“They have a uniform on and they look like a police officer”, Olson said, “but in many respects they really do work as youth workers”.
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“As a school resource officer you’re nearly all those things”, he said.
The report states that “criminal justice and education officials sought to expand school safety efforts – which included assigning law enforcement officers to patrol schools – in the wake of a series of high-profile school shootings in the 1990s”. By 2011, according to the Department of Justice, $905 million in federal grants had gone toward hiring and training more than 6,300 school resource officers, who are sworn law enforcement agents assigned to police schools. But black students with disabilities, including behavioral disorders, are singled out for the most severe treatment of all-especially black boys.
But as common as the officers and their arrests have become, there are no generally accepted standards for how they should be trained, used, armed or organized.
After reviewing the video of the incident in South Carolina, Officer Payne said there’s a thing line between giving discipline and going overboard. At that point, Lott said Wednesday, Fields did not use proper procedure.
The Sheriff has asked the US Department of Justice to open an independent investigation. Usually, when an officer shows up, a student realizes just how much trouble he or she is in and begins to cooperate.
How Mr. Fields should have acted is open to debate, but people who specialize in school security said the better question was whether he should have been involved at all.
“The school district, they handle all of those problems or the majority of the defiance problems and all of that that you hear about”, said Wichita School Resource Officer Steven Meyer.
The girl broke a school rule by using her cellphone in class, but the teacher could have spoken to her quietly, even when she refused to surrender it, rather than delay the lesson for everyone else, said Geoff Alpert, a University of South Carolina professor and expert on police violence.
Sheriff Lott seemed to agree.
School officials have to understand when they call us, were going to take a law enforcement action, he said at a news conference.
On average about 60% to 65% of all public schools called law enforcement for violent incidents such as a rape, robbery with a deadly weapon or someone threatening an attack. Gregoire said the resource officer’s responsibility is to build relationships between the police department, students and the community and to create a safer environment at the school. And the sad part is that its educators that teach on a daily basis that you try to diffuse a situation. One report found that white children were more likely to be punished for objective offenses (smoking, vandalism, obscene language), while black children were most often disciplined for offenses like “being disrespectful, loitering and excessive noise”. Nationally, black students and disabled students are far more likely than their peers to be suspended or drawn into the court system for school infractions. The officer involved, Deputy Ben Fields, is now on administrative leave. A few local lawyers have raised such concerns about Richland School District Two and have asked Ms. Thuraus group to step in.
“At no time would I have dumped her out of the chair”, said Brown, chief of school safety for Pittsburgh Public Schools.
For its part, the NDRN recommends that the U.S. Department of Education and the DOJ develop joint guidelines for school-resource officers.
It is unclear how many organizations follow the associations guidelines. A few campus officers receive no specific training for working in schools, while in Boston, they must pass a 100-hour training course at the William Cloran Academy, a training facility for security professionals, and then pass a so-called special police officer exam administered by the Boston Police Department.
The school resource officer program was never meant to deal with school shootings, said Mo Canady, the executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers which trains thousands of school police.
While Augusta is still establishing its program, both Oakland and Waterville police have had school resource officers for at least 15 years. And I think the role of the resource officer needs to be defined more clearly.
Removing other students from the room is something both Alpert and the sheriff suggested, but Alpert said it could cause other problems.
St. Paul Police Officer Mark Ross says cops working in schools can detect fights and gang activity coming on days before they happen, and they know a few groups of students should not be around others.
It’s important to take steps toward reform, advocates say, because without limits there’s been a school-to-prison pipeline. This is not a critical incident, its not an active shooter, its not a period of time where we have to react instantly.
I would ask the school administrators to please excuse the other students and let them go out in the hall, he said, and then talk calmly with the one left behind.
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While only forming 25 percent of the greater county student population, Howard added, Birmingham city high schools accounted for 85 percent of school-based arrests going to county family courts in 2008, “and 97 percent of those arrests were for what people call petty misdemeanors, but actually they just translate into misconduct”.
