NorCal Schools Mull Armed Security, Safety Options Following Uvalde

CALIFORNIA — Shortly after the City of Lathrop, California decided to contract armed private security, school personnel asked a new armed guard to leave Lathrop High School.

City officials had instructed a private security guard to patrol Lathrop High School from afar in the wake of the deadly massacre in Uvalde, Texas, the Manteca/Ripon Bulletin reported. But due to miscommunications, the school was never told to expect a new security guard, a Manteca Unified School District official told Patch.

The district continues to have no interest in hiring private security given its extensive School Resource Officer program with multiple local law enforcement agencies, according to Lindsay Harris, Coordinator of Community Outreach for the district.

The challenge facing the Manteca School District is one communities across the country grapple with in the wake of the deadly massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas: Will armed officers make students safe?

A report about local law enforcement’s failure to intervene in Uvalde has prompted a national conversation about public safety and the place of armed security on school campuses, one had not long ago in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd. Districts everywhere are reexamining school safety, training and security staff.

Armed Security And School Resource Officers?

Lathrop was not alone in quickly opting for armed security. Farther down the coast, the Malibu City Council recently voted to request proposals for school safety consultants and private security. Neighboring Beverly Hills Unified School District has used a private security company to patrol their schools for years.

Fremont Unified School District in Northern California has become somewhat of gold standard for SRO proponents. The district decided to remove police officers from local schools in 2020 amid the nationwide George Floyd protests over police brutality. However, the district quickly reversed that decision due to outcry from parents who wanted the cops back, The Mercury News reported.

The current school resource officer program for Fremont schools was a years-long collaboration between community stakeholders such as staff, students, parents and city officials, Public Information Officer Laura Forrest told Patch. The district’s approach focuses on transparency and reporting — a goal that recently produced a nearly 80-page report that outlines data from every interaction between an SRO and a school community member. The report includes information broken down by race and gender identity.

The district was recently recognized by the National Association of Student Resource Officers as a model agency for its efforts to proactively address school resource officer responsibility and accountability.

Other California districts have just chosen to opt-out. Oakland eliminated its school police force in 2020 with the support of its school police chief, Jeff Godowin, Time reported. Any continued focus on school resource officers is unrealistic and unaffordable, and focus is better placed on gun control, Goodwin recently told Time.

The Alameda Unified School District in Northern California also ditched their school police in 2020. Following Uvalde, the district will review protocols and work with the local police department, but does not have immediate plans to reinstate the school resource officers, according to Susan Davis, the district’s Senior Manager for Community Affairs.

The Los Angeles Unified School District similarly eliminated a large portion of its armed school resource officers on its campuses in 2020 and put the funds toward adding social workers, counselors and mental health professionals to campuses. The district moved to a model in which school police are stationed nearby campuses and could only enter on request, L.A. Taco reported.

The district has expanded school safety protocols in the wake of Uvalde, a spokesperson of Los Angeles Unified told Patch. The district brought in a new interim school police chief and will “continue to have armed police officers stationed throughout District school sites,” the spokesperson said. The district continues to “aggressively recruit” employees for roles related to social work and de-escalation.

Some two-thirds of California high school students attend a school with school resource officers. They are most common in California high schools and schools with higher enrollment. African American and Latino students are 16 and 14 percent more likely to attend a school with school resource officers than their white counterparts, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

Across the country, the presence of school resource officers has increased dramatically over the last two decades. The number of schools across the country that reported having one or more security officers on campus at least once a week reached 61 percent in 2018, a 19 percent increase from 2006, according to the Center for Public Integrity.

The California Department of Education does not give any specific guidance to local school districts on the question of armed security, but rather urges districts to consult with local law enforcement agencies to “develop and update comprehensive school safety plans,” according to Brody Fernandez, public information officer for the department.

“There is no one single recommendation for the presence of armed personnel on school campuses. School resource officers can be one important element in school safety as well as mental health support for students who are in distress and showing signs of the potential for violence,” Fernandez said.

Do Armed Guards Work?

In Malibu, teacher Maia Zander posed a question at the core of the armed guard debate: will armed security actually make schools safer, or will it only make people feel safer?

Many studies — including this JAMA Network study considering all gunshot injuries during mass school shootings between 1960 and 2019 — have found that armed guards are not associated with a significant decrease in gun injuries and rather associated with a greater death rate than schools without an armed guard present.

A 2021 study found that armed campus police “do effectively reduce some forms of violence in schools, but do not prevent school shootings or gun-related incidents,” Poynter reported. These other forms of violence include physical attacks and fights.

