‘Softening’ school resource officers: the extension of police presence in schools in an era of Black Lives Matter, school shootings, and rising inequality

ABSTRACT

This study examines how and why a US city that is known nationally for its political progressivism continuously reaffirm its decision to maintain and expand the School Resource Officers (SRO) program in its high schools. By examining local discourses within a racial capitalism framework, we show that elements of racial neoliberalism re-emerge within a neoliberal therapeutic discourse that dominated decision-making processes and countered challenges to SROs in schools. This discourse argued that individual officers benefitted low-income students of color by providing care and challenging school racism. Despite research evidence and a counter discourse, which argued that SROs enacted harm and racism against low-income students of color, especially Black students, and should be removed from schools, SROs came to be an ‘easy’ fix to racial neoliberalism in the school district and city and contributed to the continuation and extension of the school to prison nexus.

KEYWORDS:

• School resource officers
• police
• discipline
• school to jail nexus
• racial capitalism

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the editors; anonymous reviewers; and colleagues Bianca Baldridge, Stacey Lee, and Nancy Kendall for helpful feedback and insights on this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We do not cite specific research or reporting in order to maintain the anonymity of study participants.

2. We recognize the specificity of Black experiences and the intellectual origins of this thought tradition in Black mass movements. We use ‘race radical’ (Melamed 2011) because those most closely associated with race radicalism in this study identified themselves as Black and Southeast Asian, followed by white.

3. In the US, a ‘purple state’, also known as a ‘battleground’ or ‘swing’ state, is a state where neither the Democratic Party (blue) nor the Republican Party (red) dominates election outcomes.

4. This state policy was in line with the STOP School Violence Act, approved by Congress in 2015 (Ujifusa 2018), and the Trump Administration’s repeal of Obama-era guidance to reduce racial disparities in discipline (Binkley 2018). Both shifted funding and focus towards policing and away from ending punitive discipline in schools.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Wisconsin–Madison Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education with funding from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation; and by a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship.