code red at MMS

I worked at MMS during the time there was a D.A.R.E. officer associated with the school - I don't remember if he was there full-time then, or just often, but he was a very caring person and all of the students seemed to like him and benefit from his presence. The classes I worked with had many minority and/or special ed students and they liked the officer very much. I think they felt that he'd be there for them if they needed him and they enjoyed going up to him and talking with him. So, it can be a good thing - I think it depends on the personalities of the officers selected for the assignment and how they present themselves to and interact with the students.

The cops are there to intimidate the kids

The cops are there to intimidate the kids

The cops are there to intimidate the kids

The cops are there to intimidate the kids

The cops are there to intimidate the kids

Clearly you don't know many that have served as DARE officers in the schools, and the accolades they've received from administrators and students, and why. Sorry that, for whatever reason, you have such a low opinion of the professionalism of the MPD. I do not.

As to bringing up Omar Perry in this debate, not even remotely worth any further comment.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/23/opinion/do-the-police-belong-in-our-public-schools.html

SOMa is hardly NYC

ParticleMan said:
SOMa is hardly NYC

Fully agree.

I'm amazed by the out-and-out denial of those who oppose a police presence at MMS. Do you realize this officer would be a regular member of the local police department, not some guy working for the feds? And he/she absolutely likely would have prevented the theft of bands instruments. The officer does not wait in a cubicle to be called. He/she constantly roams the hallways, aware of issues that are arising. Regarding the armed student, perhaps the criminal would have thought twice about bringing the gun to school had he considered the chance he would be shot by a cop had he brandished the weapon. With many boys being "redshirted" due to sports interests, some of our 7th and 8th grade males are closer to man than boy and to refer to them as "children" can be misleading.

ctrzaska said:
Clearly you don't know many that have served as DARE officers in the schools, and the accolades they've received from administrators and students, and why. Sorry that, for whatever reason, you have such a low opinion of the professionalism of the MPD. I do not.
As to bringing up Omar Perry in this debate, not even remotely worth any further comment.

This seems to me to be a rather silly misrepresentation of my words, but perhaps I didn't express myself clearly and yours is a reasonable interpretation. If so, I apologize for my lack of clarity.

I don't have a low opinion of the MPD at all. All my experiences of the MPD have been of highly professional people, doing an excellent job. But well trained professional police are not professional educators. They do not have training in child psychology. They are not necessarily aware of all the developmental issues that the staff in our schools are aware of and attuned to as they do their complicated and demanding jobs.

My understanding is that DARE is a drug education program and that the officers have specific training for it and when in the schools are not there to generally police student activity (misbehavior in the halls, etc). Is this not correct?

The reason I bring up Omar Perry is not to find fault with the officers involved, but to note that even with the best intentions, bad outcomes can occur.

I think everyone can agree that a self-harming mentally ill person is a challenging situation for any police officer, but also that shooting and killing the mentally ill is not the ideal resolution to such a situation, no? I bring it up not to denigrate the officers involved, but to point out that any officer, faced with a situation in which they lack specific training and tools, will use the training and tools they have and this may result in very bad outcomes.

The record of police acting as enforcers of hall and classroom behavior from many communities, large and small, is very mixed. I think this evidence, weighed objectively, is good reason not to have police in the middle school at all and only in the high school with very careful planning and a set of checks and balances to ensure that the kind of things that have often gone wrong when police have been assigned to other middle and high schools don't happen here.

What I have seen in this thread and the one about fighting at CHS is hysteria by some of the parents and a conflation of different issues at different schools into one "problem with the schools" and a sense of desperate urgency to fix "the problem." This thread, focused on the Glock incident at MMS, has contained many discussions about events at CHS and a problem with groping in the halls at MMS as if these were all a single problem. I think the pattern of thinking that conflates these separate incidents into a single problem is not helpful and the idea that police in the schools will solve these problems is mistaken.

