Agenda Item # 10.2 - Jacob Yoder-Schrock | Received 05/16/2022CAUTION: This email originated from an External Source. Please use proper judgment and caution when opening
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From:Jacob Yoder-Schrock
To:City Clerk
Subject:EXTERNAL - Public Comment for Agenda item 10.2
Date:Monday, May 16, 2022 4:25:51 PM
Hello,
I'm writing to submit a public comment for tonight's Gilroy City Council meeting, for
Agenda item 10.2. My comment is below:
Gilroy City Council members, thank you for your time. My name is Jacob Yoder-
Schrock, and I attended Gilroy schools my entire life, graduating from Christopher
High School in 2017. As long as I can remember, there were often police officers
stationed on the campuses I attended, and their presence was nothing but
unnerving and intimidating; my peers and I did not feel safer at school when they
were on site.
Tonight, the City Council is voting to renew the MOU between GUSD and the Gilroy
Police Department, and maintain the presence of police officers on school
campuses. For the safety of Gilroy students and their education, I urge you not to
renew the contract, now nor again in the future.
Across repeated studies, school resource officers have not been shown to increase
school safety. Rather than provide even a sense of security for some students, they
have instead been shown to create an atmosphere of intimidation and anxiety for
Black and Brown students whose communities are already unjustly more targeted by
police.
Gilroy already has a high rate of youth arrests, proportional to other cities in the
state. It's been shown that the more contact of any kind that children have with
police throughout their lives (including through SRO programs), the more likely they
are to have future contact with police and the criminal justice system. By putting
students in frequent contact with police officers, Gilroy's SRO program endangers
their future, and contributes to an existing crisis of criminalizing children in Gilroy.
Please vote not to approve the MOU between GPD and GUSD.
Thank you,
Jacob
Jacob Yoder-Schrock (he/him/his)Yale College 2022 ( comGilroy, CA | New Haven, CT