Police officer teaching elementary school children about safety. ©iStock.com/asiseeit

Police officer teaching elementary school children about safety. Credit: iStock.com/asiseeit

A new law that encourages school districts to consider alternative approaches to school safety beyond just posting police on their campuses was signed by Gov. Jerry Brown this week, just days after the U.S. Department of Justice awarded $44 million to beef up the number of police officers in schools nationwide, including California.

The two approaches to school safety – one encouraging alternative approaches to law enforcement such as using conflict resolution practices and mental health professionals and the other focusing on increasing police presence – encapsulate the still heated debate about how to keep students safe from harm. In a sign of how divisive the issue of school policing remains in California, Assembly Bill 549 deliberately refrains from restricting what police can do on campus and leaves it up to school districts to decide which student behaviors call for mental health intervention and which require police action. As originally proposed, the bill would have limited school police to handling dangerous or physically violent situations but that language was removed in committee.

The law now simply “encourages” districts to update their school safety plans to include clear guidelines for roles and responsibilities of mental health workers and school counselors as well as police officers in creating safe school environments.

But even just encouraging districts to include these alternative strategies in their safety plans is viewed as victory by Rubén Lizardo, deputy director of the Oakland-based nonprofit research and advocacy organization PolicyLink, which co-sponsored the bill. He said that putting mental health workers on par with police officers in ensuring school safety was significant step that could lead to increased adoption of emotional supports and interventions in schools. “If there’s a superintendent that wants to tap into a behavioral program, he could now legitimately say, ‘Our state’s approach to campus safety includes this,'” Lizardo said.

Just lobbying for the bill provided a vehicle for advocates of alternative approaches to educate legislators about what Lizardo called the “inadvertent negatives” of police on campus, including what studies have identified as the disproportionate number of arrests of African American and Latino youth and the referral of tens of thousands of students to the juvenile justice system for misdemeanors such as disorderly conduct and minor schoolyard fights.

In the Los Angeles Unified School District, for instance, school police handed out nearly 10,200 misdemeanor tickets to students in 2011 for fighting, daytime-curfew violations and other minor infractions that community groups say might better be handled by school officials or counselors, according to an account published by the Center for Public Integrity, an investigative news organization. Of those ticketed, 43 percent were children 14 or younger, including an 11-year-old who was ticketed, suspended for one day, handcuffed, driven to the police station, booked, fingerprinted and photographed in a mug shot for what the citation termed a “mutual fight” over a basketball game, according to the account. Research has found that suspending, expelling or referring a student to the juvenile justice system increases the risk that the student will drop out of school and become incarcerated as an adult.

Clarification for campus police

This clarification of roles is also being pursued at the national level through the School Discipline Consensus Project, an effort launched by the Council of State of Governments Justice Center in coordination with the federal Supportive School Discipline Initiative of 2011. The project, which is collecting data on school discipline and will convene experts in school safety, behavioral health and law enforcement, studies the same question that California lawmakers have asked: What, if any, role should local law enforcement play in enforcing a school’s code of conduct?

The California law gives a nod to research that has tied a reduction in school suspension and expulsion rates to interventions such as the framework known as Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, a system used in an estimated 750 California schools to evaluate programs that teach social and emotional skills. The law encourages schools to place a priority on mental health and intervention services and to create a positive school climate, a loosely defined term that relates to how connected and supported students feel at school.

Advocates praised the law as “a victory for youth and families” that could increase conflict resolution practices and decrease school expulsions and referrals to the juvenile justice system, according to a statement from the Dignity in Schools Campaign, a national coalition of advocacy groups including the Youth Justice Coalition in Los Angeles and the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California.

In schools, police officers are known as school resource officers but they work for city or county law enforcement departments and are most often paid by federal, state or city funds. Typically, they are assigned to the same school or schools for several years in a row, to strengthen their collaboration with school administrators, teachers and students. Their duties may include teaching the anti-drug curriculum called D.A.R.E. to students, patrolling school grounds and hallways, and intervening in student conflicts, including allegations of bullying.

