CRIMINOLOGY: "DEFUND THE (SCHOOL) POLICE"? BRINGING DATA TO KEY SCHOOL-TO-PRISON PIPELINE CLAIMS.

• Author: Heise, Michael

INTRODUCTION 718 I. LITERATURE REVIEW 724 A. The Tightened Intersections Between Schools and the Criminal Justice System 724 1. Evidence of Tightened Intersections Between Schools and the Criminal Justice System 724 2. Why Intersections Between Schools and the Criminal Justice System Have Tightened 732 3. Consequences of These Tightened Intersections 734 B. A Growing SRO/Police Presence in Public Schools 735 1. Evidence of and Explanations for a Growing SRO/Police Presence in Public Schools 735 2. Empirical Assessments of SRO/Police Presence in Schools 740 II. DATA AND EMPIRICAL STRATEGY 741 A. Data 741 B. Dependent Variables 744 C. Independent Variables 745 D. Control Variables 747 1. School-Level Variables 747 2. Student-Focused Variables 750 E. Empirical Strategy 751 F. Data and Empirical Strategy Limitations 752 III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION 755 A. Logistic and Fractional Regression Models 755 B. The Specter of School Selections 760 C. The Elementary School Context 764 CONCLUSION 771 Introduction

While it is not clear at this juncture which lasting legal and policy changes may emerge from recent and ongoing efforts to "Defund the Police," attributable to the resurgent Black Lives Matters movement, (1) one specific change is already clear: a growing number of public school districts are now confronting related demands to "defund" school resource officer ("SRO/police") programs that operate in one-half of the nation's public elementary and secondary schools. (2) Despite a sustained growth in SRO/police presence in public elementary and secondary schools over time, much remains unknown about the full suite of costs and benefits for students, schools, and families attributable to these programs. (3) What remains all but assumed amid this uncertainty, however, is that a school's SRO/police presence helps fuel a "school-to-prison pipeline." (4)

The growing school-to-prison pipeline research literature features two general claims that frame key debates about how public schools approach student discipline. One claim is that schools' student discipline practices have become increasingly legalized. (5) A steadily increasing SRO/police presence in the nation's public schools both contributes to, and reflects, this trend. (6) Aside from an array of factors that help account for an increased SRO/police presence in public schools, schools' evolving posture towards student discipline raises important policy concerns. An increasingly legalized school environment may contribute to a net increase in overall school safety and a concurrent decrease in school violence. (7) Even if such benefits are realized, important potential costs also lurk. Absent a truly randomized and controlled experiment, efforts to assess and weigh the benefits and costs associated with schools' increasingly legalized approach toward student discipline impose significant demands on potential research designs.

Notwithstanding important research design challenges, much of the public and scholarly attention to schools' evolving posture toward student discipline dwells on the possible negative spill-over effects imposed on students, their families, and schools. (8) One potential cost that has attracted particular scholarly (and public) attention involves students' increased exposure to the criminal justice system. (9) Given the important stakes involved, concerns about adverse implications for individual students and their futures attributable to an increasingly legalized student discipline model are important and warrant careful attention. This is especially so if schools' motivations for this policy shift include a desire to functionally out-source a greater share of responsibility for student discipline to law enforcement agencies. Making matters worse is that referrals of student incidents to law enforcement agencies--particularly for lower-level non-violent student incidents that were traditionally handled internally within schools--often set into motion a series of legal events that can culminate in ways that deleteriously impact students' lives. (10) Operationalizing this first general claim--that schools' approach to student discipline is becoming increasingly legalized--contributes to the following hypothesis: SRO/police presence (no matter how small or large) at a school corresponds with an increase in the likelihood that the school will report student discipline incidents to law enforcement agencies. A related, though distinct, form of this hypothesis is that as a school's SRO/police presence increases so too does the likelihood that the school will report student discipline incidents to law enforcement agencies.

