Abstract
Excerpted From: Jason P. Nance and Michael Heise, Law Enforcement Officers, Students, and the School-to-Prison Pipeline: A Longitudinal Perspective, 54 Arizona State Law Journal 527 (Summer, 2022) (332 Footnotes) (Full Document)
Law enforcement officers are transforming the educational experience for hundreds of thousands of students across our nation. While uncommon decades ago, recent data indicate that law enforcement officers now have a sustained presence in the majority of American public schools. There are many forces fueling the expansion of partnerships between law enforcement agencies and schools. For example, school officials wish to minimize school crime, create orderly learning environments, and deter students from harming members of the school community. Furthermore, several highly-publicized events of school violence have roiled our nation over the last twenty-three years, including the tragic incidents that occurred at Columbine, Newtown, and, most recently, Parkland. These horrific events have put pressure on school officials to tangibly demonstrate to parents, community members, and others that they are taking concrete steps to keep children safe. In addition, millions of dollars of federal and state aid have been funneled to schools to support school resource officer (SRO) programs.
Proponents of SRO programs contend that a sustained law enforcement presence is an effective way to keep students safe from harm and lower school crime levels. But the available research provides conflicting conclusions regarding the overall efficacy of SRO programs in reducing school crime and violence internally. It is also unclear whether a law enforcement presence effectively deters outside intruders from harming members of the school community.
The legal and policy implications for students, however, are much more established. Regular contact with law enforcement is a dynamic that has significantly tightened the intersection between schools and the criminal justice system, a phenomenon known as the “school-to-prison pipeline.” Observational studies reveal that having law enforcement officers in schools influences how student disciplinary issues are managed. For example, rather than being viewed as social challenges or opportunities for growth and improvement, disciplinary issues become redefined as criminal justice issues that require a criminal justice orientation. Indeed, the presence of a police officer can transform a routine disciplinary situation from one that would be handled by a teacher or school official into a criminal justice situation handled by a police officer resulting in an arrest. Empirical studies also confirm this phenomenon. When schools have regular contact with law enforcement officers, they are more likely to report students to law enforcement agencies for disciplinary events, including lower-level offenses that arguably should be addressed using more pedagogically-sound methods.
The negative outcomes that flow into the lives of students who are involved in the criminal justice system can be severe. Students who are arrested are less likely to graduate from high school and more likely to be involved in the criminal justice system as adults, even if the arrest does not lead to an immediate conviction and detainment. Incarcerating youth is connected to an array of undesirable outcomes, such as failure to graduate from high school, mental health concerns, the development of violent behavior and attitudes, unemployment, and future involvement in the criminal justice system.
While the debate over the proper role of law enforcement officers in schools has persisted for years, it was elevated to an unprecedented level during the summer of 2020. The tragic deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other victims by police officers precipitated national calls to “defund the police.” Soon thereafter, many turned their attention to school police officers, causing several school districts nationwide to rethink their SRO programs. Several school districts elected to curtail their SRO programs or withdraw their partnership with local police departments altogether. The debate over the proper role of law enforcement officers in schools (if any) rages on today and will continue in the foreseeable future.
We contribute to the scholarly literature on school police officers, the school-to-prison pipeline, and education law by providing much needed data drawn from the U.S. Department of Education's School Survey on Crime and Safety (SSOCS), the nation's leading cross-sectional database on public school crime and safety. We are the first scholars to examine data on law enforcement officers and schools at three junctures spanning a decade (SSOCS 2009-2010, SSOCS 2015-2016, and SSOCS 2017-2018). Furthermore, our various models include supplemental data on (1) state-level mandatory reporting requirements (e.g., statutes that require schools to report students to law enforcement for engaging in certain acts) and (2) district-level per pupil spending information.
Our analyses provide a critical longitudinal perspective revealing several important trends. First, we find that both the percentage of schools relying on law enforcement and the magnitude of law enforcement presence in schools increased significantly from 2009 to 2018. Second, consistent with prior research, at every juncture of the data gathering stage we find that regular contact with law enforcement officers is strongly associated with reporting students to law enforcement agencies for committing various offenses. Furthermore, the data reveal that the magnitude of law enforcement presence is also connected to higher reporting rates.
Because (1) the percentage of schools having regular contact with law enforcement increased over time and (2) there is a strong connection between regular contact with law enforcement and schools' rate of reporting students to law enforcement agencies, we hypothesized that the rate of reporting students to law enforcement also increased over time. However, our analyses revealed that the opposite is true. Strikingly, the overall reporting rate of students to law enforcement actually decreased quite significantly from 2009 to 2018.