School resource officers are the fastest growing segment of law enforcement, according to the National Association of School Resource Officers, which estimates that more than 10,000 police officers serve in schools nationwide. The number of officers dramatically increased after the mass shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999, the same year the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Community Policing Services initiated the “COPS in Schools” grant program, according to a 2011 study published in Justice Quarterly, edited by the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences. “The increased use of police in schools is driven at least in part by increased federal funding,” the study states.

Ensuring student safety

In Washington, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder promoted increasing police officers in schools as a necessary safety step.

“In the wake of past tragedies, it’s clear that we need to be willing to take all possible steps to ensure that our kids are safe when they go to school,” Holder said in a news release announcing the funding Sept. 27.

The Justice Department grants include nearly $6 million to fund school police officers in 44 California cities and counties, including funds to put eight more police officers in Modesto schools, two additional officers in Hayward schools and four additional officers in Chula Vista schools.

Officers in schools describe the experience as a way to build relationships with students and contribute to an orderly school environment.

“The positive thing about having officers assigned to high school and middle school is that they get to know the kids,” said Sgt. Ozzie Dominguez, spokesman for the Visalia Police Department, which received a $350,000 grant that would bring three police officers to middle schools in the Visalia Unified School District, pending approval from the city council. “They’re able not just to respond promptly, but ideally prevent things from happening.” Screen Shot 2013-10-03 at 5.32.19 PM

Joseph Grubbs, president of the California School Resource Officers’ Association, acknowledged criticism of school resource officers and their potential impact on higher school suspension rates, but he said the officers’ primary focus is ensuring the safety of all students.

“I am not a big advocate of suspension,” he said. “If a kid does something stupid, we’re not going to reward him by suspending him. But if this is a kid who is out of control every single day making this a terrible learning environment for all the other kids, we’ve got to get him out of there.”

A 2010 report published by the U.S.  Justice Department and authored by Barbara Raymond, a program director at The California Endowment, points to the lack of solid research showing that school resource officers necessarily make schools safer.

“It will be apparent that despite their popularity, few systematic evaluations of the effectiveness of SROs exist,” states the report, “Assigning Police Officers to Schools.” The report notes, “Studies of SRO effectiveness that have measured actual safety outcomes have mixed results. Some show an improvement in safety and a reduction in crime; others show no change. Typically, studies that report positive results from SRO programs rely on participants’ perceptions of the effectiveness of the program rather than on objective evidence.”

This week, the Dignity in Schools Campaign is holding a National Week of Action Against School Pushout that seeks to reframe the dropout issue as a crisis of school discipline practices that are exacerbated by the presence of police on campus.

On Thursday, the campaign showcased “restorative justice” models of discipline and conflict resolution at FreeLA High School, a school for academically at-risk students in Inglewood, and at Augustus Hawkins High School in south Los Angeles. “These approaches focus on building healthy relationships between teachers and students, and treating discipline as a teaching moment, rather than an opportunity to punish and push kids out of school,” said the Dignity in Schools Campaign.

Jane Meredith Adams covers student health. Contact her or follow her @JaneAdams.

Note:  EdSource receives grant support from The California Endowment, which has no control over its editorial policies. 

To get more reports like this one, click here to sign up for EdSource’s no-cost daily email on latest developments in education.

Share Article

Comments (5)

Leave a Reply to Jane Meredith Adams

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked * *

Comments Policy

We welcome your comments. All comments are moderated for civility, relevance and other considerations. Click here for EdSource's Comments Policy.

  1. Susan Gross 8 years ago8 years ago

    Thank you for providing this informative article and the links to similar information about this controversial topic. My children are current high school students and have had a CRO on campus for the last year but funding has ceased and the CRO will not be available on their campus at the end of this academic year. I stumbled upon your article while attempting to research this decision. I'd be interested in receiving any updated statistics … Read More

    Thank you for providing this informative article and the links to similar information about this controversial topic. My children are current high school students and have had a CRO on campus for the last year but funding has ceased and the CRO will not be available on their campus at the end of this academic year. I stumbled upon your article while attempting to research this decision. I’d be interested in receiving any updated statistics on the pros and cons of CROs as well as any available funding for mental health and team building resources available to California high schools.

