School Resource Officers: Safety Priority or Part of the Problem?

As scrutiny of the relationship between law enforcement agencies and the communities they're charged with protecting continues – heightened following the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Tamir Rice, among others, at the hands of police – some are turning their attention to the role of officers in schools.

In theory, so-called school resource officers are supposed to foster exactly what many civil rights groups are campaigning for: better relations between law enforcement and citizens, particularly minorities and lower-income families. In practice, some say, they are worsening the situation, facilitating the "school-to-prison pipeline" rather than curbing it. Thanks to inconsistent training models and a lack of clear standards, critics contend school officers are introducing children to the criminal justice system unnecessarily by doling out harsh punishments for classroom misbehavior.  

“Is this is an effective intervention strategy? It’s really not having the impact we want to have,” says Emily Morgan, a senior policy analyst at The Council of State Governments Justice Center, a nonprofit that works to strengthen public safety and communities.

Many attribute the explosion of police presence in schools to the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, but Deborah Fowler, executive director of the advocacy group Texas Appleseed, says the push for more law enforcement on campuses started earlier.

“School policing is tied to that broken windows, tough-on-crime era, when we were all panicked about the juvenile supercriminals that were going to start running the streets,” Fowler says. “They didn’t emerge, obviously.”

Instead, she and others says, school resource officers have become more involved in the basic discipline of children, stepping in where teachers previously would have handled low-level misbehavior. A special-needs student at a high school in Texas, for example, was arrested in 2012 by a school resource officer, booked in jail and charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest after an incident that started with a teacher asking the student to stop talking.

In fact, out of 3,500 student arrests in 11 Texas school districts in 2006-2007, only 20 percent involved violence or a weapon, which usually meant a fist was used, according to a Texas Appleseed report.

“The fear of drugs and the fear of gangs in some places, as well as Columbine, all led to the decision that more police should be in the schools,” says Lisa Thurau, executive director of Strategies for Youth, an advocacy group that seeks to improve police-youth interactions. “People had very different ideas of what police would be doing, and so did the police.”

International Association of Chiefs of Police President Richard Beary, speaking at a public forum this month for the President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing, said that officers hands are often tied by laws and policies that require mandatory action.

“Unfortunately anything to with schools anymore, if you don't make an arrest and something bad happens, it’s over," he said. He later added, “If you're called into a situation that falls into a mandatory reporting area, you don't have much discretion."

Youth advocates often pair the surge in school resource officers – a trend that's occurred roughly over the last two decades – with the rise of “zero-tolerance policies” that call for harsher penalties for minor classroom offenses. The number of full-time school resource officers employed by local law enforcement agencies nationwide rose between 1997 and 2003, before decreasing slightly later on, according to a 2013 Congressional Research Service report. 

“What teachers do now is call on officers and ask them to handle things,” says Jim St. Germain, co-founder of Preparing Leaders of Tomorrow, a nonprofit mentoring group.

And when "handling" leads to a suspension or worse, it can have an adverse effect on a student's development. A study by The Council of State Governments Justice Center found that, when controlled for campus and individual student characteristics, being suspended or expelled made a student nearly three times more likely to come into contact with the juvenile justice system within the next year.

“Because kids are suspended or expelled, they're out getting into trouble in places they shouldn’t be at times they shouldn't be. They are more likely to be picked up by law enforcement and be processed by the system,” Morgan says.

Research also has shown that minorities; lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender children; and those with special needs are disproportionately suspended and expelled from school. A study by The Civil Rights Project at the University of California-Los Angeles found that middle-school suspension rates were double the national average in urban school districts, with urban middle schools often suspending more than a third of their black male students.

Last year, the Justice and Education departments issued a letter to school administrators warning “racial discrimination in school discipline is a real problem,” and saying they would be investigating reported incidents.

“Kids from suburban white America – they don’t get arrested for cursing out a teacher, throwing a book,” St. Germain says. “These are the things they go to a counselor for.”

Tim Servoss, an assistant psychology professor at Canisius College in New York, is working on a study of the role law enforcement officers play in discriminatory discipline. His past work, often done with Jeremy Finn of the State University of New York at Buffalo, has found that in schools where security is high in general – including when school resource officers or security guards not affiliated with police agencies are present – punishments for misbehavior are harsher, even when adjusted for other factors.

“A lot of people who hear about disproportionate suspensions will argue that the disparity is appropriate because misbehavior is disproportionate in the same way,” Servoss says.

But Servoss' research has found that even when statistical controls were set in place for an individual student’s misbehavior and other characteristics, African-American students were nearly twice as likely to be suspended than white children, and Hispanic students were about 1.5 times as likely to be suspended as their white counterparts. The disparity between black and white student suspensions was even higher in schools with increased security measures and, within his data set, nearly two-thirds of African-American students were going to schools in the highest third in terms of security level.

“Suspension levels are worse for black kids who go to high-security schools, and most black kids go to high-security schools,” Servoss says

Research into the general effects of school resource officers, however, is mixed, as the report by The Council of State Governments Justice Center pointed out.