Disaggregating the data further reveals that not only did the referral rate decline at schools that did not have regular contact with law enforcement (which was less surprising), but it also declined significantly, albeit at a slightly lower rate, at schools that had regular contact with law enforcement. While the data do not reveal the reasons for this unexpected result, we suspect that it may be attributable to a combination of factors, including requiring schools to publicly disclose the number of student referrals to law enforcement and schools failing to accurately report all referrals, in violation of federal law.
In addition, our study highlights the complexities associated with race and student discipline and may shed more light on the nuanced influence that implicit racial bias wields on school officials' decision-making. Interestingly, the concentration of students of color attending schools largely did not influence the rate at which schools reported students to law enforcement at each juncture of the data gathering stage. We emphasize that the SSOCS data sets do not contain demographic data (e.g., race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status) on the individual students who were referred to law enforcement. Rather, the SSOCS data sets only provide demographic information on the collective student populations at the school level (e.g., the percentage of students at a school who are Black, male, etc.). Thus, it is certainly possible that marginalized students in a school were referred to law enforcement at disproportionate rates. Our narrower point, however, is that at least at the school level, the SSOCS data do not indicate racial disparities relating to student referrals to law enforcement.
Our finding that the overall concentration of students of color in a school largely did not influence the rate at which schools reported students to law enforcement may surprise some, especially because it is well-documented that racial inequalities are pervasive in many areas of school discipline, public education, criminal justice, and other areas of society. Yet our findings comport with our general understanding of the nuanced ways that implicit racial bias influences school officials' decisions in the disciplinary context. Specifically, when a disciplinary incident requires an educator to subjectively characterize student behavior (e.g., determining if a student has engaged in defiant, disrespectful, or disruptive behavior), the effects of implicit racial bias are more pronounced, often resulting in racially disparate outcomes. But for disciplinary incidents requiring less characterization (e.g., drug possession, fighting, vandalism)--which are the bases for the vast majority of referrals to law enforcement--the effects of implicit bias often are muted, resulting in fewer racial equity concerns.
This Article proceeds in three parts. Part I briefly summarizes the relevant research literatures. In Part II we describe our data, research design, and empirical strategy. In Part III, we present our results and consider their legal and policy implications. We also provide recommendations for reform based on our findings.
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It is vital that we better understand how students' educational experiences are changing now that law enforcement officers have a sustained presence in more than half of our nation's traditional public schools. We are the first researchers to provide a longitudinal perspective of important trends that have emerged from this phenomenon by examining data spanning a decade. Our analyses reveal that at each time juncture, regular contact with law enforcement is strongly associated with an increased rate at which school officials report students to law enforcement agencies for various disciplinary events, including non-violent offenses. These findings are troubling because involving students in the criminal justice system can lead to severe outcomes.
Our study also highlights the complex relationship between race and student discipline. The overall concentration of students of color at a school largely did not influence the rate at which school officials reported students to law enforcement at each data gathering stage. However, these findings are consistent with our understanding of how implicit racial biases operate. Specifically, implicit bias wields greater influence when disciplinary situations require school officials to subjectively characterize behavior. Because the vast majority of law enforcement referrals are for objectively-defined offenses that require less characterization, we should expect to (and do) observe fewer racial disparities related to law enforcement referrals.
In addition, our study reveals another perplexing trend. Because (1) more schools experienced sustained contact with law enforcement over time, and (2) regular contact with law enforcement is positively associated with the rate at which schools report students to law enforcement, we expected to observe that the overall reporting rate also increased over time. However, the opposite trend emerged: schools' reporting rates during the 2017-2018 school year were far lower than in 2009-2010. We do not know for certain the reasons for this unexpected decline, but the declining rates imply that schools are responding to an environment that continues to evolve in real time. We further suspect, as do other researchers, that many school districts may underreport or fail to keep track of the number of student referrals, in violation of federal law. We encourage additional research to identify the precise reasons for this decline. We also recommend that the U.S. Department of Education establish a random auditing mechanism to ensure that schools report these data accurately.
Finally, we call on federal and state legislative bodies to reduce funding for SRO programs and augment support for evidence-based initiatives that promote healthy school climates. Such initiatives will create learning environments that are more inclusive, equitable, and safe--environments where all children have an increased opportunity to reach their potential.
Judge James Noel Dean and Professor of Law, SMU Dedman School of Law.
William G. McRoberts Professor in the Empirical Study of Law, Cornell Law School.
