The use of school-based law enforcement officers has increased exponentially over the past quarter-century, but how SBLEs have performed while promoting student safety is a question that has largely gone unanswered, namely because a lack of incidents isn’t a good metric by which to measure performance.
The use of SBLEs expanded following the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999, and by 2005, the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services within the U.S. Department of Justice awarded more than $750 million to schools to hire approximately 6,500 school resource officers. By 2019, the funding totaled more than $1 billion.
SBLE programs, however, also have faced controversy over whether or not they ultimately add to school and student safety or create a larger school-to-prison pipeline in underrepresented communities.
A new study led by Amanda Rutherford, an associate professor at the Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, and colleagues Nya Anthony and Lillian Rogers collected demographic and training data about SBLEs, and they found that the training and mission of SBLEs varies widely from state-to-state and even community-to-community. There also are large differences in the way SBLEs are perceived in schools depending on a community’s location.
“Any school that has a school resource officer or any other type of school security system is going to change dramatically from school to school, from district to district, and from state to state,” Rutherford said during an appearance on O’Neill Speaks, the official podcast of the O’Neill School. “No two student experiences across schools are really going to be the same. They might both say, ‘Yeah, we both have a school resource officer,’ but their experience is going to be very, very different. That’s something we should be aware of and have more conversations about.”
The study also suggests that states and the federal government should develop baseline standards for SBLE positions to understand whether the programs are effective or not.
“They are so ubiquitous in schools, and there is such debate about them,” Rutherford said. “We’re really not equipped to speak on what they can or can’t do, or what they’re doing well and what they’re doing poorly. There should be systems in place, and there already are, to a certain extent, which would allow for data to be collected without overhauling any major systems.
“We want to bring in more information and try to create more partnerships to even bring in other perceptions of the students, the teachers, the school administrators, so we can kind of see what are the things that align up across these populations.”
O’Neill Speaks can be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast service.
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