How will a police officer at MMS help with the (small number of) boys groping girls situation? Should those boys face immediate arrest and criminal prosecution? How will a police officer at MMS deter a child from bringing a weapon to school? How will a police officer at MMS deter fights at CHS? I have a son and a daughter at MMS and I don't want either of them to face violent, bullying or groping kids, but neither do I want them to go to schools where discipline has become an extension of the criminal justice system.

Not only do I think having police as enforcers in the schools is a bad idea, I don't think it's a solution to the problems the schools face, with the possible exception of the assaults at CHS.

I haven't seen or heard any detailed account of the perpetrators decision making process in the MMS gun incident, but I know who he is--his identity was plainly evident to my daughter when he was in school before the event and not in school after the Police left, or in school at any time since. From the information I do have, I think it's reasonable to assume that this kid was not operating rationally or considering the possible outcomes of his action when he made the decision to steal his parent's weapon and take it to school.

Is it reasonable to assume that a child making irrational decisions is going to be deterred by the rational calculation that there may be bad consequences for his actions?

How does this work in practice? Are schools with permanent police assigned to general policing of the students crime-free or do they see huge reductions in crime rates?

I think people often make the erroneous assumption that the police will only respond to someone else's kids, that their kids will never have a problem and that everything will be fair and balanced at all levels of the criminal justice system. But this idea is not supported by evidence.

We have a Bill of Rights for a reason and it isn't a denigration of the professionalism of the MPD or any other police body to say that we need it. I think we should be very careful about turning our schools into areas of continual criminal policing because there is plenty of evidence that this does not always end well.

Adam_West, those are good, thoughtful points. And, as you noted earlier, my experience is anecdotal and limited to two schools. I know of no empirical evidence to measure the effect that the full-time presence of a uniformed officer had there. Would it help to see the possible benefits, though, if the comparison were not "criminal policing" but "community policing"? The job and uniform of an officer connote an authority that teachers, counselors and administrators are not always able to command as easily; if the officer, like a beat cop, earns the respect to go with it, is it possible it becomes a compass for everyday behavior?

As for irrational students not deterred by consequences, is it possible that the presence makes them more aware of potential consequences, while the compass helps guide them to more rational decisions before they go in the other direction?

http://ccjs.umd.edu/sites/ccjs.umd.edu/files/pubs/Police%20Officers%20in%20Schools-Effects%20on%20School%20Crime%20and%20the%20Processing%20of%20Offending%20Behaviors.pdf

I found this paper to be quite interesting as it has the history of the program as well as compares schools with SROs to one's without. It acknowledges that schools with SROs tend to be schools that had higher discipline issues to start with. it finds that SROs do not seem to reduce crime but there is an increase in reported crimes in these schools (though to me it was not clear whether it was just instances of crimes that were just not found out before or a real increase in incidence of crime.) The highest increase in reported crimes were in unarmed assaults. It also finds that there was no disparate impact on minority and special ed populations, nor was there an increase in harsh discipline.

dg64 said:
http://ccjs.umd.edu/sites/ccjs.umd.edu/files/pubs/Police%20Officers%20in%20Schools-Effects%20on%20School%20Crime%20and%20the%20Processing%20of%20Offending%20Behaviors.pdf

I found this paper to be quite interesting as it has the history of the program as well as compares schools with SROs to one's without. It acknowledges that schools with SROs tend to be schools that had higher discipline issues to start with. it finds that SROs do not seem to reduce crime but there is an increase in reported crimes in these schools (though to me it was not clear whether it was just instances of crimes that were just not found out before or a real increase in incidence of crime.) The highest increase in reported crimes were in unarmed assaults. It also finds that there was no disparate impact on minority and special ed populations, nor was there an increase in harsh discipline.

My impression from reading about this a bit is that the best you can say is the evidence is inconclusive, positive reports tend to be subjective self appraisals by participants in the programs and there are indicators of negatives associated with these programs. While the study you reference did not find disparate impact in minority and special ed populations, other studies have. Again, the best you can say is there is no clear evidence of systemic harm, though there are very clear instances of harm to individuals. Likewise there is no clear evidence of benefit, though there are some positive anecdotes.

