Just Say “No” to SROs

It is a white person’s fantasy that school resource officers do anything to deter violence or stop mass shootings that we’ve become all too numb to in the United States.

Recently, the superintendent of Norman Public Schools sent an email to families, co-signed with the president of the teachers’ professional organization, decrying the city council and county officials’ decision to not fund School Resource Officers (SROs) at each district school.

I am a member of the Columbine generation- that should have been the first, last, and only mass school shooting in the US- but my daughters are a part of the Newtown, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, and Uvalde and numerous-other-mass-shootings-at-school generation. It simply should be unacceptable to us that as citizens, we live with the constant specter of gun violence, particularly to which our children are vulnerable.

Remember, Uvalde and Marjorie Stoneman had SROs, neither of whom did a thing to stop the massacre. Instead, the SRO at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas hid. The Uvalde officer waited outside with a platoon of highly armed police, while the slaughter continued.

None of these shootings came at the hands of men who were unknown to the system. They had mental health flags, and many, many of them had a known history of violence or expressions of violence and hatred towards women. It’s just not a mystery *who* perpetrates these casualties. And it’s not a mystery that SROs are ineffective against them.

But why do we insist on a police presence in our schools? Why should any child get dropped off to a building with a police car (or two or three).

In fact, research shows not only are police in schools more likely to respond with an arrest to an incident instead of trying to de-escalate but they’re more likely to target Black, Brown, and Native students, and also students with disabilities.

Prisons have guards. Our children should not.

Instead of turning each school into San Quentin or Attica High, let’s invest in what we know works: mental health care and intervention with trained mental health professionals- not police, who protect property over people.

And that may be at the heart of Cleveland County’s decision to defund SROs in Norman Schools- their presence is more of a liability than anything else.