Student Race, School Police, and the School-To-Prison Pipeline: Mixed Evidence of Indirect Pathways

ABSTRACT

While research consistently finds that increases in a school’s SRO/police presence correspond with increases in the rate of school referrals of student disciplinary incidents to law enforcement agencies, direct evidence of distributional concerns across various student subgroups is scant. Drawing on data from the 2017–2018 School Survey on Crime and Safety (SSOCS), this study explores the possibility that student racial effects might indirectly inform school law enforcement reporting activity. While results from a generalized structural equation modeling strategy (SEM) do not preclude the possibility, direct evidence of indirect student race effects on school police reports is mixed, at best.

KEYWORDS:

• School crime
• school safety
• SRO/Police
• race

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data for this article draw principally from the 2017–18 School Survey on Crime and Safety [SSOCS] [Restricted-Use Data File]. A public-access version of this data set as well as relevant codebooks are publically available. https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/ssocs/data_products.asp#2018.

Notes

1. See Restricted Use Data Licensees, Nat’l Ctr. for Educ. Statistics, https://nces.ed.gov/statprog/instruct.asp, for a more detailed description of “restricted-use” data. While restricted-use data sets are not generally available to the public, the corresponding public-use data files may be downloaded at https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/ssocs/data_products.asp#2016. Finally, to comport with NCES’ requirements regarding reporting unweighted results from restricted-use SSOCS data sets, all reported “Ns” are rounded to the nearest 10 in the Tables.

2. Results from nested negative binominal regression models (Table 3) provide additional support for our SEM model’s specification that reflects an assumption that the stream of schools that include a SRO/police presence systematically differ from schools that do not. And that this systemic difference informs school law enforcement report counts.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Heise

Michael Heise is William G. McRoberts Professor of the Empirical Study of Law, Cornell Law School.

Jason P. Nance

Jason P. Nance, is Judge James Noel Dean and Professor of Law, SMU Dedman School of Law.