Controlling Partners: When Law Enforcement Meets Discipline in Public Schools (original) (raw)

See infra text accompanying note 42. 3. A recent report surveying arrests of youth found that while pre-teen and teen arrests for most offenses, especially violent offenses, were far lower in 2006 than they were in 1980, they increased 19% for simple assault. The data also showed that the majority of arrests for pre-teens occurred in school. This data may suggest that one of the long-term effects of expanding the role of SROs is an increase in the number of younger children arrested while in school for fist fights, shoving matches, and other behaviors that rarely warranted police intervention in the past. See Jeffrey A. Butts & Howard N. Snyder, Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago, Arresting Children: Examining Recent Trends in Preteen Crime (2008), available at http://www.njjn.org/media/ resources/public/resource_813.pdf. An example of the environment that led to the deployment of police in so many schools can be found in a 1999 New York Times article entitled "After Shootings, Nation's Schools Add to Security." David Firestone, After Shootings, Nation's Schools Add to Security, N.Y. Times, Aug. 13, 1999, at A1. The article stated that "many students returning to school will find metal detectors and armed security guards at the door," and that these new policies "all are a direct reaction to the shootings this spring at high schools." Id. Students in Massachusetts also returned to a police presence in their schools in the fall of 1999. See Robert Preer, Local Schools Reopening with a Police Presence, Boston Globe, Sept. 3, 2000, at 1 (noting that "[w]hen students in the Boston suburbs return to school this year, many will greet not only teachers, principals, and classmates, but their school police officer."); Ronnie Casella, Punishing Dangerousness Through Preventative Detention: Examining the Institutional Link Between Schools and Prisons, 21-22 (2003), available at http://www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/ research/pipeline03/Casellav2.pdf. 979 nEW YOrK LaW sChOOL LaW rEViEW VOLUME 54 | 2009/10 culture of crime and disorder that was ruining the educational opportunities for our students, and the results have been promising." 4 In another instance, when school officers were accused of unnecessary force, a police chief was quoted as saying: ''School safety agents are the backbone of school security. .. . They take front-line responsibility for keeping schools safe.'' 5 But civil rights and juvenile justice advocates have for years been distressed and concerned by what they view as the growing criminalization of student behaviors that in the past would have been addressed through a call to parents or after school detention. Advocates and some researchers have argued that officers' and principals' stated concerns about safety actually mask the true purpose of placing police in schools: to raise the stakes for student misconduct and exclude youth who do not conform to behavioral, attitudinal, or educational demands. 6 This article explores the evolving role of the police officer in school, and attempts to identify several "models" that are currently being used in school districts in Massachusetts. It is intended to probe deeper than has been done in the past into the ways in which police and school officials attempt to bridge the divide between nurturing the academic and social development of pupils and preventing crime, enforcing laws, and keeping the peace. A decade after police have become ubiquitous presences in schools across the country, the day-today activities and responsibilities of SROs still remain shrouded 4.