Critics fault SRO bill

Some say it fails to recognize benefits of having cops in schools

DANBURY — Objection across the state to a bill that would block federal money being spent on school police officers is just a taste of the larger debate awaiting the controversial legislation in Washington, D.C.

And that’s OK with U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy if the debate over his Counseling Not Criminalization in Schools Act helps close the gap between the urban poor and affluent suburbanites in the divided national dialogue about police and race.

“Different experiences make it hard to have one conversation,” the Democratic lawmaker said during a town hall meeting earlier this month. “Of course it makes sense that police in schools could

help repair some of the damage between law enforcement and communities of color, but that is not the storyline we are hearing from a lot of these families, and it is still not what the data is telling us.”

But the problem, some of Connecticut’s educators and law enforcement leaders say, is that Murphy’s legislation doesn’t recognize the benefits students, staff and families receive when local police departments and school districts devise successful SRO programs.

“Those relationships are paramount in keeping our schools safe and orderly, while avoiding the need for school-based arrests,” reads a letter to Murphy from the Connecticut Association of Urban Superintendents, a coalition of 18 districts including Bridgeport, Danbury, New Haven and Norwalk. “We all support reducing the number of children entering the juvenile justice system ... (but) we believe your current legislation could have the opposite impact.”

A veteran former school resource officer agrees.

“As a Hispanic police officer, I would be the first to say that I totally understand kids who, because of their background and family life, look at me and run the other way,” said Caleb Lopez, a South Windsor police officer who was an SRO for seven years. “That is why we are always training and maintaining our certification and learning best practices from other officers to improve, but taking away money from the SRO program is just going backwards.”

Murphy’s bill blasts the disproportionate number of school arrests for kids of color and other traditionally marginalized students in districts that have police officers in their buildings. He argues federal money is better spent helping districts hire more counselors and social service workers to address the root of school-based violence: Poverty and untreated trauma.

His bill carries a $2.5 billion grant program to help districts with the neediest populations make a transition from school resource officers to “evidencebased and trauma informed services.”

“We have been trying to do better in Connecticut to make sure these school resource officers aren’t using their arrest powers to turn hallway shoves and pushes into arrestable offenses, but as much reform as we have undertaken in our state it is still true that if you are a Latino kid you are six times more likely to be arrested in school if you have an SRO there,” Murphy said. “Other data suggest that Black students are five times more likely to be arrested (in school where there is an SRO) than a white kid.”

Murphy’s bill, co-sponsored by U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., is gaining visibility and local opposition as the nation debates how to eradicate systemic racism in the wake of the public slaying of George Floyd in Minnesota.

“If we’re going to tackle systemic racism, we need to start at childhood,” said U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, a co-sponsor of the House version of Murphy’s bill.

Bill supporters say $1 billion in federal money spent on SROs since 1999 has put 46,000 police officers in classrooms across the country, making arrests of marginalized students more likely.

“In a state like Connecticut, despite all the work we have done, if you’re a kid who goes to school in a low-income school district, you are 23 times more likely to be arrested if there are SROs in your school,” Murphy said. “Kids in urban schools are not 23 times more violent; they are not 23 times more likely to commit a criminal act in school.”

A New Haven student activist agrees.

Lihame Arouna, a leader of a Black Lives Matter march that drew thousands to New Haven earlier this summer, told the New Haven Board of Education in June “we’ve become way too used to policing our black and brown children.” In response, the school board convened a committee to re-examine its relationship with school resource officers.

It’s unclear where Murphy’s bill goes from here, except it’s unlikely to get a hearing until 2021.

“If we want to make good on the promise that all lives matter in this country and that Black lives and brown lives matter, we’ve got to listen to the data which tells us we still have serious work to do,” Murphy said.

Solving the problem

Murphy is quick to point out that the only schools the bill would affect are those that depend most on federal aid. Those schools tend to have the highest enrollments of traditionally underserved students, he says, and less money for counselors, social service workers and other trained support staff.

Nor will schools be penalized for having school resource officers or armed security officers.

“We’ve invested in a decade of reform and we still

have these disparities in terms of how kids in low income schools are treated and arrested,” Murphy said. “Maybe this is not the right model ... maybe we can have a new model.”

Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, said data in Murphy’s bill about schoolbased arrests was skewed because it didn’t differentiate between patrol-based arrests, arrests warrants served on school grounds and actual arrests by SROs.

Canady added that many times SROs act as advocates and intervene to prevent students from being arrested.

“Not only do you not solve the problem by getting rid of SROs, but you likely will exacerbate the problem of juvenile arrests,” said Canady, a former police officer and former SRO. “We don’t see much support for this (bill) frankly.”

Minneapolis, Denver and Portland, Ore., have all recently severed school district ties with SROs in the aftermath of the national outrage over Floyd’s May 25 slaying in Minneapolis. Floyd died while a white police officer who had him in custody kept a knee pressed on his neck.

But in Connecticut, where protests filled the streets, it’s uncommon to find such prominent examples of schools breaking off relationships with police.

Educators and law enforcement leaders say they couldn’t be more pleased with their partnership.

“People may think an SRO is there because of school security, but that is not their purpose,” said Newtown Police Chief James Viadero. “The purpose of their job is to have a positive impact on the kids in school.”

After the 2012 killing of 20 first-graders and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Newtown recruited a group of armed school guards — all retired police officers who carry concealed sidearms — as part of a larger 19-member civilian school security force that has become a model in Connecticut.

Newtown wouldn’t dream of doing without them or the two school resource officers assigned to the district, Superintendent Lorrie Rodrigue said.

In nearby Danbury — one of the fast-growing and most diverse student bodies in the state — the city’s top educator has no intention of parting with the police department’s school resource officers.

“Our SROs are a godsend,” said Sal Pascarella, superintendent of Danbury schools. “If you could stand behind the glass in my school and see our kids say ‘hi’ to them, you would know that these are not the lock-em-up-and-throwaway-the-key type. They are people trying to change the lives of these kids in a positive way.”

The former superintendent of Bridgeport schools agreed, saying school-based arrests “went down drastically” during the end of her tenure on the strength of the SRO program.

“I realize I am coming at this as a white person who is very aware of my shortcomings, but when I was in Bridgeport, nobody wanted to defund the SROs,” said Fran Rabinowitz, the executive director of the Connecticut Association of Public School Superintendents.

Rabinowitz’s statewide organization has not taken a position on Murphy’s legislation, but she convened a selection of superintendents to hear a recent presentation about Murphy’s bill.

“There was no consensus to get the SROs out,” Rabinowitz said about the meeting.

Murphy responded it’s not the SROs themselves who are under scrutiny as much as their power of arrest on school grounds.

Murphy told town hall attendees that kids are getting arrested for “shoving matches and talking back.”

“I wish the reforms were stopping that from happening in our state but they’re not,” Murphy said. “It is the presence of police in a lot of our learning environments that get the kids rammed into the criminal justice system, and the lack of funding available for folks who could help these kids is what is holding them back.”