To say there’s a very anti-police sensibility out there would be putting it mildly. There’s a growing number of people who want law enforcement abolished completely. How law and order will be kept in their Utopia is beyond me, of course, much less how they can fund all the socialism many of them want without some way to compel folks like me to pay taxes, but here we are.

However, there seems to be an attempt to link the police existing with crime itself. At least, that’s the take I get.

There are now more law enforcement officers in Florida’s K-12 schools than there are nurses, and arrests of students have jumped in the two years since legislators passed a law requiring that every school deploy a police officer or armed school employee, according to a new report.

During a single school year, 2018-2019, the number of youth arrests at school increased 8 percent even though communities around the schools saw a 12 percent decline in the number of youths arrested, the report said. And police officers arrested elementary-age kids 345 times, including an arrest of a 5-year-old and five arrests of 6-year-olds in that same year.

The authors of “The Cost of School Policing: What Florida’s students have paid for a pretense of security,” said there is “little consistent evidence” that the presence of law enforcement led to a drop in the number of student behavioral incidents, indicating that school-based law enforcement officers “were not necessarily making schools safer.”

I beg to disagree.

By making many of these arrests, schools inherently safer. See, that’s how it works. The police arrest people who hurt other people so they don’t go on to hurt still more.

This ain’t rocket science, people.

Especially since there’s no reason to believe these crimes wouldn’t have been committed if there weren’t an officer there on the campus. The school cops didn’t make people break laws, after all.

Sure, some will argue that those incidents would have been handled with school discipline and wouldn’t have required arrests, but I disagree. I’ve seen how little some kids care about school discipline. They seem to rejoice in it, actually, because it gives them status with their peers but no real ramifications beyond the school grounds. They might get disciplined at home, but not all of them do.

By reminding them that they’re actually breaking laws, these students are learning a valuable lesson. They’re learning that for every illegal action, there may be an opposite reaction such as getting your butt locked the hell up.

No one is making these students act in ways that would land them in handcuffs. They’re doing that on their own. They can learned it as juveniles or learn it as adults, at least since they didn’t learn it at home for whatever reason. There’s zero reason for the rest of society to have to suffer later because someone finds the idea of them getting arrested at school offensive.

Look, if kids are acting like this when police are present, what are they doing when they know there are no real ramifications of their actions? Let’s stop blaming the presence of police for this when it’s the kids who are at fault in the first place.

Meanwhile, those police also help to deter would-be mass shooters from targeting those schools, which is part of why they’re there in the first place.