Just a few months after the December 2012 Sandy Hook shootings, a school safety project funded by the National Rifle Association urged the arming of trained school staff to protect against future school shootings. Although many of us scoffed at this proposal, we failed to recognize that this recommendation was already being implemented in our schools with the increasing utilization of law enforcement officers. So how is the presence of these law enforcement officers affecting our schools and children? Courtesy of cell phone video taken by a student in a classroom, we witnessed in October an incident in a South Carolina high school where a white school resource office put a choke hold on an African-American student, flipped her out of her chair, and then dragged her across the floor. The 16-year-old student was later arrested for “disturbing the peace” as was the student who made the video. It is not clear what led to this ugly incident, and frankly it doesn’t really matter. The crime here is that it did happen. The executive director of the South Carolina branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, Victoria Middleton, stated, “There is no justification whatsoever for treating a child like this. Regardless of the reason for the officer’s actions, such egregious use of force—against young people who are sitting in their classrooms—is outrageous. School should be a place to learn and grow, not a place to be brutalized.” This incident only highlights concerns about the placement of police or school resource officers (SROs) in our nation’s schools.
An article entitled, “Chokehold, Brain Injuries, Beatings: When School Cops Go Bad,” appeared in Mother Jones. I would like to say the article was in response to this incident in South Carolina, but it was in fact a prescient story that was published this past summer. According to the article, school resource officers have injured at least 28 students seriously and shot one student to death in the past five years. Although these incidents are relatively rare, the article decries the lack of training and oversight of SROs and their disproportionate impact on minority and special needs students.
So how did we come to accept the increased use of armed police officers in our schools? In a nutshell, fear. Initially, the rising juvenile crime rate in the 1980s and 1990s led to the creation of “zero tolerance” policies in our schools. These policies maintained that cracking down on even minor infractions would deter major crimes. Additionally, the mass shootings at Columbine, Sandy Hook, and countless other schools had left us all deeply shaken and concerned about the safety of our children. However, Dr. Dewey Cornell, a University of Virginia psychology professor who studies school safety, characterizes this fear as “misguided.” According to Dr. Cornell, “schools are one of the least likely places for a shooting to occur, and pulling officers off the street and putting them on guard in a school lobby is short-sighted and dangerous. The fear of school shootings has been greatly overestimated because of the attention to a handful of tragic cases.”
Yet, subsequent presidential administrations continued to pump money into programs that increased the number of police officers in our schools. The Department of Justice provided $876 million to place 7,000 SROs in schools in 2006 following the Columbine shootings and spent another $67 million to fund another 540 cops in schools after the Sandy Hook shootings. In 2014, the Obama administration requested $150 million from Congress for the Cops in Schools (COPS) program. Additionally, many other officers are funded by local school districts or police departments.
So how many law enforcement officers are in our schools? It’s unclear. Most reports don’t specify who is being counted: school resource officers, police, sheriff's deputies, or school security. Collection of data on the number of arrests being made by officers in schools did not even begin until 2014. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 43% of all US schools have resource officers. Roughly half (43,770) of the 82,400 officers in our country's 84,110 schools have the authority to make arrests. In contrast, there were fewer than 100 police officers in our schools in the 1950s. The National Association of School Resource Officers (NASROs) estimates that anywhere between 14,000 and 20,000 SROs are in our schools (a pretty substantial range of uncertainty).
It is the presence of these law enforcement officers that civil rights groups claim is feeding the “school-to-prison pipeline” with the resultant criminalization of what should be routine school discipline issues. The US Department of Education reported in 2014 that 92,000 students were arrested in the 2011-2012 academic year. Of these arrests, black males were disproportionately represented (16% of the total student population but 31% of all arrests). A new report being released by the Washington University Law Review indicates the odds of referral to law enforcement for a low level offense increase from 1.38 to 183 when an SRO is present in the school.
The National Association of School Resource Officers, which characterizes these reports regarding the school-to-prison pipeline as “rhetoric,” states that these studies are based on flawed and misrepresentative data. According to the NASRO, the studies are restricted to certain urban, low-income districts and their outcomes cannot be generalized to all schools. As proof of the success of the SRO program, the NASRO references the nearly 50% decline of juvenile arrests between 1994 and 2009 during a time of increased use of SROs. An NASRO report entitled "To Protect and Educate: The School Resource Officer and the Prevention of Violence in Schools" states, “Child welfare on campus is not compromised by school resource officers, but is at risk without them.” The SRO plays many roles in a school. He or she may serve as a counselor, teacher, or community liaison officer in addition to providing law enforcement support. The SRO, who ideally has developed a relationship with students based on trust, may serve as a confidante or problem solver for students.
Overall, this depiction of the bonding between law enforcement and youth presents a benevolent image, but it is most likely to be true in schools that are largely white. It simply does not occur universally. According to the Washington Post, there may well be no “Officer Friendly” in low-income high schools with large black or Hispanic populations. In these schools, it is the students who may become the targets of law enforcement’s attention and who are at risk of entering the criminal justice system for disciplinary-related offenses. Incidentally, the high school in South Carolina where this video took place is largely black and Hispanic.
So what went wrong in this South Carolina high school? Even Curtis Lavarello, who founded the NASRO in 1991, was dismayed by the South Carolina video. “We saw a pretty routine disciplinary issue become a criminal issue in just a matter of minutes," he said. "(This scenario) can be handled so simply, and it escalated needlessly." Possibly the officer in question should never have been requested by the teacher or administrator. When asked under what circumstances the SRO should become involved in a discipline issue, Lavarello said that he in turn asks, “Would you have gone to the phone and called 911”?
According to Mo Canady, the executive director of the NASRO, " . . . it takes a very unique individual who understands that to some degree students have a different way about them sometimes. And you know, they’re going to say and do things that we might not like, but are not necessarily criminal in nature.” Such unique individuals clearly need specific training. The NASRO offers a 40-hour training for school resource officers, but it only includes a half day allocated for behavioral issues for students with special needs, presumably including the IEP process and behavior intervention plans. However, it is unclear if this training is mandatory or not for law enforcement officers in schools. (South Carolina does not offer NASRO training.) Even the training materials of the NASRO acknowledge that what constitutes an SRO varies from one jurisdiction to the next. The police academy in only one state (Tennessee) trains police officers for school placements. This level of training sounds pretty limited, particularly when you consider the vast amount of education as well as certification required of teachers who instruct our children.
A Congressional Research Service report from June 2013 acknowledges that research which evaluates whether SRO programs are effective or not is limited by the few studies done as well as by a lack of methodological rigor. According to the CRS, it is unclear if these programs even deter school shootings, one of the primary reasons for their existence. Finally, in its own review the research, the CRS acknowledges that the likelihood of students being arrested for low-level offenses increases in schools with SROs.
Undoubtedly, some schools are unsafe. It would be foolish and naive to deny that schools deal with gangs, bullying, thefts, and illegal weapons and drugs. But the benefits afforded by the presence of these officers may be hampered not only by the limited training and oversight they have, but also by the limited training of school staff, who clearly are too eager to call in law enforcement for routine disciplinary issues. So is this increasing police presence in our nation’s school worth it? Probably not. We have research-based programs, such as restorative justice, which can be used in place. Calling the school resource officer should never replace common-sense discipline. In the event of true emergencies or criminal activity, police officers are only a 911 call away.
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