Law enforcement officers (often called school resource officers or SROs) are an increasingly common feature in schools across the United States. Although SROs’ roles vary across school contexts, there has been little examination of why. One possible explanation is that SROs perceive threats differently in different school contexts and that the racial composition of schools may motivate these differences. To investigate this possibility, this study analyzes interviews with 73 SROs from two different school districts that encompass schools with a variety of racial compositions. Across both districts, SROs perceived three major categories of threats: student-based, intruder-based, and environment-based threats. However, the focus and perceived severity of the threats varied across districts such that SROs in the district with a larger proportion of White students were primarily concerned about external threats (i.e., intruder-based and environment-based) that might harm the students, whereas SROs in the district with a larger proportion of Black students were primarily concerned with students themselves as threats. We consider how these results relate to understandings of school security, inequality among students, racially disparate experiences with school policing, and school and policing policy.

No abstract

School resource officers (SROs) have become increasingly common in schools in the United States and this growth of police in schools has taken place as part of a trend of school criminalization. In a school criminalization framework, scholars have focused on physical security measures and punitive outcomes for students, however, the subtler dimensions have been less explored. We draw on 26 interviews where SROs were asked to detail their typical day to investigate whether, and how, SROs criminalize school spaces through routine tasks. In spite of the multi-faceted roles of the SRO, the SROs in this study framed a typical day through a crime control logic where school spaces are criminogenic hotspots and the student body is ripe with potential offenders.