The DARE Program Tried to Reshape the Image of Police Officers in the United States

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If you ask someone who went to elementary school in the 1980s or 1990s about the DARE program, they’ll likely have a story for you. Many recall the DARE program, which stands for Drug Abuse Resistance Education, as an ineffective course that did more to introduce them to drugs than anything else. They might remember making fun of their DARE officer, or watching episodes about the drug education classes in their favorite sitcoms.

In its heyday, DARE was serious business. It was the largest and most visible drug prevention program in the United States. At its height, police officers taught DARE to fifth- and sixth-grade students in more than 75% of American school districts as well as in dozens of countries around the world. Alongside the students receiving the full seventeen-week curriculum, millions of other students ranging from kindergarten to high school received variations of DARE. By the end of the 1990s, DARE had reached an estimated 50 million students globally.

While DARE is not what it used to be in the 1980s and 1990s, it’s still around, celebrating its fortieth anniversary last year. Some schools continue to graduate DARE classes while others have adopted or restarted defunct programs. DARE America, the non-profit organization that oversees the program, continues to report millions of dollars in revenue and expenses. Officials continue to promote the use of police as credible experts and reliable instructors in school classrooms. DARE to Say No: Policing and the War on Drugs in Schools is the first full history of the DARE program. It traces DARE’s rapid growth from Los Angeles to schools across the country and how, through savvy marketing and public relations, DARE became a cultural icon and symbol of the drug war. More centrally, it shows how the police used DARE as a legitimization tactic, empowering officers to enter children’s lives as teachers, friends, and mentors. A closer look at this history reveals that DARE was never solely about drug education but fundamentally about the expansion of police power and authority in America.

The most important part of the program was the DARE officer. To legitimize the use of uniformed police officers as teachers, DARE officers would teach kids self-esteem, resistance to peer pressure, and how to say no to drugs. In the minds of DARE’s proponents, enlisting police as teachers would turn officers into friends and mentors. Yet as law enforcement representatives who taught in their police uniforms, DARE officers connected the drug war’s soft side of prevention with its hard side of aggressive enforcement of drug laws.

DARE’s police-school partnership intended to reimagine the role of the police officer far more than it prevented drug use. While health and education specialists actually had expertise in substance use prevention, both LAPD and LAUSD officials believed that using officers as teachers would “provide many essential components” of the program, including “a staff which is recognized by the students as experts in the field of substance abuse; opportunity for officers to relate with students, parents and teachers in a non-enforcement role . . . and most importantly, trust between the school community and the officers based on familiarity.” They envisioned the DARE officer would change youth perception of the police by creating a nonpunitive relationship between officers and kids. “DARE officers give a different face of law enforcement,” DARE America executive director and former LAPD deputy chief Glenn Levant explained. “A child’s first experience with a uniformed police officer is in a friendly, helpful way. . . . You have to have programs like DARE in place so police aren’t viewed as an occupying army.”

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From the vantage point of the DARE officer, DARE was a not-so-subtle propaganda campaign to reshape the image of the police. While police departments had long attempted to use community relations and youth programs to push kids to identify with the police, DARE represented a shift from earlier community-oriented policing strategies. It attempted to burnish the image of the police within the context of an aggressive drug and gang war that actively undermined trust in the police.

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Students in the program were implicitly taught to identify with and respect police officers through DARE officers’ participation in a wide range of extracurricular activities….During the pilot year, for instance, one officer coached a DARE Track Club while another coached a football team. Several others were even involved in holiday activities at the school, including playing Santa Claus and Rudolf, “clearly not roles in which young people are used to seeing law enforcement officers.” Crucially, the officers believed that this sort of activity was a central part of DARE’s mission. “The officers feel that these extra activities and involvements are very beneficial to furthering the goals of Project DARE,” an interim evaluation report concluded. The most useful part of the program, according to officers, was how students shifted their attitudes and perceptions of the police as someone to be trusted, not feared. “However, the aspect of the project which brought the most satisfaction to the officers was working with the children and having the children come to accept and confide in them.”

The implicit goal of changing the image of police officers was part of the program’s origins. When the LAPD and LAUSD submitted a grant proposal for second-year funding, for example, they allocated resources to buy officers athletic uniforms. “Part of the DARE method is to involve the officers in the total school program,” the LAPD and LAUSD grant writers emphasized. “Naturally, this includes school athletic events. The officers wear their uniforms for all other school events, but they cannot be worn for athletics. Athletic uniforms serve to remind students, spectators and parents of the officer’s purpose and provide inexpensive, yet effective, program identity.” Such an orientation was meant to create a more positive image of police officers than aggressive crime fighters, which became a selling point of the program. “In addition to their formal classroom teaching,” a 1988 Department of Justice DARE manual explained, “DARE officers spend time on the playground, in the cafeteria, and at student assemblies to interact with students informally. . . . In this way students have an opportunity to become acquainted with the officer as a trusted friend who is interested in their happiness and welfare.” Adding to this effort, law enforcement agencies created collectible trading cards of DARE officers to both promote the program and further humanize the police.

