schools. And this can lead to enacting policies that are quick fixes or reactions to that fear.
My second big takeaway is that guns are not going away. Especially for people who want gun control, there is an impulse to just be like ‘well, none of this would happen if there weren’t guns!’ True! I also want to live in that alternate reality! But the Second Amendment is not going away, so we have to get more creative and realistic. I think that also means focusing more on community-oriented solutions to address the ways most people in this country die of gun violence, which is not through mass shootings. One of the most eye-opening interviews I had was with community organizers in Lansing who facilitated conflict resolution with the fighting boys at the high school. They talked to me about how gun violence is so often driven by fear—by the fear that other people have guns and so people feel they also need to be armed—and how they’re using harm reduction techniques to tackle it.
Is there any new or upcoming work that you would like to share with us?
I’m really excited for the Silver Podcast Network’s (who I collaborated with on the production of this series) next project, My Phantom Memory. It’s created by Mark Blumberg and the story follows a cast member of Broadway’s Phantom of the Opera in the show’s final days. I think theater fans will especially love it, so look out for that!
If this show’s topic interests you, you might also want to check out the Sounds Like Impact interview with Jessica Terrell of Left Over podcast.