Student Perceptions of School Resource Officers and Threat Reporting

ABSTRACT

National debate over law enforcement in schools has largely overlooked student reporting of violent threats to school resource officer (SROs). This statewide assessment of Virginia high school students (n = 99,358) found that the majority of Black (64%), Hispanic (72%), White (71%), and other racial/ethnic identity (71%) students agreed the SRO made them feel safer at school. Logistic regressions revealed that positive perceptions of the SRO and frequency of speaking with the SRO were associated with increased willingness to report a peer who brought a gun to school or talked about killing someone. Perceptions of the SRO interacted with student race/ethnicity such that favorable views reduced disparities in nonwhite students’ willingness to report a peer with a gun. Although correlational, these results suggest that positive relationships with SROs encourage students to report threats of peer violence.

KEYWORDS:

• School resource officers (SROs)
• threat reporting
• threat assessment
• school safety

Disclosure statement

Portions of these findings were presented in a poster at the 2021 American Psychological Association virtual convention. Dr. Cornell discloses that he is the principal developer of a threat assessment program for schools, the Comprehensive School Threat Assessment Guidelines.

Notes

1. See Cornell et al. (2020) for sampling and screening procedures.

2. We ran analyses with only students who identified as either female or male and found a similar pattern of results as results using male and other grouping.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institute of Justice [#NIJ 2017-CK-BX-007]. The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Department of Justice or the DCJS Virginia Center for School and Campus Safety.

Notes on contributors

Caroline Crichlow-Ball

Caroline Crichlow-Ball, MEd, is a doctoral candidate in the University of Virginia School of Education and Human Development’s Clinical and School Psychology program. As a student in Dewey Cornell’s Youth Violence Project, her research focuses on school threat assessment and student threat reporting.

Dewey Cornell

Dewey Cornell, PhD, is the Virgil Ward Professor of Education and director of the Virginia Youth Violence Project in the University of Virginia School of Education and Human Development. His research is concerned with school safety and the prevention of youth violence. He led the development of the Comprehensive School Threat Assessment Guidelines.

Francis Huang

Francis L. Huang, PhD, is an associate professor in the Statistics, Measurement, and Evaluation in Education program in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Missouri and the methodology co-director of the Missouri Prevention Science Institute, 16 Hill Hall, Columbia, MO 65211. His research focuses on both methodological (e.g., analysis of clustered data) and substantive (e.g., school climate, bullying, disparities in disciplinary sanctions) areas of interest.