  2. Jane Meredith Adams 10 years ago10 years ago

    Hi Bernie. You are correct in stating that the piece does not mention Matthew Theriot's finding (Journal of Criminal Justice, 2009, vol. 37, issue 3, pages 280-287) that having school resource officer did not predict more total arrests. Theriot's research found that having a school resource officer predicted more arrests for disorderly conduct but predicted a decrease in the arrest rate for assault and weapons charges. Thanks for sending the data you mentioned, the 2012 National School … Read More

    Hi Bernie.
    You are correct in stating that the piece does not mention Matthew Theriot’s finding (Journal of Criminal Justice, 2009, vol. 37, issue 3, pages 280-287) that having school resource officer did not predict more total arrests. Theriot’s research found that having a school resource officer predicted more arrests for disorderly conduct but predicted a decrease in the arrest rate for assault and weapons charges.

    Thanks for sending the data you mentioned, the 2012 National School Resource Officers report “To Protect and Educate”:http://www.nasro.org/content/protect-and-educate-report.

    As the EdSource story mentions, solid research on the impact of school resource officers on campus is lacking. A June 2013 Congressional Research Service report for Congress cites the dearth of well-designed research studies: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43126.pdf

  3. Bernie james 10 years ago10 years ago

    You have misrepresented the Theriot study and ignored a trove of data that adjusts impressions of collaborative school safety in line with the 25 years body of existing research. If you care to receive this data, then I await your reply.

    Bernie

  4. Frances O'Neill Zimmerman 10 years ago10 years ago

    I don't know about "school resource officers" who come onto campuses from CA cities or counties issuing misdemeanor citations, but I do know about the San Diego Unified School District's own police officers who are too few to be based at every middle or high school but who do a fantastic job of maintaining positive contact with students and an orderly school environment wherever they are assigned. Either as resident or transient members of the school … Read More

    I don’t know about “school resource officers” who come onto campuses from CA cities or counties issuing misdemeanor citations, but I do know about the San Diego Unified School District’s own police officers who are too few to be based at every middle or high school but who do a fantastic job of maintaining positive contact with students and an orderly school environment wherever they are assigned.

    Either as resident or transient members of the school community, the school police ARE the “counselors” or “school officials” (who for years have been in tragic short supply) whom this legislation calls for. They work to reduce tardiness and truancy, intervene in fights, keep an eye out for any gang expression on campuses and befriend kids who might need special attention. Most are are fully-trained police officers who prefer to work positively in a school setting.

    Conflict resolution is a beautiful thing and it can work, but it is fragile and expensive in time and personnel. It represents a human ideal rather than the reality of our crowded, understaffed urban schools. Similarly, the “restorative justice” movement as I understand it from a story in the Los Angeles Times earlier this year, is near-ludicrous in its divorce from the facts of public school teaching and learning in 2013.

    Replies

    • navigio 10 years ago10 years ago

      Its great to have such people intervening where necessary, however, it is past dismaying to realize that we may have intentionally replaced counselors with police officers. In fact, I'd go so far as to call it disgusting. Maybe we could look at getting prison guards into the mix.. cut out the middleman and all.. We should also make sure we talk about this 'strategy' when holding workshops for parents on choosing middle schools.. Anyway, bitter, cynical … Read More

      Its great to have such people intervening where necessary, however, it is past dismaying to realize that we may have intentionally replaced counselors with police officers. In fact, I’d go so far as to call it disgusting. Maybe we could look at getting prison guards into the mix.. cut out the middleman and all.. We should also make sure we talk about this ‘strategy’ when holding workshops for parents on choosing middle schools..

      Anyway, bitter, cynical and angry comments aside, if this is our ‘solution’, it is no wonder that we have so much segregation.