Why So Few School Cops Are Trained to Work With Kids
Only 12 states mandate that school resource officers receive student-specific preparation.
A high-school girl who refuses to follow school rules is body-slammed to the ground, ripped from her chair, and thrown past rows of desks. The school resource officer’s use of force, caught on video, unleashes national outrage and costs him his job.
An 8-year-old boy is cuffed above the elbows as a cell phone captures the scuffle. “You can do what we ask you to or you can suffer the consequences,” the school resource officer says to the boy in a video that prompted a lawsuit over his use of restraint.
In Irving, Texas, a boy who shows a clock to his science teacher, proud of his ingenuity, finds himself in handcuffs—accused of building a “hoax bomb.” 180 miles south in Round Rock, an SRO called to stop a gym fight chokes a 14-year-old boy to the floor.
The police officer “should have been trained well enough to know that this is a 130-pound child,” the boy’s father tells a local TV station. “The action that was taken was totally unnecessary.”
There are about 19,000 sworn police officers stationed in schools nationwide, according to U.S. Department of Justice estimates, and stories about their school-discipline disasters cross Mo Canady’s desk all the time.
“The first thing I do is search our database to see ‘Did this person come through our training?’” said Canady, the executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, which offers specialized training to SROs—primarily on a voluntary basis. “And the answer is consistently ‘no.’”
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