Additional resources that may be of interest:

http://www.wrightslaw.com/blog/?p=3175

http://www.popcenter.org/responses/school_police/1

https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43126.pdf

http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/rgs_dissertations/2006/RAND_RGSD200.pdf

http://www.nasponline.org/advocacy/schoolsecurity.pdf

https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/209271.pdf

DaveSchmidt said:Would it help to see the possible beneifts, though, if the comparison were not "criminal policing" but "community policing"? The job and uniform of an officer connote an authority that teachers, counselors and administrators are not always able to command as easily; if the officer, like a beat cop, earns the respect to go with it, is it possible it becomes a compass for everyday behavior?
As for irrational students not deterred by consequences, is it possible that the presence makes them more aware of potential consequences, while the compass helps guide them to more rational decisions before they go in the other direction?

Benefits and positive results are certainly possible. I don't think there is any way to estimate the likelihood of either positive or negative results, and this doesn't seem like a good basis for moving forward with a plan. I don't like decisions made hastily in response to fear.

As it seems the decision has already been made, I hope you are right.

Adam_West said:

I don't like decisions made hastily in response to fear.

Another good point.

ParticleMan said:
SOMa is hardly NYC

Soma is pretty much the same as NYC. Most people here are from NYC. And someone brought a gun to school which is a "NYC style problem". So yeah I would liken Maplewood to NYC. Also we are 9 miles away not 900.

arturosfan said:

ParticleMan said:
SOMa is hardly NYC

Soma is pretty much the same as NYC. Most people here are from NYC. And someone brought a gun to school which is a "NYC style problem". So yeah I would liken Maplewood to NYC. Also we are 9 miles away not 900.

Um... ok. Thanks for letting me know.

ETA: Not to be all pedantic-y, but I think you're off by a factor if two. New York is more like 20 miles.

SOMSD got hit with a complaint regarding alleged discrimination in disciplinary outcomes last year. Teachers and administrators have a full-time job educating our children and a part-time job dealing with disciplinary issues. Execution of the part time job now threatens the ability to keep the full time job, and so there is a prior restraint in handing out punishment.

Now instead of things being handled in the principal's office they'll be handled in a holding cell. The incentives for a cop are the opposite of a teacher- they get in trouble if they don't act when witnessing or being informed directly by the witness of a crime. They are disincentivized to "go easy" because if something happens subsequently and they're found to have let something slide, they lose their job. They don't have a primary job of educating or guiding youngsters to the right path. They are law enforcement, period.

For the vast majority of kids who just want to go to school, learn and socialize it's a boon. For those who want to victimize their classmates, they were better off when educators hands weren't tied.

The law of unintended but completely foreseeable consequences. Parents aren't going to put up with their kids being victimized in this district. Fighting a proxy fight with the complaint isn't going to go anywhere because the district complied without complaint. What is a parent to do? Agitate for a police presence- and with the gun incident, no one can really claim overkill. Now the district is out of it and discipline is outsourced to police agencies. Nobody is going to be happy- it's a far from ideal circumstance. But what option is open?

Woot said:

ParticleMan said:
SOMa is hardly NYC

Fully agree.

Ya think?

DaveSchmidt said:

Adam_West said:

I don't like decisions made hastily in response to fear.

Another good point.

Absolutely.

Adam_West, only the Omar Perry reference in my post was directed at you. Appreciate the rest of your response however, and I do not disagree on many facets of it.

Two points of clarification, however: my issue with the Omar Perry reference is context: aside from the clearance by the courts, this clearly wasn't a reactionary shooting, and also clearly a one-off situation. ANY situation is possible, and plucking one out as an example doesn't carry far in my book. As to the DARE reference, aside from the fact that it was meant for arturosfan, maybe I should have provided the same clarity I found lacking with the aforementioned Perry reference... these ARE professionals, and well-trained, and have in their limited exposure a good relationship with the students and the schools. I see no reason to doubt the premise that with additional training they would serve the wider role quite well. As to whether that role is needed is up for debate.