Elsevier

Journal of Criminal Justice

Volume 37, Issue 3, May–June 2009, Pages 280-287
Journal of Criminal Justice

School resource officers and the criminalization of student behavior

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2009.04.008Get rights and content

Abstract

As school resource officer (SRO) programs continue to be widely implemented, there is concern that an increasing police presence at schools will “criminalize” student behavior by moving problematic students to the juvenile justice system rather than disciplining them at school. If true, this has serious implications for students and schools; yet research on this topic is limited and the discourse is often based on speculation or anecdotal evidence. To address this issue, this study evaluated the impact of SROs on school-based arrest rates by comparing arrests at thirteen schools with an SRO to fifteen schools without an SRO in the same district. Poisson and negative binomial regression models showed that having an SRO did not predict more total arrests, but did predict more arrests for disorderly conduct. Conversely, having an SRO decreased the arrest rate for assault and weapons charges. Implications of these findings for understanding SROs and their role in criminalizing student behavior are discussed.

Introduction

Following a handful of high-profile incidents of lethal school violence in the 1990s, growing attention has been given to the protection of students and faculty at school. Though contrary to statistics showing that school crime nationally was declining, relatively rare, and usually nonviolent (Dohrn, 2002, Jackson, 2002, Miller et al., 2005), school shootings like those in Littleton, Colorado, and Jonesboro, Arkansas, fed growing public fear of juvenile and school crime. This led to the rapid implementation and expansion of numerous school security measures, ranging from the use of high-tech security devices like metal detectors and surveillance cameras to student-driven peer mentoring programs, school resource officer programs, and punitive zero-tolerance policies for disciplinary infractions (Eisenbraun, 2007).

Empirical evaluations of these various security strategies are limited, have varying levels of methodological rigor (D. C. Gottfredson, 2001), and often report conflicting findings (Brown, 2005). For example, while research done by Green (1999) and Johnson (1999) reported that metal detectors and school resource officers, respectively, enhanced school security, Schreck, Miller, and Gibson (2003) found them to be ineffective while Mayer and Leone (1999) found that they actually led to more school disorder. Moreover, while development of a positive school environment is considered critical to violence prevention (Eisenbraun, 2007, Gottfredson, 2001), common security measures like strip searches and use of undercover agents actually lower students' self-esteem and cause emotional distress (Hyman & Perone, 1998). According to Beger (2003), such strict measures foster an “adversarial relationship” between students and school personnel and interrupt student learning (p. 340). Conflicting findings like these make it difficult to determine what works to prevent school violence while showing clearly that more research is needed (Brown, 2005, Eisenbraun, 2007).

Moreover, several criminologists and legal scholars have expressed concerns that some strategies designed to make schools safer—particularly the growing number of school resource officers (SROs)—might actually criminalize student behavior and lead to a substantial increase in the number of school-based arrests. SROs are sworn law enforcement officers assigned full-time to patrol schools. As they become more common on school campuses, it is argued, discipline problems traditionally handled by school principals and teachers now are more likely to be handled by a school police officer (Hirschfield, 2008). Thus, as a scuffle between students becomes assault or disrupting class becomes disorderly conduct, it is expected that the number of youths referred from public schools for delinquent and criminal prosecution will climb, especially for behaviors that pose no legitimate threat to school safety (Beger, 2003, Brown, 2006, Dohrn, 2001, Dohrn, 2002, Hirschfield, 2008, Lawrence, 2007). According to Dohrn (2002), American schools have been transformed into “prisonlike” facilities, replete with locked doors, metal detectors, camera surveillance, and greater police presence (p. 283).

More information on this matter is urgently needed given the implications of criminalization for students, schools, juvenile and criminal justice systems, and communities. Students removed from school miss educational opportunities. These students also face humiliation and stigma from classmates and teachers after being led from school in handcuffs. Being stigmatized and labeled as an offender also might result in greater scrutiny, surveillance, and questioning from school staff and security. This type of regular suspicion and harassment could lead some youth to drop out of school (Scheffer, 1987) and could even contribute to a rise in community and school crime rates. Furthermore, having a criminal record might negatively impact access to jobs and institutions of higher education (Dohrn, 2001).

Currently, however, data are limited and confidentiality rules protecting juvenile court records make it difficult to calculate the number of arrests made by SROs (Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, 2000). Much of the discourse about criminalization is based on speculation, anecdotal evidence, or descriptive statistics. The present study therefore contributed to the literature by quantifying and evaluating the impact of school resource officers on school arrest rates. By comparing schools with an SRO to schools without an SRO in the same district, this study sought to identify differences in the number of arrests and types of charges. Such comparisons are critical for understanding the effect of SROs on school arrests while also considering their possible role in criminalizing behavior.

