Minority students account for nearly half of all student arrests in Spokane schools

Spokane school district security officers arrested 99 students this school year. Nearly half of them were minorities.

Forty-seven students arrested self-identified as either black, Hawaiian, multiracial Hispanic or Native American. Fifty-two Caucasian students were arrested in 2016-17. Of all students arrested, 47 percent were minority students.

That’s despite the fact that those minority groupings of students only make up 28.9 percent of the district student population, according to 2015 data from the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction.

Overall arrests were down about 85 percent between 2015-16 and 2016-17, according to the data released Thursday evening. There were 29 arrest of seventh-graders and 27 arrests of eighth-graders.