Security and a School Culture supporting Positive Learning: Students require a safe and welcoming environment for learning. SROs can help by ensuring physical safety, and by welcoming, counseling students, educating them on the law, and mentoring them, serving as role models (School Resource Officers (SROs) and Law Enforcement in Schools 2020). Additionally, SROs can help educate students on creating good relations with law enforcement officers (Alonzo Anderson, 2018).
Training: SROs are not simply off-duty police officers or security guards, but are given special training for the complex and variable responsibilities unique to securing and protecting the school environment, and thus arguably offer a better solution for campus security than other approaches (School Resource Officers (SROs) and Law Enforcement in Schools 2020).
Potential Negative Impact: Many argue that SROs can have a deleterious effect on the school climate and discipline, while possibly playing a catalyzing role in the school-to-prison pipeline (School Resource Officers (SROs) and Law Enforcement in Schools 2020). :
Racial, economic, and ability prejudice: The poorest schools have a greater police presence than more affluent schools. Additionally, the more non-white students a school has, the more SROs are employed there, on average (Lind, 2015). SROs' ability to arrest students on criminal charges have resulted in a far greater arrest rate in schools with SROs (Lind, 2015). There are additional concerns about disproportionate and/or unwarranted disciplinary measures against students of color (School Resource Officers (SROs) and Law Enforcement in Schools 2020). Counts et al. (2018) further noted that while students with disabilities accounted for 28% of all referrals and arrests despite making up only 12% of the student population.
As of 2013, 42 states do not address the obligation to lower disproportionate minority contact mandated by federal policy (Thurau, 2013). The U.S. Department of Education (2020) has noted that students of minority ethnicity or race are much more likely than their white peers to face suspension or expulsion despite the lack of evidence for a greater frequency or seriousness of misbehavior.
While additional training is always welcome, recent events seem to reveal prominent police attitudes toward ethnic minorities and persons of color that call for more rigorous departmental oversight, including heightened accountability for officers and/or SROs who exceed clearly defined policies for reasonable disciplinary methods regarding students, administered impartially, regardless of student race or ethnicity.
Increased SRO presence in schools can have the effect of criminalizing student behaviors: a fight becomes criminal assault, or what might be considered common disruptive behavior may be charged as criminal disorderly conduct (Theriot, 2009). Students have been arrested and detained for such minor offenses as dress code violations (Rimer, 2004). The Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice (2000) reported one incident in which a disabled Florida student was arrested and charged with felony robbery for stealing $2 from a classmate, and another in which a student was charged with making terroristic threats for warning fellow students in the lunch line not to take all the potatoes.
While there may always be an uncomfortable number of individual incidents involving excessive force by SROs, there is a shortage of rigorous research as to the actual benefits in terms of school safety from their inclusion on security staff (Stern & Petrosina, 2018). Meanwhile, there is much disagreement in the public discourse as to whether SROs in schools create a net benefit or detriment. Additional research would be helpful. In the meantime, the U.S. Department of Education (2014) has recommended that SROs and other policing authorities concentrate on protecting school grounds and preventing criminal activities from non-students, leaving the job of student discipline to teachers and administrators.
SROs may have to answer to disparate authorities: school boards set their own policies and procedures regarding disciplinary measures for administrators to follow, but SROs may have to follow a different set of policies and procedures mandated by local law enforcement authorities such as the Sheriff's Department (Robinson, 2014).
Intergovernmental agreements between police departments and/or other local law enforcement agencies and school boards and administrators can be used to produce a set of common practices for disciplinary measures and thresholds. Such an agreement was forged between the Denver Police Department and Denver Public Schools in 2013 (Emerging Models for Police Presence in Schools n.d.).
The majority of police academies do not teach recruits adolescent behavior and psychology. While about 80% of respondents to an International Association of Chiefs of Police survey claim to have received departmental training for juvenile justice, most indicated they received less than 10 hours of training (Keierleber, 2015). Less than 1% of training hours are spent on juvenile justice in 37 states, with a high of 20-24 hours in two states, and zero hours in five states (Thurau, 2013).
If SROs are truly meant to be specialists in school safety and student conduct, a logical first step would be to mandate specific training for working with children and adolescents. The Colorado Peace Officer Standards and Training Board has developed an SRO curriculum in response to a 2012 revision in the CO state education statute to set minimum requirements for SRO instruction (Keierleber, 2015)
Theriot & Orme (2014) found no link between SROs in schools and and increased feeling of student safety, and that in fact African American males students felt less safe.
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