While a few school resource officer (SRO) programs have existed since the mid-1900s, the number has swelled since the late 1990s. Today, these officers represent a significant and popular trend in school violence prevention. Following the fatal shooting of a school principal by a middle school student, for example, Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen announced that he would “look into making the SRO job a part of the framework for every public school” (Kovac, 2006, p. B7). It is not surprising then that, according to the National Association of School Resource Officers (NASRO, n.d.), a member service organization boasting about 10,000 members, school-based policing is the fastest growing area of law enforcement. While it is difficult to know the exact number of school resource officers, it is estimated that there might be more than 20,000 law enforcement officers patrolling schools in the United States (Brown, 2006).

School resource officers in the United States (also known as school police officers or school liaison officers) typically are employed by a local law enforcement agency and assigned to work in a school or schools. They perform traditional law enforcement functions like patrolling school buildings and grounds, investigating criminal complaints, handling students who violate school rules or laws, and trying to minimize disruptions during the school day and at after-school activities (Lawrence, 2007). SROs also are charged with educating students and school staff about crime and violence prevention, acting as mentors to students, and helping to improve the school environment (Rich & Finn, 2001). Officers usually are armed and often in uniform. While some schools utilize area law enforcement officers on a part-time or irregular basis, true SROs frequently have received extensive training in school-based policing and are a consistent fixture at the school. For these reasons, Rich and Finn urge clear differentiation between official SROs and other “sworn officers who focus exclusively on law enforcement activities in schools” (p. 4).

To date, most published research on school resource officers or school-based policing focused on the implementation of such programs at schools (e.g., Briers, 2003) or on describing officers' duties while at school (e.g., Finn et al., 2005, Rich and Finn, 2001). There also was literature discussing the development of collaborative partnerships between school and law enforcement personnel (e.g., May et al., 2004, Patterson, 2007) as well as students' attitudes about school police officers (Hopkins, 1994, Hopkins et al., 1992, Jackson, 2002). Though such research, commentaries, and process evaluations are essential for understanding school resource officers, they rarely discussed the notion of criminalization or provided data about arrests made at school.

Nevertheless, in support of the criminalization hypothesis, there were numerous published reports documenting incidences in which students were arrested for seemingly minor offenses. For example, Rimer (2004) described how a fourteen-year-old student was arrested and detained for violating a school's dress code. The Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice (2000) similarly described how a fourteen-year-old disabled student in Florida was arrested and charged with felony robbery after stealing $2 from a classmate. The student was held for several weeks in an adult detention center before charges were dropped. In another example, a twelve-year-old student in Louisiana was arrested and charged with making terroristic threats and detained for two weeks after telling classmates in the school's lunch line that he would “get them” if they ate all of the potatoes.

Authors also noted the rising number of school-based arrests in some districts as validation of the idea that SROs contribute to criminalizing behavior. Rimer (2004) reported that the number of school-based arrests in one Ohio county increased from 1,237 in the year 2000 to 1,727 in 2002. According to juvenile court officials, most of these arrests were for minor offenses or unruly student behavior while only a very small percentage was for serious threats to school safety. A similar escalation was reported in Miami-Dade County, Florida, where the 2,345 school arrests in 2001 were a threefold increase over the number of school arrests in 1999. The vast majority of these arrests were for simple assaults and disorderly conduct. Given that both locations utilized SROs extensively at district schools, these figures make a compelling statement about the possible criminalization of student behavior. The number of arrests made specifically by an SRO is unknown, however, and such figures can be somewhat misleading since it is unusual for all schools in a district or county to have regular SRO involvement. In Miami-Dade County schools, for example, school resource officers are assigned to middle schools and high schools only, while police service is provided to elementary schools as needed.

Focusing on SROs exclusively, Johnson (1999) studied eighteen SROs recently placed at nine high schools and eighteen middle schools in one district in the southern United States. These officers made 145 arrests in a five-month period, including ninety-seven arrests involving drugs and forty-nine involving weapons. Without a comparison group though, it is difficult to know if this number of arrests is high or unusual for these schools. Similarly, Dohrn (2001) reported the number of arrests from one Chicago-area high school with an assigned police officer. There were 158 arrests during the 1996–1997 school year, including sixty-one for pager possession, twenty-one for disorderly conduct, and sixteen for non-firearm weapon possession. Yet, it is unclear if these data from a single school generalize to other locations since officers' and school principals' discretion as well as the school climate will influence decisions to arrest. In contrast, however, studies citing national statistics likewise were limited because they included data from schools with and without an SRO.

