It’s Time to Take DARE a Little More Seriously

With Professor Max Felker-Kantor

Chances are you’ve seen the DARE logo — on a t-shirt, a bumper sticker, a license plate, or maybe a street sign. In DARE to Say No: Policing and the War on Drugs in Schools, and in conversation, Professor Max Felker-Kantor (Ball State University) traces the history of the ubiquitous tough-on-drugs program. It's almost too easy to make fun of DARE (almost), but as Professor Felker-Kantor reveals, law enforcement had a very serious goal: to legitimize a deeper police presence in schools, and by and large, they succeeded.

A condensed transcript of our conversation edited for clarity is below. You can also listen to the audio, which includes further bemused discussion of the zero tolerance era of the `80s, how conservatives thought DARE protected family values, why the police enjoyed hanging with kids more than their usual jobs, Professor Felker-Kantor ruining Paw Patrol and Paddington 2 for me, and more:

We unraveled a perverse feedback loop

Ben: To begin, how were DARE’s origins rooted in failure?

MFK: Beginning in the 1970s, the LAPD paid growing attention to youth drug use. They started a program where they arrested drug dealers in schools.

But in the early `80s, they started looking at all this data and realized, wait, we've arrested a lot of kids. We've confiscated drugs. But youth drug use remains high. So that's why I talk about DARE as a product of failure — specifically a failure of this idea that you can just arrest your way out of the drug problem.

LAPD chief of police Daryl Gates, the notorious police chief who was later in charge when the Rodney King beating happened, went to the school board in January of 1983 and said we need a different solution. We need to address the demand side of drugs now. Together with the Los Angeles Unified School District, they came up with Project DARE, which pretty quickly became DARE. 

The idea was for police officers to teach drug prevention in schools. They launched a pilot in the fall of 1983, with ten officers at 50 elementary schools teaching drug prevention to fifth and sixth graders.

Ben: And they targeted fifth and sixth graders because... they were liable to take debaucherous lessons about ancient Rome to heart?

MFK: So interesting that they targeted these kids, right? The real idea was to reach kids before they’d tried drugs, and to reach them with veteran officers who could tell tales straight from the street.

But of course, the underlying side of the program was to try and get kids to see the police as trusted friends and mentors. DARE was claiming expertise by the police and turning what we might see as a public health issue into a police one. 

Ben: Regarding the police’s teaching credentials, later in the book you quote a cop in Colorado who said, “Law enforcement officers are not teachers and they should not be expected to become teachers by virtue of the minimal training provided in the DARE program.”

MFK: Their training was like two weeks, 80 hours.

Ben: Basically they learned how to teach on Duolingo.

MFK: Ha, yes.

Ben: I noted how DARE officers taught kids a variety of “Ways to Say No” when offered drugs, such as “Saying ‘No thanks,’” “Giving a reason or excuse,” “Broken record or saying no as many times as necessary,” “Walking away,” and “Changing the subject.”

I like the idea of “broken record” crossed with “changing the subject.” I’m picturing kids leaving class muttering, How about those Yankees? How about those Yankees? How about those Yankees?

MFK: Some kids really did love DARE. Others wondered why are we losing all our class time? 

By the time most kids got to high school, and long after, they made fun of teachers who told them things like listening to rock music would make them Satan worshipers. Kids would smoke pot in their DARE t-shirts.

Ben: So if DARE was ineffective, how did it grow so much? You note that at its height, there were 40,000 officers worldwide teaching some form of DARE to more than thirty-six million students!

MFK: The program was built on the idea of expanding from the beginning. Daryl Gates hired public relations firms very early on to help promote the program.

L.A. officials also promoted DARE through law enforcement networks. Daryl Gates wrote op-eds about DARE in some school magazines, too. Quickly, they brought in police officers from other departments, who’d send their officers to get trained in the program.

DARE also had corporate sponsors. They worked with Kentucky Fried Chicken to host events. Coca-Cola sponsored pamphlets. And then of course there was all the swag: the now notorious T-shirts, bumper stickers, textbooks, license plates, and more. Even the Los Angeles Lakers created a “Just Say No” rap music video, featuring players and coaches like Pat Riley, Magic Johnson, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. 

Ben: Yogi Bear played a part, too.

MFK: Right, DARE bear Yogi became the program’s official mascot.

Ben: I can’t fault them there. I would support Robert Moses building more highways if he dressed up as a bear to announce them.

MFK: Ha, the Power Rangers got involved, too. And amid all of the good publicity, DARE became a symbol that politicians fawned over.

Ben: Across the political spectrum, you write, “Supporting DARE was a win-win for policymakers — they could be both anti-drug and pro-police.” 

MFK: Right. And a key piece of it is that DARE was about personal responsibility. I argue DARE was implicitly saying that if you know the consequences of your choices, the consequences are justly deserved, and that the government doesn’t have to help people — people just have to make better choices. Of course, the backdrop of this was hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the drug war and locking people up.

During the Clinton era, DARE officials claimed that even if public funding went away, they’d still be able to fund the program. In reality, DARE operated a lot on “donated services”— i.e. police departments donating their officers’ time — which is still, effectively, government funding.

Ben: And asset forfeiture too, right? 

MFK: Oh, yes. DARE used asset forfeiture — seizing people's money, cars, houses, whatever — from the war on drugs to fund the DARE program in some cases. 

Ben: That blew my mind. Taking money seized in a violent war on drugs, using it to fund a program that teaches young kids in school to like the police, then using added goodwill to send in more police to seize more assets is such a perverse feedback loop. It’s like music fans telling Imagine Dragons to keep making music, so they keep making more music, which gets more people to tell them to make more music.

MFK:  Ha, yeah. 

Ben: And unsurprisingly, DARE most acutely and disproportionately affected communities of color.

MFK:  Yes. Kids were getting mixed messages. They’d hear we need to be friends with the police, but then they’d go out and see their family members and others getting arrested and beaten by the police.

Ben: What eventually led people to begin saying no to DARE?

MFK: In the 1990s, social scientists started to evaluate the program independently. Studies began to show that DARE didn't prevent youth drug use, especially over the long term. Then new studies showed that suburban kids did more drugs after participating in DARE, and that really got people upset. 

DARE America fought back, criticizing the studies and saying they were superficial. But eventually, the evidence became overwhelming. DARE also started to come under a lot of fire when stories emerged of kids being encouraged by DARE officers to turn their parents in for drug use.

DARE never scrapped its curriculum but instead adopted a new kind of revised version. It’s fallen far from what it was at its height, but a version of DARE continues today.

Ben: You say that “the long staying power of DARE in American society and culture, even if through parody and irony, spoke less to the efficacy of the program than to the ways the program had attempted to shape the image of the police and enable cops to infiltrate schools.” What do you mean?

MFK: I always use the example of Serena Williams’s husband wearing a DARE shirt at the US Open when she was playing Maria Sharapova, who was coming off a doping violation. Clearly, DARE’s had a long-term cultural impact. 

And I think we have to take some of the parodies of DARE seriously as a form of political critique — a critique of the methods of zero tolerance and “Just Say No.” Even smoking pot in a DARE t-shirt is a political criticism of a failed program.

On the other hand, DARE was able to create the idea that police in schools are normal — that they’re just there, part of everyday life. DARE helped legitimize the police and make them an everyday presence in kids’ lives, and the program’s worrisome history feeds into debates about whether or not we need police in schools today.

Ben: Thanks for reviewing some of that history with us today, Professor Felker-Kantor.

MFK: It was great to be here. Thank you for having me.