Does America Really Need Cops in Schools?

Earlier this week, a shocking video of a black South Carolina high school student being tossed around like a rag doll by a white cop went viral. It picked up traction on the internet partly because it fit into a nationwide debate about how the police routinely mistreat people of color, but that the target of the violence was a teenager sitting at her desk in school rendered the outrage especially acute. Beyond the usual questions about why this cop—a sheriff's deputy named Ben Fields who was fired on Wednesday—went postal on an unarmed civilian, there was a simpler one: Why are the police in schools anyway?

Cops assigned to schools are usually referred to as school resource officers (SROs) and are a daily sight at some middle and high schools—in particular, those in poorer neighborhoods or areas with large minority populations. At my mostly white public middle school on Long Island in the 90s, for instance, there was no police presence except on days when we were educated about the many dangers of drugs.

"Could you imagine this happening in one of these Manhattan prep schools where the kids pay $50k a year to go to fifth grade?" asks Eugene O'Donnell, a former Brooklyn cop and prosecutor. "It degrades our profession, too. This is what the police are for? This is what you need a skilled person in a police agency to do?"

According to the National Association of School Resource Officers (NASRO), the first SRO program appeared in 1958, in Flint, Michigan. That happens to be around the time American adults really started to freak out about the scourge of juvenile delinquency. Rebel Without a Cause had come out three years earlier, Beatniks were roaming urban centers waxing poetic about the alienating affects of post-war capitalism and groupthink, and Elvis was gyrating in alarmingly suggestive fashion on television.

But it wasn't until about 20 years ago that SROs really began to take off nationwide, according to William Terrill, a professor in the school of criminal justice at Michigan State University.

"Most of what the police do is much more oriented to doing social work than law enforcement," Terrill says of American cops generally. He maintains that it's a myth that "even in high-crime urban areas… officers are often enforcing the law. All the evidence indicates that the bulk of an officer's time is spent doing non-law enforcement activities."

There are now an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 SROs around the country, as the New York Times recently reported, but less than half are members of the national organization, which sets standards for training and conduct. They're supposed to teach kids about the law and mentor them, as well as resolve conflicts before they get out of hand. But as Buzzfeed reported, many SROs—Fields apparently among them—are not trained by the national group. Meanwhile, federal data shows that the number of full-time cops at American schools rose by 40 percent between 1997 and 2007, with the 1999 Columbine shooting helping open the spigot for millions in new federal grants to pay for them.

The trend suggests many believe SROs can prevent or respond to school shootings and gang activity. And if police generally made students safer, who would argue with their presence? But according to the experts on school safety I canvassed, SROs don't have all that much to do with deterring violent crime. And in addition to the deeply problematic "school to prison pipeline," where arrests at school trap young people in the criminal justice system, there are enough horrific tales involving pepper spray, batons, and traumatized children that it's awfully hard to justify bringing armed officers into the hallways of America's places of learning.

"The average school can expect a student to be murdered [there] every 6,000 years, and the idea that we would want an officer in the school to prevent something like that from happening, I think, is unreasonable," said Dewey Cornell, a forensic clinical psychologist and professor of education at the University of Virginia. "Using them to prevent school shootings is probably one of the least efficient and effective ways to make use of limited resources."

Dewey added that even in crime-ridden urban neighborhoods, where having police at schools is often insisted upon by parents and faculty, research suggests keeping cops on hand doesn't have a major impact. (Neither do metal detectors, he said.) Instead, most school resource officers—who are either employees of the school district or a local law enforcement agency—serve three roles under what's often called the "triad model": law-enforcement officer, counselor, and legal educator.

"The number one role of the SROs is to bridge the gap between police and young people," says Don Bridges, a vice president of the National Association of School Resource Officers. He called the video out of South Carolina "disturbing," but insists it doesn't speak to the broader profession. "If you walked my school with me, you'd know this is how the program is supposed to work."

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