Armed officers have famously been present at many deadly school shootings, including the 2018 shootings in Parkland, Florida and Santa Fe, Texas and the shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

Averted violence is an important piece to determining the effectiveness of school resource officers, Mo Canady, Executive Director of the National Association of School Resource Officers.

Canady pointed to some examples of armed security stopping a school shooter before a massacre, including a 2018 incident in Dixon, Illinois and a 2022 incident in Olathe, Kansas.

Earlier this year, a SRO and the vice principal at a school in Olathe, Kansas engaged with a student rumored to have a gun, KMBC reported. The student refused to let authorities search his bag and ultimately fired gunshots, prompting the SRO to shoot back, KMBC reported. In the end, the student, SRO and vice principal were each shot multiple times, according to authorities.

The National Police Foundation compiles and analyzes such instances of averted school violence. Since 2019, the group has analyzed over 170 averted attacks and over 60 completed attacks.

Communication of intent to a third party was one of the most common warning signs for all the analyzed incidents. The organization found that 100 of the suspects had communicated to a third party their intent to do harm through an attack, and 62 had communicated a direct threat to damage, injure or kill targets.

Community Concerns and Added Risk

Multiple studies have found that school resource officers disproportionately affect students with disabilities and students of color. Nationwide, Black students and students with disabilities were referred to law enforcement at nearly twice their share of the student population, the Center for Public Integrity concluded using data from the U.S. Department of Education Civil Rights.

A 2021 study found that school resource officers are associated with more suspensions, expulsions, student arrests and police referrals, which all disproportionately affect Black students and students with disabilities, according to Poynter.

In 2020, many students spoke up about their negative experiences with law enforcement on campuses. A New York Times article from 2020 outlines many California students’ encounters with police, including an incident in Los Angeles when school police used pepper spray to break up a fight.

More recently, Malibu teachers expressed concern that Malibu students of color will feel unsafe on campuses with armed security. She cautioned Malibu City Council that good people with genuine concern can still make decisions with negative consequences for students.

"Feedback [from teachers] was pretty mixed but a very sizable majority was completely against any armed presence and especially private security," Zander said. Zander served on the school safety committee and was present for earlier conversations with the city about security measures.

"An armed presence will make many people on our campus feel less safe," Zander said. "There are very serious concerns, especially about our students of color, being made to feel less welcome on campus than they already do. ... Many of us teachers would like to prioritize solutions that don't have guns."

“Yes, you can see that having more police officers in school is an immediate action. … but what are the consequences down the road in a year, in two years, in ten years? You’re talking about feeding the school to prison pipeline, you’re talking about traumatizing children potentially for who knows how long,” said Zeenat Yahya, policy director for March for Our Lives.

Perceptions of the role policing plays on public safety is different for people of different backgrounds, Yahya said.

“I think there is sentimental value that a lot of folks, particularly white folks, have around the correlation between safety and police. There’s a lot of communities — communities of color, Black communities — that don’t actually consider police equal to safety for them,” Yahya said.

School resource officers should be well trained on issues of diversity, Canady said. Officers are carefully trained to avoid allowing biases inform their enforcement, he said.

“I get the concern and I hear it,” Canady said. “It is part of the importance of careful selection and the specific training we do. We train very deeply around issues of diversity and implicit bias.”

So, what now?

Well-trained school resource officers are an important piece of a complicated, multipronged answer to gun violence on campuses, according to Canady, of the National Association of School Resource Officers. But schools should not be getting just any law enforcement officer, they should be getting the best-trained veteran officers who have a genuine interest in adolescent development, Canady said.

This is why part of the reason why private security is less favorable to SROs as a solution, Canady said.

Any expert will understand that security measures like school resource officers are only a small piece to a bigger puzzle, Canady said.

“In addition, best practice considerations include forming behavioral threat assessment teams to evaluate threats that students make and should include law enforcement, teachers or staff members who know the student, psychologists, administrators, and other mental health professionals,” Fernandez with the CA Department of Education said.

Many advocates have argued that solutions to school shootings that still center guns and violence miss the point.

Increasing access to mental health resources and adding social workers to schools would be a good immediate use of energy and funds, Yahya with March for Our Lives said. A broader understanding of public safety must include conversations about poverty, food scarcity and other things, Yahya said.

“When we think of safety we think of, what does that mean for a community, and really redefining that. Overall that means addressing things like poverty, homelessness, food scarcity, a breadth of issues,” Yahya said. “What it means to keep students safe in schools is a wide variety of stuff including things like having access to more mental health counselors and services, or having access to be able to afford meals — things like that”

Bea Karnes and Paige Austin contributed to this report.