School police: protect kids or criminalize behavior?
The Uvalde, Texas, school shooting that left 19 children and two adults dead has reignited the long-standing debate over the presence of police in schools.
Lawmakers and school leaders across the country are talking about having more armed guards, also known as school resource officers, stationed on campus.
Virginia plans to spend more than $27 million to fund police positions in schools. Kentucky passed a bill last week that requires all schools in the state to have school resource officers. A Somerset, Massachusetts, police chief asked to increase the number of school resource officers permanently.
“We know from past experiences that the most effective tool for keeping kids safe is armed law enforcement on the campus,” said U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-texas, in an interview with MSNBC on May 24, right after t e shooting.
But researchers have found that campus policing does not reduce gun violence.
A 2021 JAMA Network Open study examined the presence of armed officers on the scene and the occurrence and severity of mass school shootings from 1980 to 2019. The data suggested “no association between having an armed officer and deterrence of violence in these cases” and no significant reduction in rates of injury.
Another 2021 study by RAND Corporation, a nonprofit think tank, and the University at Albany used national school-level data from 2014 to 2018 to evaluate the impact of school resource officers. It found officers reduce “some forms of violence in schools,” such as physical attacks and fights, but “do not prevent school shootings or gun-related incidents.”
The RAND study also said school resource officers intensify the use of suspensions, expulsions, police referrals and arrests of students.
The Center for Public Integrity found last year that in every state, the rate at which students with disabilities were referred to law enforcement was higher than the rate for all students.
The issue has special resonance when very young children are involved. A USA TODAY analysis of FBI data this year found that more than 2,600 kids ages 5-9 were arrested in schools from 2000 to 2019. Those children were disproportionately Black and male, and the offenses frequently were listed as “assaults” by very young children against adults.
School policing overall has been on the rise over the past two decades.
Data from the National Center for Education Statistics shows that 65% of public schools in the United States had at least one security staff person in 2019-2020, up from 42% in 2005-2006. A little more than half had sworn law enforcement officers who routinely carry firearms, up from 43% in 2015-2016, the first school year with comparable statistics available.
Kaia Rolle illustrates what can happen when police deal with very young students who misbehave on campus.
Three years ago, Rolle, then 6, wore sunglasses to school and threw a tantrum when a teacher told her to remove them. A school resource officer arrested her at school in zip ties, and she was charged with battery.
“She should have never been arrested in the first place,” Darryl Smith, Kaia’s lawyer, told USA TODAY.