The sharp increase in campus-based law enforcement coincides with the 1999 Columbine High School shootings, which left 15 dead, including two teen gunmen, and prompted calls across the country for a stronger police presence on school grounds. The Sandy Hook massacre in 2012 also incited renewed interest in such efforts, with federal funds earmarked for SROs flowing to local police departments. In Montgomery County, Maryland, a suburb adjacent to Washington, D.C., the number of SROs doubled in the year following the Connecticut mass school shooting.

“The original point of SROs was to give young people the opportunity to interact with [police] officers in a positive way, and there is some reason to think this can be accomplished in some places,” said Emily Owens, a criminology professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “But of course, having an officer means that there will be an increased likelihood that law enforcement is involved in what would otherwise be a disciplinary event.”

Combined with the rapid expansion of zero-tolerance discipline in schools that accompanied the War on Drugs, these isolated yet seminal incidents of mass violence help explain the upsurge in school resource officers, making them a fixture in many of the nation’s schools. A recent survey conducted by the Department of Education found that 43 percent of public schools employ security staff, including school resource officers, while 28 percent have “sworn law enforcement officers routinely carrying a firearm.”



While law enforcement’s presence at schools is hardly a new phenomenon, its value and purpose has lately grown especially contentious. As police officers, those engaged in school-based law-enforcement are, in a way, “beat cops” who are often called on to serve as school disciplinarian. And some experts and juvenile-justice advocates cite systemic educational risks when police patrol school hallways. A report published by the Justice Policy Institute in 2011, “Education Under Arrest: The Case Against Police in Schools,” concludes that placing SROs and other police in educational institutions exaggerates how school misbehavior, much of it involving minor infractions, is interpreted—to the extent that such activities can be treated as criminal offenses.

These tendencies result in arguably unnecessary arrests that increase the likelihood that a child will end up in the juvenile-justice system—and later, as a byproduct of these experiences, adult prisons. According to the institute’s research, youth with court records are more inclined to drop out of high school, and because schools with SROs are more likely to see students arrested for minor offenses, the presence of such officers on campus can take a significant toll on students’ academic outcomes. When UPenn’s Owens examined the data, she found that, on average, “having SROs means more young children [youth under 14-years-old] will be arrested for stuff that happens in school.”



“Students are needlessly arrested for offenses as minor as … swearing at a teacher or throwing spitballs,” said Amanda Petteruti, a senior policy analyst who authored the Justice Policy Institute paper. “SROs lead to discipline applied without the filter of school administrators or policies.”



The inclination of SROs to criminalize youth behaviors, especially that of blacks and Latinos, has become particularly concerning for social-justice activists, community leaders, and parents. In the months following the McKinney, Texas, story, an analysis by the Austin-based public-interest law center Texas Appleseed found that police officers assigned to McKinney schools had arrested and ticketed black students at an “extremely high and unequal” rate. In a district where black students account for only 13 percent of the population, they make up 39 percent of arrests by McKinney SROs, the analysis found. Additionally, misdemeanor citations in McKinney against black students for “disorderly conduct” increased from 47 percent to 61 percent between January 2012 and June 2015, while ticketing of white students dropped from 28 percent to 15 percent over the same period.