Effects of school resource officers on school crime and responses to school crime

Abstract

We examined the effects of an increase in school resource officer (SRO) staffing on schools in a sample of 33 public schools that enhanced SRO staffing through funding from the Department of Justice's Community Oriented Policing Services Hiring Program and a matched sample of 72 schools that did not increase SRO staffing at the same time. In longitudinal analyses of monthly school-level administrative data, we compared the treatment and comparison schools on disciplinary offenses and actions. We found that increased SROs increased the number of drug-and weapon-related offenses and exclusionary disciplinary actions for treatment schools relative to comparison schools. These negative effects were more frequently found for students without special needs. Policy Implications: The study findings suggest that increasing SROs does not improve school safety and that by increasing exclusionary responses to school discipline incidents it increases the criminalization of school discipline. We recommend that educational decision-makers seeking to enhance school safety consider the many alternatives to programs that require regular police presence in schools.

Making Schools Safer and/or Escalating Disciplinary Response: A Study of Police Officers in North Carolina Schools

“…The Initiative explicitly encouraged research that recognized the tension between reducing crime and maintaining fair policing that do not increase racial disparities in discipline. Partially as a result of this initiative, new empirical studies have begun to try to pin down the causal impact of SROs on both safety and school discipline (Anderson, 2018;Gottfredson et al, 2020;Owens, 2017;Weisburst, 2019;Zhang, 2019). Owens (2017) explored the causal impact of SROs on arrest and delinquency by exploiting variation in the use of SROs created by the federal Cops in Schools (CIS) grants program.…”

The Role of Law Enforcement Officers/Police in Drug Prevention within Educational Settings—Study Protocol for the Development of a Guiding Document Based on Experts’ Opinions

“…A total of 6/11 studies reported negative effect include the following: Gottfredson et al, 2020, Ryan et al, 2018, Fisher et al, 2016, Schlosser et al, 2014, Na et al, 2013 and Sloboda et al, 2009 [ 14 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 ]. One study, Javdani, 2019 [ 15 ], reported both negative and null/no effect 4/11 studies reported null effect (Gist, 1995, Lynam et al, 1999, West and O’Neal, 2004 and Pan and Bai, 2009) [ 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 ].…”

Legal socialization during adolescence: The emerging role of school resource officers

“…The following year, the number of cases in which students were referred into the criminal justice system increased by over 1000%; purportedly 90% of those incidents were for actions that would have previously been dealt with by administrators (Teske & Huff, 2011). Most recently Gottfredson et al (2020), in a comparison of schools that had enhanced or maintained their SRO staffing, suggested that "increasing SROs does not improve school safety and that by increasing exclusionary responses to school discipline incidents it increases the criminalization of school discipline (p. 905)."…”

“…felt watchful or on guard, been bothered by nervousness, etc. ''), (1 = not at all often, 5 = extremely often), α = .92 (M = 2.21, SD = 1.07), (adapted from Derogatis & Melisaratos, 1983; see also Geller, Fagan, & Tyler, 2017).…”