More cops in schools won't make schools safer; it will likely inflict harm

I shortened the title a bit to make it fit in the allowed space.

As usual, Radley hits all the points here in a convincing and easy-to-digest way. If you came straight to the comments, do yourself and click to the article at least to see the image that was literally printed on t-shirts for a SRO union. It's horrifically vulgar.

Radley also points out:

> ...we first need to acknowledge something before delving into this discussion: a classroom is just about the safest place a kid can be in America.

> The odds of a given child getting killed in a mass school shooting — or any school shooting — are literally less than 1 in 1 million. The criminologist James Alan Fox points out that since 1990, there have been 22 shootings at schools in which two or more people were shot, or well less than one incident per year. That’s less than one incident per year out of 100,000 public schools and 33,000 private schools. This means that the average elementary, middle, or high school can expect to see a mass shooting about once every 150,000 years.

Maybe it's just my isolation from the matter, but I think that the safety of the classroom is still fairly widely understood. Issues like bullying and over-medication seem to be more widely viewed as concerns re: classroom safety, at least among those in my parenting circles.

Nevertheless, it's refreshing to be reminded of how rare (mass- and other) shootings are.

> Cops are authorized to use force in a way that teachers and school administrators are not. This is because cops are trained to use force. Administrators are trained to counsel, de-escalate and discipline in other ways. If administrators increasingly turn to on-site police officers to discipline students, that means more kids will be handcuffed, Tased and beaten. There have been a number of incidents over the years that made national headlines, particularly once video cameras in cellphones became common. Though SROs exist in every state, only 12 states require specialized training for officers who are assigned to schools.

Crazy. Having otherwise unspecialized police officers in schools seems almost designed to make students feel less, rather than more secure. What are these other 38 states thinking?

> Black students were 16 percent of the total student enrollment in the 2011-12 school year but 27 percent of students referred to law enforcement and 31 percent of students involved in a school-related arrest, according to the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights data.

> Students with disabilities represented about 12 percent of the total student population but accounted for a quarter of those arrested and referred to law enforcement, 75 percent of those who were physically restrained at school and 58 percent of those placed in seclusion or involuntary confinement.

Sadly, no surprises there. It's certainly disturbing though, and a strong case for keeping cops out of schools as we work out the plaguing bigotry and institutional discrimination at work here.