School Resource Officers Lack Training, Effectiveness Questioned: Study

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"Since 1999, the federal government has spent close to $1 billion to deploy police in our nation's public schools.  Commonly referred to as School Resource Officers (SROs), these mostly armed law enforcement officers can now be found in an estimated 71% of all public high schools in the country, as well as in middle and elementary schools.

It remains unclear how effective SROs are in preventing the types of school tragedies that have rocked the country for 20 years and that are frequently used as a major justification for SROs' deployment."

Why More Cops in Schools Is a Bad Idea

Even before Newtown, more cops were patrolling our schools. Parents, judges, and civil libertarians give them failing grades for treating routine discipline like a crime.

In post-Newtown America, those with power say they must act to prevent another massacre of innocents.

The Obama administration wants stiffer gun control, and $150 million to help schools hire up to 1,000 more on-campus police or counselors, or purchase security technology. State legislators are considering shifting millions of dollars around to help schools hire more police. Some locals aren't waiting: The 5,500-resident town of Jordan, Minnesota, has moved its entire eight-officer police force into schools.

"The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun," National Rifle Association executive vice president Wayne LaPierre said after a young man shot his way into his former grammar school on December 14 in Newtown, Connecticut, and killed 20 first-graders and 6 educators.

With the new year, the NRA has been flexing its political muscle, lobbying states not just to hire more school police—under the group's National School Shield project—but also to pass laws allowing teachers or other staff to bring licensed guns to school to defend their students and themselves.

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Mississippi County Jails Kids For School Dress Code Violations, Tardiness, DOJ Alleges

In Meridian, Miss., it is school officials – not police – who determine who should be arrested. Schools seeking to discipline students call the police, and police policy is to arrest all children referred to the agency, according to a Department of Justice lawsuit. The result is a perverse system that funnels children as young as ten who merely misbehave in class into juvenile detention centers without basic constitutional procedures. The lawsuit, which follows unsuccessful attempts to negotiate with the county, challenges the constitutionality of punishing children “so arbitrarily and severely as to shock the conscience” and alleging that the city’s police department acts as a de facto “taxi service” in shuttling students from school to juvenile detention centers. Colorlines explains:

Once those children are in the juvenile justice system, they are denied basic constitutional rights. They are handcuffed and incarcerated for days without any hearing and subsequently warehoused without understanding their alleged probation violations.

To illustrate how this system works, Colorlines provides the example of Cedrico Green. When he was in eighth grade, he was put on probation for getting in a fight. After that one incident, every subsequent offense was deemed a probation violation — from wearing the wrong color socks, to talking back to a teacher – and the consequence was a return to juvenile detention. He couldn’t even remember how many times he had been back in detention, but guessed 30 times – time when he wasn’t in school, fell behind in his schoolwork and subsequently failed several classes, even though he said he liked school.

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CU-Boulder Chancellor: Faculty Must Allow Students With Concealed-Carry Permits To Have Firearms In Class

A top administrator at the University of Colorado says if a professor doesn't like his students legally bringing guns to class, he'll have to holster his emotions.

Jerry Peterson, a professor and chair of the CU-Boulder Faculty Assembly, told colleagues he'd cancel his class if a student brought a gun there.

"My own personal policy in my classes is if I am aware that there is a firearm in the class -- registered or unregistered, concealed or unconcealed -- the class session is immediately canceled," Peterson said. "I want my students to feel unconstrained in their discussions."

Shortly after Peterson's comments were reported, CU-Boulder Chancellor Philip P. DiStefano said he can't do that.

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Guns In School: Plainfield Police Propose Storing Assault Rifles In High Schools To Protect Students

An Illinois community southwest of Chicago is astir after the local police chief proposed a new method to protect students: bring more guns to school.

Plainfield Police Chief John Konopek wants officers regularly assigned to district high schools to be allowed to keep an AR 15 semi-automatic rifle under lock and key in school offices so they are better prepared to handle school shootings, if the situation were to arise.

School officers will be the only ones able to access the weapons, NBC Chicago reports. Konopek notes that training exercises have shown that officers are "much better equipped to handle this type of incident" while using a long gun -- with greater range, accuracy and stopping power -- versus a handgun.

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Are Police in Schools Making Students Safer, or Putting Them at Greater Risk for Abuse?

Police intervention in our public schools is on the rise. Whether that's a good thing for students has yet to be determined.

In spring 2012, student organizer Malik Alaya began rallying students to respond to proposals for school closures in his Bronx district. While passing out flyers in a hallway, he was spotted by the school’s safety officer and sent to the dean’s office. Whatever happened inside that office led to the decision to summon a representative of the New York Police Department’s School Safety Division, and Alaya was ticketed for his actions . Less than two weeks later, he received another ticket for filming police officers on a subway platform while they conducted a stop and frisk. 

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