Date of Award

5-1-2024

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College/School/Department

School of Criminal Justice

Dissertation/Thesis Chair

David McDowall

Committee Members

Frankie Y Bailey, William A Pridemore

Keywords

Exclusionary Discipline, Racial Disparities, School Resource Officers, School-Based Offending, Violence Prevention

Subject Categories

Law Enforcement and Corrections

Abstract

There have been police and school partnerships in the United States for as long as public schools have existed, dating to the early- to mid-1800s. These partnerships have formalized as educational philosophies have changed, particularly in the context of school safety and discipline practices. In this dissertation, I explore the impact of implementing a School Resource Officer (SRO) program on school safety and I contribute to the national conversation about disparities in exclusionary discipline practices related to the presence of SROs. There have been several key turning points in these police and school partnerships, notably the Flint, Michigan, school liaison program in the 1950s, the creation of the National Association of School Resource Officers (NASRO) in 1991, the massacre at Columbine High School in 1999, and the backlash against the racially disparate school-to-prison pipeline throughout the 21st century, most recently in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. Complicating study of this topic, there is no national accreditation of School Resource Officers (SROs) and there is inconsistent data collection on these programs, leading to a dearth of empirical evaluations of their efficacy and unintended consequences. Addressing this issue from the federal level, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) recently published a report on this topic and recommended using the US Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) managed by the Office of Civil Rights, as it contains a national measure of sworn law enforcement in schools (McKenna & Petrosino, 2022). In this dissertation I use these CRDC data to examine some of the key metrics that these programs are intended to achieve, mainly a reduction in crime, and explore in a more nuanced way the impact that the presence of police officers in schools has on racial disparities in exclusionary discipline. Study One examines whether the adoption of an SRO program is related to short-term decreases in an array of school-based offenses, including assaults and threats, contributing to the national conversation regarding SRO efficacy in the US context. Study Two aims to describe the relationships between the presence of SROs and disparities, across race and disability status, in the use of exclusionary discipline practices, providing additional nuance to the national conversation about school pushout.

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