Persuaded that policy costs associated with schools' increasingly legalized approach to student discipline outweigh the benefits, many critics quickly advance a second general claim: such a policy's costs distribute unequally across various traditional sub-groups of students." Thus, a second hypothesis--an extension of the first--is that a school's referrals of student disciplinary incidents to law enforcement agencies disproportionately involve students of color, boys, students from low-income households, and other vulnerable student sub-groups.

Despite both claims having already secured general acceptance in the school-to-prison pipeline literature, we find mixed empirical support when these two claims are subjected to the nation's leading cross-sectional data set on public school crime and safety, the U.S. Department of Education's 2015-2016 School Survey on Crime and Safety ("SSOCS"). (12) With respect to the first claim, we find evidence that a school's SRO/police presence corresponds with an increased likelihood that the school will report student incidents to law enforcement agencies. (13) Our finding on this first claim generally comports with prior studies that analyze earlier versions of the SSOCS data set. (14)

At the same time, however, we do not find direct empirical support for the second claim: that school reports of student incidents to law enforcement agencies systematically distribute unevenly across various student sub-groups. (15) Direct evidence on this specific claim is simply not possible owing to the absence in the SSOCS data set of any individual-level demographic data (e.g., race/ethnicity, gender, socio-economic status) on students whose conduct triggered a school referral to law enforcement agencies. To be clear, however, this hypothesis remains a viable possibility as supportive anecdotal and related evidence exists. (16)

Our narrower point is that there is no direct empirical support from the SSOCS data set that school referrals to law enforcement raise troubling distributional issues. (17) Moreover, the weight of the indirect evidence from school-level data similarly does not imply troubling distributional outcomes. (18) Notably, the paucity of supportive empirical evidence from our study generally contrasts with broader scholarly and public claims about uneven distributions of school discipline across various student sub-groups. (19) Our study of the relation between a school's SRO/police presence and the school's likelihood of referring student disciplinary incidents to law enforcement agencies seeks to contribute to the existing research literature in three specific ways. First, our analyses exploit a more recent (2015-16) version of the SSOCS data set. (20) Second, our various models include such complementary data on state-level mandatory reporting requirements as well as district-level per pupil spending information. (21) These complimentary data provide helpful, and perhaps essential, controls for any modeling efforts. (22) Third, we explore three distinct analytic approaches, including logistic regression, fractional response regression, and Heckman selection specifications in an effort to better isolate the possible independent influence of a school's SRO/police presence along with the magnitude of that presence on a school's student discipline reporting behavior. (23)

This Article proceeds as follows. Part I briefly summarizes the relevant research literatures. Part II describes our data and empirical strategy. We present our results in Part III and consider their legal and policy implications. We conclude in Part IV and discuss possible next steps for subsequent research.

1. LITERATURE REVIEW

   While our Article seeks to both build on and extend the relevant empirical literature, it also inevitably brushes up against two other related research literatures that supply much needed analytic context. One such literature seeks to explain the tightened intersections between schools and the criminal justice system over the past few decades. A second, related research literature endeavors to understand SRO/police officers' increased role in public schools and the consequences of this change.

   1. THE TIGHTENED INTERSECTIONS BETWEEN SCHOOLS AND THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM

      1. Evidence of Tightened Intersections Between Schools and the Criminal Justice System

         Over the last few decades intersections between schools and the criminal justice system have tightened significantly. (24) This trend can be conceptualized in at least two ways. First, schools have increased their reliance on various criminal justice oriented measures designed to intensify student surveillance and deter violence and student wrongdoing. (25) For example, during the 2017-2018 school year, 83.5% of surveyed schools reported that they used one or more security cameras to monitor students. (26) This was a sizeable increase from the 1999-2000 school year, in which only 19.4% of schools indicated that they used security cameras. (27) Also during the 2017-2018 school year, 95.4% of surveyed schools controlled access to school buildings by locking or monitoring their doors (up from 74.6% in 1999-2000), 50.8% controlled access to school grounds by locking or monitoring gates (up from 33.7% in 1999-2000), and 27.8% conducted one or more...