A study on a Chicago police-school partnership program showed that crime fell 50 percent in a four-year period; another study saw a drop in assault and weapons charges with the presence of a school resource officer. However, a national study of officers in schools found no drop in crime and an increase in weapons and drug offenses, while yet another study found police presence corresponded with an increase in arrests for disorderly conduct.

Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers – a training organization for school-based officers – objects to claims that placing guards in schools does more harm than good.

“A true school resource officer unit is a community-policing project at its core,” he says. He argues that a drop in juvenile arrests by nearly 50 percent between 1994 and 2009 – a Department of Justice statistic cited in a 2012 report by his organization – coincided with an expanding use of school resource officers and disproves the notion that the presence of officers leads to more minorities being placed in the juvenile justice system.

“The number one goal of an SRO, based on our training, should be to bridge the gap between law enforcement and youth. So what we are talking about at the end of the day is building relationships,” he says.

The benefits or detrimental effects of school resource officers certainly can vary across school districts, and are dependent on respective recruitment policies, training systems and oversight initiatives – as well as what data is collected to determine results.

In some places, Thurau says, there is an extensive selection process in which police departments and school districts collaboratively decide how to bring on officers best suited for the job. Other schools, she says, receive “retired-on-active-duty” types or “officers who don’t really want to do anything.”

“It is completely unregulated by the state and left to each locality to define,” she says.

In all cases, an officer should not be placed in a school without some sort of written agreement outlining what his or her role is there, particularly when it comes to discipline, civil rights advocates say.

“Ideally if you are going to have SROs, it’s important that there will be a clear understanding who will ultimately respond – whether it was them or the school administration who had the final call against students,” says Dennis Parker, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Racial Justice Program. “They are not there to enforce clothing rules or hallway passes … they should be used in things that are more serious safety threats.”

Training is also extensive in some districts and all but absent in others. “You have to use different policing approaches with youth than you use with adults,” Thurau says. “These officers are not trained in normative child development, much less special-needs child development.”

But both Canady and critics more or less agree on what is required for a healthy program. Canady says his organization trains around 2,000 school resource officers a year in various programs across the country, covering everything from emergency preparedness and public safety to law enforcement education, informal counseling of students and relationship-building. 

“There are things that are supposed to happen to have this program have any hope in succeeding,” Canady says. “First, there has to be a foundational, collaborative effort between the school district and the law enforcement agency. Second, it has to be the right officer that's placed in this position. Third, the officer has to be properly trained.”

Still, it's up to individual agencies to decide if and how school officers will be trained, and to decide what protocols should be followed. And Canady says very few metropolitan-area police departments – where many problems seem to occur – send their school resource officers to his group's programs.

In some places, local governments have stepped in to help set standards.

A law passed in Denver in 2012 advises schools to adopt policies that limit law enforcement involvement in cases of minor misbehavior and beefs up training requirements for school officers. It requires data collection and analysis regarding reports of student misconduct and punishments received, broken down by race and gender. The next year, an agreement between Denver police and the city's public school system reinforced a limited approach to student discipline. 

In Broward County, Florida, government agencies, civil rights advocates and education officials formed a task force to outline specific expectations and training requirements for officers, and to discourage their involvement in disciplinary measures.

"Many types of minor student misbehavior may technically meet the statutory requirements for nonviolent misdemeanors, but are best handled outside of the criminal justice system," the agreement states.

But those examples are the exception and not the rule, and some are pushing for state governments to be more involved. They say states should develop specific training standards and recruitment protocols for school resource officers, along with data-collection requirements and general expectations for what role an officer should play, if any, in student discipline.

Civil rights groups in Texas, for example, are pushing for a state moratorium on Tasers in schools after an officer used one on a student who was trying to break up a fight between two others. The student, Noe Niño de Rivera, was placed in a medical coma for 52 days.

Concerns also have been raised about school districts' use of the 1033 program, which allows the Defense Department to send military equipment to local governments and came under scrutiny during the protests over Brown's death in Ferguson, Missouri. At least 20 school districts reportedly have been involved in the program.

Canady argues that military equipment doesn’t necessarily mean tanks, but the sort of firearms that could be crucial for officers to have in case of a school shooting like Columbine.

“Most schools, most of these officers, are never going to face one of these shootings, but they have to be prepared in the event that this does happen,” Canady says, pointing to the school resource officer credited with ending a 2013 shooting at Colorado’s Arapahoe High School.

The 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, brought the issue of police presence in schools back into the national spotlight, and President Barack Obama proposed funding for schools to hire law enforcement officers, drawing concern from civil rights advocates about the policing of students.

In 2013, the Department of Justice announced nearly $45 million in grants to fund hundreds of school resource officer positions across the country, with Attorney General Eric Holder saying "all possible steps" should be taken to keep kids safe "in the wake of past tragedies."

But some still wonder whether tragedies like Sandy Hook justify the need for a greater police presence in schools.

“We need to question whether or not you need school resource officers to keep a school safe,” Thurau says. “The belief that a single SRO will stop an attack like Newtown is something that even the police question.”

And without proper training and standards for school resource officers, it’s not just students who suffer.

“You are setting police up [for criticism] when you don’t prepare them, and when you don’t explain to them that the goal is to keep these kids in schools,” Thurau says.