Perceptions of School Resource Officers: Protectors or Prosecutors*?

• Published date: 01 September 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/07340168221113352
• Author: Matthew Almanza,Makayla Mason,Chris Melde
• Date: 01 September 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Perceptions of School Resource

Off‌icers: Protectors or

Prosecutors*?

Matthew Almanza

1

, Makayla Mason

1

,

and Chris Melde

1

Abstract

Since the 1990s there has been a signif‌icant rise in the number of police off‌icers in schools. There

have been growing concerns regarding the effects of school resource off‌icers (SRO) on students’

long-term outcomes and whether or not they are an effective aspect of school safety. Public opin-

ion, especially among key stakeholder groups, impacts policy and practice decisions, and, therefore,

there is a need to examine and synthesize the current state of the literature on stakeholder percep-

tions of SROs. We conducted a systematic review of the literature regarding student, teacher, prin-

cipal, parent, and SRO perceptions of the role and effectiveness of SROs. The f‌indings across thirty-

one publications suggest that key stakeholder groups largely report SROs as a positive presence

within schools. Findings are mixed across studies, however, and key differences in perceptions of

law enforcement among important school stakeholder populations are discussed.

Keywords

systematic review, school resource off‌icers, school-to-prison pipeline, perceptions, school safety

Introduction

The presence of police off‌icers in schools has become commonplace in recent decades, largely in

response to high prof‌ile school shootings and on the heels of a spike in youth violence in the

early 1990s (James & McCallion, 2013). Research over the last decade, however, has highlighted

the potential for school disciplinary practices to have long-term negative consequences on youth,

especially those that lead to exclusionary (e.g., out of school suspension, expulsion) or punitive

1

School of Criminal Justice, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

*

This project was supported by Cooperative Agreement No. 2019-YS-BX-K001awarded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance.

The Bureau of Justice Assistance is a component of the U.S. Department of Justice’sOff‌ice of Justice Programs, which also

includes the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the National Institute of Justice, the Off‌ice of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency

Prevention, the Off‌ice for Victims of Crime, and the Off‌ice of Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending,

Registering, and Tracking. Points of view or opinions in this document are those of the author and do not necessarily rep-

resent the off‌icial position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

Corresponding Author:

Makayla Mason, School of Criminal Justice, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA.

Email: masonmak@msu.edu

Article

Criminal Justice Review

2023, Vol. 48(3) 318-338

© 2022 Georgia State University

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/07340168221113352

journals.sagepub.com/home/cjr

legal responses (e.g., arrest; Skiba et al., 2014). Studies have indicated that the presence of a school

resource off‌icer (SRO) increases the likelihood that students will be disciplined and arrested for

offenses that were once resolved through non-legal means by school staff and administration

(Bleakley & Bleakley, 2018; Chan et al., 2019; Na & Gottfredson, 2013). These legal responses

to student misbehavior have been described as having long-term negative consequences on life

course development, including an increased risk of school dropout, arrest, and incarceration; a

process commonly referred to as the school-to-prison-pipeline (Bleakley & Bleakley, 2018;

Owens, 2017; Theriot, 2009). An example of the school-to-prison-pipeline is as follows: schools

with overly punitive or zero tolerance policies use SROs or other police to respond to student mis-

behavior. Off‌icers then arrest the students, and this arrest creates a precedent where the student is

off‌icially labeled as problematic. Further misbehavior and arrests only enhance the idea among

school staff and law enforcement that this student is a criminal, and they begin to treat the student

as such. Subsequent to their arrest, the student may drop out of school, which puts them at high

risk for future unemployment and further increases the risk of criminal behavior.

It was this process, and the possibility of long-term negative consequences associated with the

presence of law enforcement in schools, that has recently led school off‌icials in Portland, Denver,

Oakland, and Minneapolis to no longer include law enforcement in their public schools for the fore-

seeable future (Balingit et al., 2020). Similarly, Seattle public schools moved to suspend the use of

SROs in their schools for a year (Balingit et al., 2020; Yu, 2020). As indicated in a tweet by the super-

intendent of Portland Public Schools Guadalupe Guerrero, one of the primary reasons for school off‌i-

cials to move away from using SROs in their schools is a desire to replace the traditionally punitive

role of police off‌icers with counselors and social workers who would act in ways more consistent

with restorative practices (Yu, 2020).

Despite calls for reinvestment in alternative off‌icial responses to student misbehavior (e.g.,

through social workers and school psychologists; American Civil Liberties Union, 2022) and the

removal of SROs from several prominent school districts, there are still those who believe police

are essential to school safety (Balingit et al., 2020). This presents researchers and policymakers

with an interesting conundrum: while there is an apparently growing proportion of the U.S. public

losing conf‌idence in police off‌icers as a whole, and research has documented reason for concern

with respect to the impact of SROs on student development through their use of punitive disciplinary

practices, several school stakeholder groups still feel that police in schools are an important aspect of

school safety. Research suggests that as long as public support for SROs as a school safety measure is

high, policymakers and local school off‌icials are likely to continue using police off‌icers in school

(Pickett, 2019), even in the face of high costs (Burton et al., 2021), suggesting a systematic under-

standing of stakeholder perceptions of SROs is important.

The purpose of this paper is to present a systematic review of the recent scientif‌ic literature regard-

ing perceptions of the roles and effectiveness of SROs among a number of stakeholders (students,

teachers, principals/administrators, parents, and SROs) in order to document how these key

groups have come to understand the role of police in schools. This is important because if SROs

are perceived to be an effective or necessary component of school safety by a majority of stakehold-

ers, removing them from schools may have unintended negative consequences on those most imme-

diately impacted by their presence. In particular, the removal of SROs may lead students and staff to

feel less safe, which can negatively impact their educational experience and performance (Wang

et al., 2020). Conversely, if SRO presence is viewed as associated with negative outcomes by key

stakeholders, the presence of an SRO may have negative consequences (e.g., feelings of fear or alien-

ation among students who distrust the police) that would not exist if alternatives to police were used.

This paper explores the similarities and differences in perceptions of the roles and effectiveness of

SROs between school administrators, staff, students, teachers, parents and the SROs themselves.

It will begin with a review of the history of SROs, then move to a systematic review of the most

Almanza et al. 319