School arrest prompts questions about officers

    As it is, student videos of a deputy flipping a teenager over in her desk has left students, parents, educators and politicians questioning the role of school resource officers (SROs). Do these officers make schools safer? Or does student behavior that once would have resulted in a detention instead end with a criminal record?

     Background: The girl had been using her cell phone in class on Oct. 26, according to another student who witnessed the event and was interviewed on MSNBC. After the girl refused to surrender her telephone, the teacher called a school administrator, but the student refused to leave the classroom. The school administrator then called Ben Fields, the resource officer. Fields asked the girl to come with him. She refused. In the process of removing her from the classroom, Fields flipped the desk over with her in it. He then dragged her across the floor and put her in handcuffs.
    The girl involved is African-American. Fields is white. Reuters has reported that a federal probe also has been opened in the case.

    When did the practice of assigning police officers to schools begin? Police officers served in schools before the 1930s, according to a report by researchers at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center at Dartmouth College. The concept of a “school resource officer” emerged in the 1950s in Flint, Michigan. Even so, the practice of assigning officers to schools was uncommon.
    Research published in Justice Quarterly said that in 1975, 1 percent of principals reported having police officers in their schools. By 2007-08, the number had grown to 40 percent of principals.

     Why did the practice become more common? A combination of factors led school systems and police departments to station officers in schools. Here are two of the reasons mentioned in research: 

• Concern over student safety grew out of an increase in juvenile crime in the 1980s and school shootings in the 1990s.
• Education associations wished to limit teacher liability for disciplinary actions.

     How many police officers are assigned to schools?  There are approximately 17,000 employed by local law enforcement agencies, according to a Congressional Research Service report. (The report was done in 2013, and figures were from 2007.)  

     Can any cop be a good school resource officer? Not really. It isn’t a typical beat. Police officers from a New Hampshire town interviewed for the Dartmouth report described the need for a patient personality.
    They “emphasized the importance of an SRO’s relationship with students. They suggested that the personality of the officer in the position and their appreciation for children make a difference in cultivating positive relationships, rather than being an additional, unyielding authority. When an SRO is in the high school, he or she has to uphold the students’ anonymity when they come to officers with tips. SROs must also be comfortable dealing with pranks and be aware of their surroundings because of the incidences of violence among high school students.”

    Does the presence of police officers make students safer? The Congressional Research Service concluded, "Research in this area is limited to a small number of studies, but these suggest that children in schools with SROs might be more likely to be arrested for low-level offenses. On the other hand, some studies indicate that SROs can deter students from committing assaults on campus as well as bringing weapons to school. Schools with SROs may also be more likely to report non-serious violent crimes (i.e., physical attack or fights without a weapon and threat of physical attack without a weapon) to the police than schools lacking SROs."
   The Justice Quarterly research asserted that there is “no evidence suggesting that SRO or other sworn law-enforcement officers contribute to school safety. That is, for no crime type was an increase in the presence of police significantly related to decreased crime rates. The preponderance of evidence suggests that, to the contrary, more crimes involving weapons possession and drugs are recorded in schools that add police officers than in similar schools that do not. The analyses also showed that as schools increase their use of police officers, the percentage of crimes involving non-serious violent offenses that are reported to law enforcement increases. These findings are consistent with the conclusions from previous qualitative research ... which found that the presence of police officers helps to redefine disciplinary situations as criminal justice problems rather than social, psychological or academic problems.”

        Sources:

• Congressional Research Service, June 26, 2013, School Resource Officers: Law Enforcement Officers in Schools,  by Nathan James and Gail McCallion.
• Justice Quarterly, 2011, Police Officers in Schools: Effects on School Crime and the Processing of Offending Behavior, by Chongmin Na and Denise C. Gottfredson.
• Nelson A. Rockefeller Center at Dartmouth College, 2013, The Use of School Resource Officers in High Schools, By Kamran Ali, et al.

       Related:

       Sandy Hook case: History of a war weapon

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