While more empirical research is needed to evaluate school-based arrests made by SROs, there are practical and conceptual reasons to suggest that SROs play an important role in introducing more and more students to the juvenile justice system. First, most crime occurring at schools historically has not been reported to police (Elliott, Hamburg, & Williams, 1998), yet having a police officer available and accessible at school facilitates reporting. One likewise would expect more crime to be witnessed by law enforcement when they are present daily at school. Along these same lines, as SROs assume increasingly more responsibility for handling school disciplinary problems, it is reasonable to expect that more and more situations will be resolved with an arrest now than in the past (Hirschfield, 2008). Finally, Bailey (2006) described SROs as having a “quasi-law enforcement role” in the school (p. 38). This complicates security issues and gives officers more freedom to search students and detect contraband. Specifically, while the standard to search a suspect for police officers patrolling the streets includes probable cause and/or issuance of a warrant, the standard for school officials as determined in New Jersey v. T.L.O. (1985) is reasonable suspicion only. Therefore, an officer acting at the request of school officials—and thus serving as an agent of the school—operates under a less stringent standard for searching students (Bailey, 2006).

For all of these reasons, it was hypothesized that schools with an SRO have more total arrests and more arrests for charges like disorderly conduct and assault than schools without an SRO. To evaluate the role of SROs in school-based arrests, this study compared arrests occurring at middle schools and high schools with an SRO to those occurring at schools without an SRO in the same district. While school resource officers often are placed at all schools in a district (e.g., Johnson, 1999), the SRO program studied here was implemented by one metropolitan police department within the school district's catchment area. Thus, SROs in this district were not assigned to schools based on a school's need, history of violence, or demographics but rather by geography only and a school's location inside or outside of city limits. One school resource officer therefore was assigned to each of the seven middle schools, five high schools, and one alternative school within the city limits regardless of the school's past experiences with violence or delinquency. Consistent with standards promoted by the NASRO (n.d.), these officers received extensive training in school-based law enforcement, teaching skills, and school violence prevention programming. This police department served the largest city in the county with a population of nearly 200,000 residents.

The remaining seven high schools, seven middle schools, and one alternative school in the district were outside city limits and thus did not have an official, trained school resource officer assigned to them. Deputies employed by the county sheriff's department were responsible for these schools. Unlike the city schools, however, these deputies focused exclusively on law enforcement duties at schools. They received less training in school-based policing, often were assigned to more than one school in an area, and were not expected to make presentations to students or faculty or be a visible or proactive presence in the schools. Instead, when present at a school, deputies typically were stationed at the school's main office and charged with assisting the school principal in handling disciplinary referrals as needed. This activity contrasted markedly with the actions and level of involvement expected from the school resource officers. Such an organizational structure, wherein roughly half of the district's middle and high schools had an SRO and half did not and SROs were assigned based on school location rather than need, provided a unique opportunity to study the alleged criminalization of students by SROs.

Section snippets

Sample and study design

To evaluate the impact of school resource officers on arrests at school, this study compared the number of arrests in three consecutive school years at thirteen schools with an SRO and fifteen schools without an SRO in one school district. Analyzing multiple years of data neutralized anomalies that might arise from a single year of data, while comparing schools in the same district controlled for variations in policies and guidelines that might exist across different districts. The district

Results

Comparisons of the school characteristics presented in Table 1 show that a larger percentage of students at schools with a school resource officer (SRO) had economic disadvantage compared to schools without an SRO. These schools also had a larger percentage of ethnic minority students. Regarding delinquent arrests, there were 216 more arrests at schools with an SRO (n = 614) than at comparison schools (n = 398). The most common charge at SRO schools was disorderly conduct (n = 361) followed by other

Evidence of criminalization

While it was hypothesized that having an SRO at school predicts more total arrests, this hypothesis received only limited support here. While the data presented in Table 1 implied significant differences in the total number of arrests between SRO and non-SRO schools, such differences were not as robust as expected. Though the presence of SROs did predict a dramatic increase in the rate of arrest per one hundred students independent of other variables, this variable ceased to be significant when

Conclusions

Concerning the role of SROs in criminalizing student behavior, this study yielded mixed results. The findings showing that SROs were not associated with an increase in total arrests when controlling for school poverty and that schools with an SRO had fewer arrests for weapons and assault charges are encouraging. Such results are contrary to the criminalization hypothesis and may even signify that SROs have a positive impact at schools. Nonetheless, the number of arrests involving disorderly

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to gratefully acknowledge the contributions of Judge Tim Irwin, Darrell Smith, Laurence Gibney, Heidi Garrett, Paul Lewis, and all members of the Juvenile Court Assistance Board. The author also thanks John G. Orme, Professor, University of Tennessee College of Social Work, for his consultation regarding this project and Andrea Prince, BSSW student, University of Tennessee College of Social Work, for her assistance preparing the data.

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