One Maryland police chief said it was “a damn shame” that a national climate of violence had made it necessary to put armed police officers in more schools, the Maryland Gazette reports.
“They’re still kids, and they need to be handled properly,” the paper quoted Anne Arundel County Police Chief Larry Tolliver as saying.
But even as the National Rifle Association released a 225-page report earlier this month calling for armed police officers, security guards, or staff members in every school, police organizations and criminal courts are speaking out to say adding police officers in schools may not be the most desirable use of resources and may not bring all good consequences.
Not enough police officers
David Daughters, president of a police-community relations council in the county, said the police department would have to hire 100 new officers to station a resource officer at all county schools: “In a practical sense, it does not work. It does not formulate,” the Gazette quoted him as saying.
Just as state budgets have reduced funding to schools in many cases, funding to municipal police departments hasn’t fared much better. Of the 57 new officers that will graduate from the academy in the next two years, Chief Tolliver said he would like to use many of them to work outside of patrol cars, walking beats and making stronger connections with the community.
In some cases, municipalities have addressed the issue of not having enough police officers by making it legal to arm school administrators. A law that goes into effect July 1 in South Dakota, for example, allows school boards to designate individuals that would be authorized to carry guns on school property. And the school board in Washington, Ill., considered a motion to train school administrators as police officers, meaning schools would not draw resource officers away from the police force.
An increase in misdemeanor arrests and court appearances
Some school districts, such as the Houston Independent School District in Texas, maintain their own police forces. These sworn police officers, it turns out, are more often used to enforce discipline among teenagers, such as stopping a scuffle in the cafeteria, than they are to fend off an armed shooter coming into the building illegally. As a result, the criminal courts are dealing with an above-average incidence of misdemeanor charges, such as disorderly conduct.
“You have to differentiate the security issue and the discipline issue,” the New York Times quoted Michael Nash, the presiding judge of juvenile court in Los Angeles and the president of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, as saying. “Once the kids get involved in the court system, it’s a slippery slope downhill.”
Police officers are, of course, trained to recognize the difference between a teenage scuffle and an assault that needs to be prosecuted, but the line isn’t always clear. Texas police officers issued more than 300,000 tickets in schools last year alone, many of them requiring students to hire lawyers students’ families can’t really afford just to get their records cleared.
There can be creative solutions to this problem, but many school resource officers end up taking the easy way out and issuing citations to everybody. One Houston school, though, reported in the New York Times that its administration had instituted a “principal’s court” in which students serve as the jury. Instead of sending kids into the criminal system, they are tried in this school-based court for what are minor offenses or strictly disciplinary matters.
