Police Officers in Schools: Effects on School Crime and the Processing of Offending Behaviors

Abstract

The use of police in schools has increased dramatically in the past 12 years, largely due to increases in US Department of Justice funding. This study used data from the School Survey on Crime and Safety to assess the extent to which the addition of police in schools is associated with changes in levels of school crime and schools responses to crime. We found that as schools increase their use of police, they record more crimes involving weapon and drugs and report a higher percentage of their non-serious violent crimes to law enforcement. The possibility that placement of police officers in schools increases referrals to law enforcement for crimes of a less serious nature and increases recording of weapon and drug offenses requires that more rigorous research be carried out to assess more carefully the school climate and school safety outcomes related to this popular and costly practice.

Keywords:

• policing
• school crime

Acknowledgments

This paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology, San Francisco, CA, November 2010. It extends work originally published in a more detailed chapter (Cook et al., 2010) that reviews statistics on crime in school, documents trends and patterns, summarizes research on school effects, and discusses organizational characteristics of schools that might influence crime. The authors thank Philip Cook for his contributions to this work and Jean McGloin, Gary Gottfredson, and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on a previous draft.

Notes

1. The SRO concept first emerged during the 1950s in Flint, Michigan, as part of the implementation of community policing (Girouard, 2001). The concept grew during the 1960s and 1970s, primarily in Florida, although did not spread nationally until the mid-1990s, when legislation such as the Safe Schools Act of 1994 and a 1998 amendment to the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 encouraged partnerships between schools and law enforcement. The US Department of Justice “COPS in Schools” grant program dramatically increased the use of SROs in schools beginning in 1999. SROs are typically uniformed, armed officers who have been trained for their role as school-based officers. Their duties typically involve patrolling the school, investigating criminal complaints, handling student rule/law violators, and trying to minimize disruptions. They are also often involved with educational and prevention-related programming, such as counseling students and providing DARE instruction. Although the specific goals of SRO programs may vary across time and space, the federal “COPS in Schools” program has two primary objectives: to “encourage working relationships between police and schools, thus bringing the principles and philosophy of community policing directly into the school environment,” and to “assist communities in focusing leadership and resources on the issues related to creating and maintaining a safe school environment” (Girouard, 2001).

2. Principals in 10% of high school in smaller and 20% of high school in larger cities reported having police stationed in the schools.

3. This study analyzed the trend of in-school and out-of-school crimes of a more serious nature (e.g. homicide, violence, property, etc.), but did not include school incidents or disciplinary problems.

4. For example, a principal may be uncertain whether a Swiss Army knife qualifies as a deadly weapon or whether a student found with somebody else’s prescription drugs should be reported as a drug offender (Kupchik, 2010).

5. Of course, police presence might also be associated with increased opportunities to detect and record crimes, especially for specific types of crime under the zero tolerance policies (see “Limitations” section).

6. In the survey, principals were asked to record the number of incidents that occurred “at school” during each school year, which includes activities happening in school buildings, on school grounds, on school buses, and at places that hold school-sponsored events or activities. Unless otherwise specified, this refers to normal school hours or to times when school activities/events were in session.

7. The population of schools is stratified into four instructional levels, four types of locale settings, and four enrollment size categories. In order to obtain a reasonable sample size of lower enrollment schools while giving a higher probability of selection to higher enrollment schools, the sample is allocated to each subgroup in proportion to the sum of the square roots of the total student enrollment in each school in that stratum.

8. Unweighted sample size numbers rounded to nearest 10 to comply with IES requirements for restricted-use data.

9. In the longitudinal sample, 70.5% of schools that had an officer also had at least one full-time officer.

10. Questionnaires that did not meet these imputation criteria were considered incomplete and were excluded from the data-set.

aFor the longitudinal sample, dependent variables are measured at time 2 and independent variables at time 1 (except “police presence,” which uses data from both time points).

bAs noted earlier, the sample design is stratified and over-samples middle and high schools. Because we cannot estimate weighted statistics for the longitudinal sample, elementary schools are substantially underrepresented in the longitudinal sample (6%) compared to the 2007-2008 sample (59%), which accounts for the discrepancies in other schools characteristics between two samples.

cUnweighted sample size numbers rounded to nearest 10 to comply with Institute of Education Sciences (IES) requirements for restricted-use data.

11. Most often, the prior measure comes from the survey taken two years prior. In 160 cases, the prior measure comes from the survey taken four years prior. A control from number of years elapsed since prior survey is included.

12. Although the longitudinal sample has relatively fewer schools whose use of police increased (n = 50) than whose use of police remained unchanged (n = 420), the two groups were not significantly different in terms of the characteristics included in Table 1 (p < 0.05).

13. Percentages are calculated from the 2007-2008 SSCS sample of schools that had at least one full-time officer, excluding schools that had only a security guard or part-time officer. Percentages are weighted.

14. Regression analyses to be reported next examine crime rates. Crime rates vary considerably by type of crime and cannot be compared easily on a single graph. We therefore present bivariate associations with the percentage of schools reporting at least one of each crime type.

15. We first conducted regressions of each set of outcomes, grouped by offense category, on the presence of police as well as a set of control variables using 2007-2008 cross-sectional data. Analyses were run in which each outcome was regressed on time 2 police presence as well as on time 1 police presence. These analyses have more statistical power than do the change analyses reported in the text because a larger number of schools report using police in one or the other year (see Table 1) than report changing their use of police, and they are based on the full sample of schools, which is more representative than the longitudinal sample. On the other hand, these analyses do not control for selection effects as well as do the change analyses because although the control variables mentioned in the text were included in the equations, unmeasured factors are likely to influence both the placement of police in schools and the change in the outcome variables. Nevertheless, the results from these analyses mirrored the results reported in the paper for the most part. The only substantive differences in results were found in the regressions for crimes reported to the police (Table 4). In these analyses: (a) the association between police presence at time 1 and the percentage of non-serious violent crimes reported to law enforcement did not reach statistical significance and (b) the associations between police presence and percentage of property crimes and total crimes (which are driven primarily by property crimes) reported to law enforcement were significant in the analyses of time 1 police presence and time 2 police presence, but not in the analyses using increase in police. The direction of the association was the same in all analyses. Complete results from these cross-sectional analyses are available from the authors upon request.

aBecause the coefficient for enrollment is estimated rather than fixed at one to test if schools with larger enrollment have higher per capita crime rates, the coefficients were recalculated by subtracting the value of one from the original coefficients estimated by negative binomial regression model. Accordingly, the test statistics were drawn by (b − 1)/SE instead of usual b/SE (see Osgood, 2000, pp. 39-40 for more detail).

16. The test for the percentage of serious violent crimes lacks sufficient statistical power because relatively few crimes of this type were reported by the principals (N = 70).