Reply to Reinstate School Resource Officers at MCPS

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]SROs are not useless.  My children are at WJ, and a couple of years ago (pre-Covid), a student told the SRO about a former student living in Baltimore who was posting messages on SM with an assault rifle, threatening to shoot up the school.  Former student was arrested and put in jail before anything bad happened.  Don't tell me SROs are useless, because you are wrong.

Just one example of many good things SROs do (did).  [/quote]

Anecdotes are not evidence. In this example, the student could have just as easily reported to the police department.

The evidence that does exist, the actual data, show few associations between SROs and reductions of violence (and absolutely no association with school shootings, btw).[/quote]

Yet anecdotes are exactly what led to the county council’s decision. Can we assume, then, that those anecdotes can’t be defined as “actual data” either? The data I suspect some of us would like to see would be MCPS-specific numbers. Survey all MCPS students, all staff, and all parents. What does the community want? Right now, the only MCPS-specific data we have to go on is the principal survey. If that’s any indicator, there is likely a lot of support for the SRO program.

The other problem we face is it’s hard to quantify how much good an SRO can do. It’s more nuanced. It’s like the old toothpaste ad that said a particular brand has prevented 97 million cavities. How would we know that?  Likewise, how would we know how many bad outcomes SROs prevented? Nobody can reasonably or accurately track that data. (“I stopped 2 kids from dropping out of school today.” - That data doesn’t exist. You often don’t see positive results for months or years.) That doesn’t mean those good outcomes don’t exist. [/quote]

The problem with that stance is that there IS evidence that SROs perpetuate disparities and exclusion of students of color and with disabilities. You combine that with little evidence that SROs are effective. Asking a population that largely isn’t affected by that disparity who gets some sort of misinformed peace of mind from having a police officer in school just perpetuates inequity. [/quote]

But it isn't true.  Look at the number of arrests in MCPS schools prior to the SRO program, and after.  Numbers are much lower with SROs in schools.  [/quote]

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