The Alignment Between Community Policing and the Work of School Resource Officers

• Author: Benjamin W. Fisher,Joseph McKenna,Ethan M. Higgins,Edward R. Maguire,Emily M. Homer
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10986111211053843
• Published date: 01 December 2022
• Date: 01 December 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Police Quarterly

2022, Vol. 25(4) 561–587

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/10986111211053843

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The Alignment Between

Community Policing and the

Work of School Resource

Off‌icers

Benjamin W. Fisher

1

, Joseph McKenna

2

, Ethan M. Higgins

3

,

Edward R. Maguire

4

, and Emily M. Homer

5



Abstract

Despite a growing literature showing the ineffectiveness of school resource off‌icers

(SROs) for reducing school crime, their use is widespread. Some of this ineffectiveness

may arise from SROs’experiences of role conf‌lict due to their multi-faceted roles and

conf‌licting expectations associated with following two authority structures. Com-

munity policing (CP) may offer a unifying perspective that can address some of these

barriers. The current study uses data from 119 qualitative interviews with SROs from

three U.S. states to examine the extent to which SROs’activities align with three

dimensions of CP: community partnerships, problem-solving, and organizational ad-

aptation. This study f‌inds that SROs’described activities align well with these di-

mensions, suggesting that a CP framework may be a strong model for organizing and

describing the work of SROs. This framework can be viewed as an initial proof of

concept, and research may elaborate on the framework and assess its utility.

1

College of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA

2

WestEd Justice and Prevention Research Center, San Francisco, CA, USA

3

Sociology and Criminology, University of North Carolina Wilmington, Wilmington, NC, USA

4

School of Criminology & Criminal Justice, Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ, USA

5

Sociology and Criminal Justice, Texas A&M University-Commerce, Commerce, TX, USA

Corresponding Author:

Benjamin W. Fisher, College of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Florida State University, 112 S. Copeland

Avenue, Tallahassee, FL 32304, USA.

Email: bwf‌isher@fsu.edu

Keywords

police in schools, school safety, school criminalization, school violence, school-based

law enforcement

Amid nationwide protests against police brutality in the United States throughout 2020,

calls to defund the police echoed from coast to coast. School-based police quickly

became one of the targets of this movement, with several large school districts ending

contracts with local law enforcement agencies, including those in Minneapolis, Denver,

Portland, OR, and others. At the same time, other districts such as Chicago Public Schools

voted not to make similar decisions, maintaining the possibility of having school-based

policing in the district. One of the most common forms of school-based policing is school

resource off‌icers (SROs) who are sworn law enforcement off‌icers assigned to a school or

set of schools. National estimates from 2017–2018 indicate that 61% of public schools

(including 84% of public high schools) employ at least one security guard, SRO, or other

law enforcement off‌icer, with most of these being SROs (Wanget al., 2020). Until 2020, the

number of SROs had continued to expand despite a growing body of research evidence

questioning their effectiveness and f‌inding negative unintended consequences in terms of

racial equity and the criminalization of schools and students (Fisher & Devlin, 2020;Fisher

& Hennessy, 2016;Kupchik et al., 2020;Na & Gottfredson, 2013;Nolan, 2011;Reingle

Gonzalez et al., 2016;Theriot, 2009;Weisburst, 2019).

Although there may be many reasons for these negative effects, including broad

structural conditions that have led to the criminalization of schools and student behavior

(Hirschf‌ield, 2008;Kupchik & Monahan, 2006;Simon, 2007), there may also be more

localized causes of the negative impacts of SROs on students and schools. Prior re-

search indicates that there is no unifying conceptual framework that governs the work

of SROs, potentially leading to conf‌lict and misunderstanding that can have negative

consequences for students and schools. For example, role conf‌lict is a common ex-

perience of SROs (Javdani, 2019;McKenna & Pollock, 2014;Schlosser, 2014), where

their multi-faceted roles call for different responses to a given situation. Moreover, there

is the potential for conf‌licting expectations about the appropriate roles and activities of

SROs between the two different authority structures in which they are embedded:

schools and law enforcement agencies (Finn et al., 2005). The work of SROs is largely

based on local decisions coupled with guidance from professional SRO organizations

and state- and national-level trainings. The recommendations provided by these or-

ganizations and training initiatives seem to be guided primarily by practitioners and not

by scientif‌ic research evidence. To our knowledge, there is not a broad, evidence-based

framework for understanding and guiding the work of SROs.

One framework that may be useful for conceptualizing and guiding the work of

SROs is community policing (CP), a comprehensive reform movement that emphasizes

the importance of police off‌icers working together with citizens to prevent and respond

to crime, disorder, and other community problems. Community policing has been

562 Police Quarterly 25(4)