The group Vigilance not Vigils formed in Montgomery County after the school district defunded its SRO program in March 2021, The Washington Free Beacon reported. The schools then experienced a jump in violence that included a non-fatal school shooting in January of this year.
Joe Connor of We Win America tells AFN he is dumbfounded by the anti-police push when armed law enforcement guards everything from airports to bus terminals.
“Why we're reluctant to have armed guards at the schools to protect our kids, I don't know,” he says. “It just seems very strange to me."
The simple answer is the school district went “woke” when police were viewed as the enemy of minorities during riots and protests in 2020.
As part of that pushback, liberal Montgomery County officials used the SRO funding to pay for mental health and “restorative justice” training. The on-campus cops were replaced with “community engagement” police officers who are spread across 200-plus school buildings where they patrol outside, not in the hallways.
Regarding the claim that school resource officers target blacks and Hispanics, the Beacon obtained a document that said 11 arrests were made on Montgomery County campuses, and six were white students and four were black.
"I think everyone should be pretty universally agreeable that we need to protect our kids,” Connor says, “and not really worry about what color or religion they are."
