Recently, Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina made headlines when video of a police officer pulling a black teenage student from her desk and throwing her to the ground went viral. The events sparked a national outcry over the use of police force in schools, and prompted the Department of Justice to begin an investigation into the incident.

While the Richland County police department has since fired the officer involved, the future of police presence in public schools remains unclear. RSF author and sociologist Carla Shedd—whose new book Unequal City: Race, Schools, and Perceptions of Injustice explores in detail how marginalized youth navigate their interactions with law enforcement in and around their schools—spoke with several news outlets about the Spring Valley High incident. According to Shedd, schools play a crucial role in either reinforcing or ameliorating the social inequalities experienced by adolescents in city environments. As she told the Wall Street Journal, in many educational settings, black students are treated differently from white students when they act like teenagers. She added, in an interview with the Washington Post, “I talk about what the consequences are when young people are not given that developmental space to mess up, to act out or make mistakes like regular teenagers.”

In Unequal City, Shedd tracks the rise of metal detectors, surveillance cameras, and pat-downs at schools in Chicago. Along with police procedures like stop-and-frisk, these prison-like practices lead to distrust of authority and feelings of powerlessness among the adolescents who experience mistreatment either firsthand or vicariously.

Yet, Shedd also finds that the racial composition of the student body has a profound effect not only on students’ performance, but also helps shapes their perceptions of injustice. In her study, black and Latino students who attended integrated, racially diverse schools performed better academically. They were also quicker to recognize inequality than those who attended racially segregated schools, in part because they experienced law enforcement treating them differently from their white peers. As a result, Shedd told Takepart, students from integrated schools end up “more prepared to deal with society.”

Shedd was also interviewed by the Crime Report, MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes, and MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry Show about her research on the growing presence of police in schools in Chicago. Of their treatment of students, she told Hayes, “It’s unequal and it’s not random. [Law enforcement] is targeted at certain types of behaviors done by certain types of children.”

Click here to read more about Unequal City or purchase a copy of the book.