The devastating failure of the police response to the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, has reignited discussion about whether police officers should be assigned to schools. As this debate continues, police departments are entrenching themselves in U.S. schools in a way that has largely gone unnoticed and unreported by national media. In some parts of the country, the DARE program is back.
Anyone who grew up in the 1980s or '90s is probably very familiar with DARE, which stands for Drug Abuse Resistance Education. DARE was part of the War on Drugs and prescribed Nancy Reagan’s infamous “Just Say No” philosophy. The program was taught in elementary through high schools. The stated goal was to educate children about drugs, but it relied on harsh rhetoric and fearmongering, and made disprovable claims about drugs with little basis in science or psychology.
This is unsurprising given that DARE was the brainchild of then-chief of the Los Angeles Police Department Daryl Gates and its curriculum was taught by police officers. Gates was known for many things, including, famously, saying that recreational drug users “ought to be taken out and shot.”
At the height of the War on Drugs and the accompanying moral panic, DARE was taught at some 75% of schools across the U.S. and received almost $10 million in federal funding. But research consistently showed that DARE wasn’t very effective at stopping children from using drugs.
If DARE was ineffective in achieving its outwardly stated goal, it was very successful in other ways: DARE instructed children to “Recognize, Resist, Report.” DARE police officers taught children that drugs were wrong, they were harmful to anyone who used them, and that the way to help anyone using drugs was to report them to the police.
While the DARE program taught students that drugs were scary, the DARE police officers themselves were not — at least, they didn’t present themselves as scary to the children they instructed. They were the sort of officers we see today in copaganda-style videos, hugging kids and kneeling with protesters. DARE officers rarely relied on overtly coercive tactics or brutality; rather, there were hokey mascots, fluffy toys, and coloring books that served as very effective indoctrination tools.
DARE officers were also quite successful at building trust with the children they taught. The result was that, in multiple instances across the country, children confided to DARE officers that their parents were using drugs, which usually meant they were smoking a small amount of marijuana.
Police were able to use this information to arrest parents. Even in cases where the parents were only cited, this could be enough for children to be removed from the home. And even if children weren’t removed from the home, they had been put in the position of betraying their parents to the police. So, DARE was successful in turning children into informants against their parents — child soldiers in the War on Drugs.
But research mounted about DARE’s ineffectiveness and federal funding began to dry up. By 2012, the program’s annual budget was just $3.5 million and had all but petered out, although it did continue in some schools.
Why is DARE back? The first sputtering reignition was in 2017, when DARE rolled out a new program focused on opioids. Previously, the organization had an outsize focus on marijuana as a “gateway drug.” Now it was perfectly placed to address the "opioid crisis” and Fentanyl.
It worked. The revamped DARE program attracted the attention of then-attorney general Jeff Sessions, who praised the involvement of law enforcement. Police departments also seized on the opportunity provided by DARE to “build” closer relationships with Black and brown communities — relationships of the sort that allowed them to collect more information about the people they were policing.
In the last couple of years, DARE has reemerged in the public school system. For instance, Chicago Public Schools have reintroduced the program, which also operates in other school districts nationwide. Of the approximately 18,000 law enforcement agencies across the country, 6,000 now have DARE officers placed in schools. Some school districts, such as Denver, Colorado, have expressed concern about the program’s track record of taking an outdated approach to drug education, especially with respect to marijuana, but this seems to be a minority view.
DARE’s reemergence is troubling because we know research indicates that the mere presence of police in schools can represent a danger in and of itself. Since the Columbine shooting in 1998, school resource officers have managed to stop only a handful of school shootings. Yet their presence is likely to lead to an increase in the number of Black and brown children arrested for minor schoolyard infractions.
So, what is to be done? First, people need to be made aware that DARE is back. Second, people need to understand that DARE, by its very design, encourages children to report their parents or their peers for drug use or other behavior. This is not an effective way to teach children about drugs.
DARE can best be described by what Professor Dorothy Roberts writes in her new book, Torn Apart, as a form of “benevolent terror.” Roberts uses that term to refer to how the child welfare system functions as an arm of policing.
Children who have participated in DARE have been removed from their families, so it is exactly appropriate there. But even when children don’t get removed, benevolent terror encapsulates how this program, which says it intends to protect children, is in fact policing them and their families.
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