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The tip came in early 2024 during an interview with a source for a different story. A 17-year-old boy in Texas had been arrested outside his special education classroom, the source told me, for allegedly hitting a school police officer. The student wound up in jail.
I was then a public safety reporter for Houston Landing, a nonprofit newsroom, and obtained video footage of the incident. It showed the officer dragging the student to the ground, straddling him and punching him twice in the face. Though the officer wrote in a report that the boy had struck him, it was hard to tell from the video, and prosecutors ultimately dismissed the charge for lack of evidence.
For months, the case stuck with me. I found news articles about officers in other parts of Texas who had also used force in schools, sometimes stemming from students swearing at teachers or arguments between classmates. And I knew that the Texas Legislature had passed sweeping legislation in 2023 to station a police officer at every public school in the state.
The law, the most ambitious effort to expand school policing in the nation, was a response to the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde in May 2022. The legislation was intended to protect students. I wondered if it might end up harming some of them, too.
I pitched an investigation to The New York Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship, a program that supports investigative reporting around the country by partnering with local newsrooms. The Times accepted my proposal, but wanted more reporting firepower to support a project in a state as big as Texas. Editors added a second fellow: Kristian Hernández, a reporter based in Fort Worth and graduate of Texas’ public school system.
Two months later, Houston Landing closed because of financial pressures. We formed a new partnership with The San Antonio Express-News, which provided additional reporting and editing resources. We also began working with Asher Lehrer-Small, who had covered education at the Landing. (Asher later joined the program as a fellow.)
Public records were key to our reporting. We submitted records requests to more than 400 school district police departments and other law enforcement agencies that supply officers to schools in Texas, asking for their use-of-force policies and the 10 most recent reports documenting use of force in their schools. To go deeper, we also requested some citizen complaints, officers’ personnel files and internal investigations records.
Using those documents, we tallied more than 2,600 use-of-force incidents from January 2022 through December 2025. That number is undoubtedly an undercount. Many districts ignored our requests or did not release their records; others demanded enormous fees — as much as $36,000 in one case — to provide them.
We were also able to collect more than 450 individual police reports documenting use of force in the same time frame. We read every one of them and tracked information like the student’s age, details on what behavior had prompted the officer’s intervention and the type of force that was used. In some of those cases, we also obtained video footage.
We interviewed teachers, principals, superintendents and school psychologists. We talked to school officers and police chiefs, observing them on duty in two districts in different parts of the state. We attended a two-day training for new school officers in Kilgore, east of Dallas, as well as two conferences on school policing where vendors sold assault rifles and tactical drones.
Above all, though, we talked to students — at a skate park in Beaumont, a restaurant outside San Antonio and school pickup lines in Houston and Corpus Christi. We knocked on doors in Galveston and in the sprawling Dallas suburbs, distributed fliers with our contact information in English and Spanish and talked with teenagers over Starbucks coffee and cheesy nachos. We reached out to parents and always identified ourselves as reporters.
Most of the teenagers we spoke with said they believed police were necessary in their schools. They described violent fights between students and concerns about school shooters. But many also said they’d had physical interactions with officers themselves. Some recalled being tackled or pinned against lockers, shocked by school police officers with Tasers or held at gunpoint. Others showed us cellphone videos of officers using pepper spray in hallways and throwing their classmates to the ground.
To many of them, the idea that officers used physical force on students was far from extraordinary; it was a part of life in school.
Clare Amari is a reporter covering law enforcement in Texas schools as part of The Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship.
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