Reply to For everyone insisting MCPS reinstate SROs

Forum Index » Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS)

Reply to "For everyone insisting MCPS reinstate SROs"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The mass shooting issue is not what the SRO program is for.  They are not effective response for that problem.  They are pretty effective in pushing the drug dealing and gang activity out of schools.  It probably just pushes it into the surrounding community but it’s still a win for teachers and kids not to have to deal with it during school hours.

The question of whether too many disciplinary matters are criminalized is an entirely different matter.  Police work for us.  If we don’t want things to be criminal, then the police won’t arrest people for them.  If school admin decide to handle internally, the police won’t make arrests.  As a community, we need to provide direction to our schools and police about what we want handled in what way.  All removing SROs does it to remove officers who are familiar with the school dynamics and have training in dealing with you, and replace them with whatever officer happens to be closest.  Yes, SROs should get more specialized training—replacing them with officers untrained in these matters is not helpful.  Knowledge of the community is also helpful—a good SRO will know if there are groups that have an outstanding beef and can be more proactive in monitoring when those groups may cross paths.  A big part of commmujity policing is averting crime just by establishing a presence in anticipated trouble spots.  [/quote]

Wow, I think I agree with absolutely everything in this post, except, perhaps, the overly optimistic view that the police are actually responsive to community wishes regarding policing. I think they are responsive to school administrators and teachers, but there isn’t a lot of oversight there, either.[/quote]

My point was more that we as a community decide what is a criminal violation.  If we don’t think property damage of under $50 by minors should be a criminal offense, we can write the laws that way.  If we say something is a criminal offense, and someone calls the police to report a criminal offense, we can’t really blame the police for treating it like a criminal offense.  Prosecutors are the ones that are supposed to exercise discretion in deciding whether to let something go.  Police sometimes do too, but that’s not really their role.  In fact, they often get in trouble for not processing a report of a crime if they decide it’s not a serious crime.  
It also irks me a little when people use national data….we have one of the most educated, trained and well-paid forces in the country.  (Obviously not perfect and there are still boneheads like the two who became infamous when called yo respond to an absconding ES kid).  But I have not seen any data suggesting that SROs in MCPS were papering kids for typical kid stuff.  [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics