Taking a cue from U.S. military operations, surveillance cameras, police officers, metal detectors, hall sweeps, expulsion, zero tolerance policing, and biometrics contour young people's everyday life in public schools. Given this influx in policing and surveillance in schools, recent critical scholarship broadly attends to the increase in and impact of zero tolerance policies. This analysis contributes to this proliferating literature by exploring more closely how the symbolic rhetoric of zero tolerance gets taken up in schools and used as the organizing principle of school safety and security. Recognizing the current context of permanent warfare, the author examines the tactical ways that adult school personnel draw from and use these zero tolerance vocabularies to script urban school space as unsafe, disorderly, and insecure to students in order to justify and normalize the deployment of militarized policing strategies aimed at the spatial administration of school space. School staff members communicate these narratives to the putatively ''risky'' young people who attend these perceived dangerous urban schools as a part of the discursive work needed to legitimate and ''produce new forms of governance through security'' (Mitchell 2010, 290). The author asserts that current studies on urban schools should take seriously how the context of permanent war, attendant perpetual feelings of unease and insecurity, and U.S. occupations abroad shape how we talk and, in turn, think about security in urban schools and how we try to make schools safe for certain youth. To do so, the author draws from anecdotal evidence of work on an urban school reform project over the course of three years, and from three years of qualitative research conducted in five urban schools, to trace how adults script school space, and how students attempt to make sense of, negotiate, and contest the aggressive and often exclusionary disciplinary procedures and their attendant discourses.