in 2021, The Vancouver School Board commissioned a third-party firm, Argyle, to engage students, families, educators, and community organisations in a trauma-informed review of its School Liaison Officer (SLO) program, which placed uniformed police in schools. The study found that while many respondents were unfamiliar with the program or viewed it positively, the research found that a significant number of Black, Indigenous, and racialised students described feeling unsafe, surveilled, or retraumatised by the presence of officers—raising profound concerns about systemic harm and prompting public debate over whether comfort for the majority should outweigh the stated fear and distress of those most affected.
On the tyranny of majoritarian sentiment
When 25% of students—many of whom are Black, Indigenous, or racialised—say that the presence of uniformed police in schools makes them feel unsafe, retraumatised, or afraid, that is not a small number to be weighed; that is a flashing red signal, a system-level alarm, a cry that should provoke decisive ethical response. The fact that 38% of all respondents said the program should continue as-is says everything about comfort, and nothing about safety. Comfort is not an ethical benchmark. Comfort is the byproduct of power, and those most comforted by the presence of school liaison officers are often those least surveilled by them.
On reference points and legitimacy
Many respondents do not carry the right reference points to evaluate the program’s impact on those most harmed by it. When a person has never been followed by a school officer, never seen their brother handcuffed on school steps, never been taught that their body is perceived as inherently threatening—then what they’re reporting on a survey is a kind of irrelevant, because no one should feel threatened or surveiled or racially profiled at school.
On the ethics of who gets asked
Asking the general public to weigh in on whether others’ pain should be taken seriously is an abdication of responsibility masquerading as consultation. It does not empower—it disperses and obscures.
Imagine if domestic violence shelters were designed according to what men in the general population think women need.
Imagine if accessibility guidelines for public buildings were crowd-sourced from people who had never tried to enter one in a wheelchair.
We don’t ask the majority to decide whether trauma survivors should feel safe. We don’t poll the public about whether racism matters. But in public education, this flattening is common—because the public system is both a civic institution and a place of childhood, and that duality invites everyone to feel ownership, even when they lack insight.
A call for better design: centring those most impacted
This illuminates a radically simple design principle: if a program is being evaluated for its impact on a specific group, then the primary data should come from that group.
This is not exclusionary—it is structurally ethical. It reflects universal design logic, which starts from the margins and builds inward. It reflects disability justice principles, which insist that those most harmed must lead. It reflects the basic feminist tenet that survivors are the experts of their own experience.
A process cannot be called trauma-informed if it invites people unaffected by the trauma to decide whether it exists, or to cast votes that dilute the testimony of those most harmed; yet that is precisely what happened in the Vancouver School Board’s SLO engagement, where students who had never feared police presence were invited to weigh their feelings of comfort against the documented distress of Black, Indigenous, and racialised youth who described fear, surveillance, and retraumatisation as part of their school experience—turning what should have been a targeted inquiry into harm into a general survey of opinion, and transforming an ethical imperative into a popularity contest.
