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- After one week ended with 23 student arrests, a group of dads decided to form a patrol at Southwood High School in Shreveport, Louisiana.
- Some have said the group, called Dads on Duty, is an example of relying on community intervention instead of police.
- "I immediately felt a form of safety," one student told CBS.
A group of Louisiana dads have gone viral after they took a community approach to address fighting at a local high school.
Southwood High School in Shreveport was struggling with fights between students. One week, 23 students were arrested for fighting over the course of three days, CBS News reported.
In response, parents started a group called Dads on Duty that patrols the school to help prevent fighting and dissolve tensions.
"We're dads. We decided the best people who can take care of our kids are who? Are us," the group's founder, Michael LaFitte, told CBS. LaFitte did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
As a result of the group's presence, there have been no more fights at Southwood High School, CBS reported. Representatives from the school did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
"I immediately felt a form of safety," one student told CBS.
"We stopped fighting. People started going to class," another added.
"The school has really just been, like, happy, and you can feel it," another student said.
Asked how the group of dads is so effective, one student said: "You ever heard of a look?"
CBS' original coverage of Dads on Duty has gained over 40,600 retweets on Twitter. Some have called the story an example that favors community intervention over increased policing. Following Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, there have been increased calls to scale back or eliminate police presence at schools.
"There is a softly spoken abolitionism here generated from the idea that parents and not police and resource officers should be involved with schools," Jared Loggins, a professor of Black studies and political science at Amherst College, tweeted about the story.
Loggins told Insider that Dads on Duty represents "a call for care over incarceration."
"It is a call for turning to community-based solutions to social conflict and not to the police. 'Dads On Duty' speaks to a long tradition in Black communities of caring for one another when we mess up as opposed to disposing and throwing away the key," Loggins said.
"The children in that school simply want to feel loved, affirmed, and safe," Loggins continued. "Police cannot, by necessity, do that work nor should we want them to try."
David Hogg, a gun control activist and survivor of the 2018 Parkland shooting, also responded to the story.
"We need more of this- not armed teachers and police that only endanger students more," Hogg tweeted.