Do School Resource Officers Do Any Good?

On April 9th, 2019, a St. Lucie County, Florida, sheriff’s deputy rushed a sixth grader outside his school, lifted him overhead, and body-slammed him to the pavement. Another student, safe inside a school bus, captured the incident on his smartphone. It took five days for the story to reach me, a white guy in the hinterlands. And now I find myself wondering what we have public schools for.

Sheriff Kan Mascara of Ft Pierce, FL says the school resource deputy, who lifted an 11 yr old Black student in the air and body-slammed him on a sidewalk, did not use excessive force.

Of course they are referencing alleged former behavior to justify obvious police brutality. pic.twitter.com/8FtdiZLcxN

— Bishop Talbert Swan (@TalbertSwan) April 12, 2019

News reports of the incident describe a child behaving in an oppositional-defiant manner, disregarding instructions and disrupting classroom activities. They don’t, however, describe a child engaging in violence. Quotes from the incident report describe the youth as “agitated,” as “punching his fist into the palm of his hand.” But they also describe him, as the video shows, as trying to walk or run away. Nothing describes him as a threat.

Therefore, I question the response: not just the school resource officer’s actions, but the school resource officer’s presence. Enough stories like this have emerged in recent years, about adult police officers using extreme physical force on children, mostly children of color, to make me question whether keeping police in schools does any good. These individual anecdotes aren’t data, certainly, but when enough accumulate, a pattern emerges, and that becomes evidence.

Sociologists have spilled copious ink about how most people, including Black people, perceive young Black men as older than White kids the same age. More recent research has determined this is also true about young Black women. From an earlier age, Black youths are perceived as more mature, more sexual, stronger, and more culpable for their actions, than White youths.

To this deputy, this also apparently means an 11-year-old’s body is more capable of withstanding a body slam.

Do I even need to say the follow-up? But they’re not. Not only will body-slamming a child, regardless of race, cause potential lifelong injuries and pain, it also has maladaptive effects on brain development. This youth, this child, will more likely fear interactions with authority figures, and will therefore behave in more oppositional-defiant ways, making future violent confrontations more likely. He’s also now at greater lifetime risk for addiction.

As a once-and-future academic myself, I have many schoolteachers among my friends. They describe incidents like the one which got this student suspended happening increasingly often: as more parents work longer hours, children start having their adolescent rebellious phase earlier and earlier. This child engaged in the most rudimentary form of in-school resistance: refusing to sit still or follow instructions. It sounds downright boring.

Once the Dean got the school resource officer involved, though, it changed the entire tenor of the event. It went from being a case of routine, if unusually early, adolescent insubordination, to a confrontation between the law and a suspected criminal. Any involvement from school resource officers turns any prosaic administrative action into a potential criminal case. That’s exactly what happened here: a trained cop treated a stroppy kid like a hardened violent felon.

The now-notorious image of a school resource officer flinging a teenaged girl
for failing to get off her cell phone, in 2015

Americans accepted the everyday assigning of police officers inside schools because we wanted to protect kids against outsiders entering and committing crimes. They’re notoriously pretty poor at doing this, though. To cite only one noteworthy example, the armed, uniformed school resource officer failed to enter Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School while an active shooter was inside. The officer’s inaction probably contributed needlessly to the body count.

Rather than preventing outsiders from committing crimes inside schools, the primary stories we hear emerging regarding school resource officers involve them treating students (and, less often, teachers) as suspects. This gets especially compounded when working with children, who haven’t learned to internalize social norms yet. Incidents which teachers would, or should, see as opportunities for instruction, police will see as crimes that need stopped.

I’m glad my high school didn’t have a resource officer. My peers and I sometimes engaged in behavior that was technically illegal. However, we didn’t need busted; we needed patient adults to explain right, appropriate, socially standardized behavior. When you treat children like children, they have opportunities to correct their actions. When you treat them like criminals, you harden them against the future.

If you send trained police into any situation, they will look for crimes. Just like if you sent carpenters into schools, they will find repairs that need done, police will find laws that need enforced, because they’re trained to see that. Presumably that’s what happened in Florida last week. But children aren’t criminals, they’re children. At least, they are until they have a record.

Edit: after publishing this essay, a classmate contacted me and informed me our high school actually had a resource officer. In those pre-Columbine days, he mostly conducted drug enforcement, and little of that; being a resource officer back then wasn't exactly a hardship assignment. The fact that I was free to not know about this makes me feel about the Whitest I've ever been.