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Many students seemed to adore their DARE officers. Photographs showed smiling students with their DARE officers both inside and outside the classroom. Oftentimes, they wrote about their experiences with officers in their “DARE Essays,” which were sometimes published in newspapers across the country. As one Ohio student wrote after completing DARE in 2000, “D.A.R.E. means a lot to me. I like seeing my D.A.R.E. officer’s happy smiling face every Wednesday. . . . I think D.A.R.E. is a really good program. It has taught me what to do and what not to do to protect myself from danger. I think D.A.R.E. has helped provide a good clear image in my mind if I do something bad. I have learned not to do drugs, get into gangs, or smoke. Thank you Capt. Stanley!” 75 Students in Sioux City, Iowa, variously wrote, “I believe D.A.R.E. helps people think of themselves as special”; “Whenever I see my plaque or wear my T-shirt, I’ll think of all the great and fun times I had in D.A.R.E.”; and “This year when I was told that we would be having D.A.R.E., I figured that it would be some officer coming into our classroom and just saying don’t do drugs over and over again. Actually, it was GREAT.” Student perceptions of DARE usually expressed a standard essay form about the program and praise for the DARE officer. And they were all positive, of course.

Other students took the messaging to heart and elevated their DARE enthusiasm to another level. Five students from San Bernardino, for example, performed a skit for their DARE graduation based on antidrug lyrics and popular music. The San Bernardino Police Department, after learning about the group, asked the students to perform their skit at a DARE convention in August 1987. The group became known as the “D.A.R.E. Squad,” a group of five kids who sang songs against drugs. The students also wrote and produced a monthly student newsletter called “D.A.R.E. Squad Speaks” with mini articles about DARE, the DARE Bear, and other antidrug initiatives, such as Red Ribbon Week. For other students, the DARE experience did not end when they left elementary school. In some instances, high school students who had completed DARE came back as “DARE role models.” As one Kentucky DARE officer noted, “As part of the DARE curriculum, we have a ‘role model’ class, using drug- and alcohol-free students from our high schools. The students talk to the elementary kids, telling them that they can be drug-free and accepted—even admired—by their peers because of their choice.” The DARE role models talked to kids about not using drugs or alcohol and the high school experience. For DARE officers, the program was another metric of success. “The students chosen did an excellent job for me,” the Kentucky DARE officer continued, “and the kids really enjoyed having them in the classroom.”

Sometimes, however, the message students took away from DARE had less to do with avoiding drugs and more to do with critiques of the program. Many students enjoyed the role-playing activities and skits not because they were invested in the antidrug messaging or content but because they enjoyed getting in front of the class and acting as a drug dealer or buyer. One student from Columbus, Ohio, recalled how they tried to make their friends laugh during skits in which they would sag their pants, wear bandanas, and act like drug dealers they had seen in movies or on television. Or, more explicitly, some saw DARE as an escape from academic work. One student in Kentucky wrote, “Our DARE officer is officer Holt. In DARE, we do lots of fun things, and we never have any tests. Near the end of DARE, when we were getting ready for graduation, we missed almost two weeks of school.” Many children enjoyed DARE because it let them connect with fellow students, make friends laugh, or avoid regular classwork, not for its antidrug messaging or content.

Some of the students who questioned the program were slightly more biting in their critiques. Students in Wausau, Wisconsin, for instance, debated in the editorial pages of the Rib Mountain Gazette, a student newspaper. While the DARE proponents reiterated similar arguments about the importance of learning how to say no to drugs and resisting peer pressure, Charlie Hughes and Erik Rajek had a different take, to put it mildly. “[DARE] is useless,” they argued, because “drugs are not a major problem in this area. In Los Angeles—yes. Rib. Mt.—no.” They also pointed out that DARE “took away 50 minutes of our Social Studies time, which in total adds up to 900 minutes a semester.” But in a more direct challenge to DARE’s entire philosophy, they summed up their argument stating, “Finally, we believe that if this has to be taught, it should be taught by a teacher, not a police officer.”

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DARE was never solely a drug prevention program. As many law enforcement officials believed, the real value and goal of DARE was as much about integrating police into schools and as part of the broader community.

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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.

From DARE TO SAY NO: POLICING AND THE WAR ON DRUGS IN SCHOOLS by Max Felker-Kantor. Copyright © 2024 by Max Felker-Kantor.  Used by permission of the University of North Carolina Press.

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