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News :: Miscellaneous |
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Police Officers In Urbana Schools a Bad Idea -- here's the facts. |
Current rating: 0 |
by Sascha Meinrath
Email: meinrath (nospam) uiuc.edu (unverified!) |
16 May 2001
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Many people have asked that I make public the document I entered into the public record at last Monday's City Council meeting. The transcript of what I read is below along with references where I collected these facts. The end conclusion is that placement of police officers in Urbana (or any public) schools is detrimental to the school's social climate, and has no proven positive effects. I have been told that Champaign has already done away with the program, hopefully Urbana will follow suit. |
My name is Sascha Meinrath and I am the co-founder and senior research assistant for the University of Illinois School Climate Research Team. This said, the views expressed here are my own and not necessarily those of this organization. I am here to speak today both as a community psychologist and a community member.
I began conducting school climate research over half a decade ago at Yale University. For the last several years I have been hired by the Champaign School District to assess the climate of its public schools. I believe the issue of whether to place an additional School Resource Officer in Urbana\'s schools is one that directly affects the social climate of our schools and the perceptions of students, teachers, and parents in these schools.
I have heard several reasons why adding a School Resource Officer would be a positive action, and would like to address each of these issues:
First is the idea that students will benefit and that better police relations will result from having a police officer interact with students. Numerous research studies have demonstrated that students, and especially minorities, do not trust police, and feel extremely uncomfortable around police officers. More than this, more recent studies have found that teacher-student relationships may be detrimentally affected when the roles of teachers and police are confounded within a school. These findings have numerous important implications for the micro-level relationship between teacher and students as well as for the structural factors that impact on this relationship (1).
A common misperception is that contact with school-based Police Officers leads to more positive perceptions of the police in general. However, the research of Hewstone, Hopkins, and Routh found students\' perceptions of police unchanged by the presence of School-Based Police Officers (2). Additional studies show that students\' perceptions of the police are only likely to be changed through changes in street relations between students and police (3). The small amount of evaluative research investigating the effect of school-based police on students\' perceptions have found results similar to the following:
questionnaire responses of 1,245 secondary-school students (aged 14-26 years) compared views of the police in schools with and without a full-time Schools Liaison Officer. Although attitudes to the police were marginally positive, they became less so over 1 yr. There was no evidence that Schools Liaison input into the target schools slows or halts this decline, or that it affects perceptions (4).
Given these findings, the fact that many students feel uncomfortable around police, and that minority students are inequitably affected by these feelings of discomfort, I would question the utility of placing police in public schools if your goal is to benefit students or create better police relations.
A second reason for adding a School Resource Officer is to help reduce violence in schools. However, there has been no systematic assessment showing any systematic lessening of violence in schools due to placement of School Resource Officers. Let me repeat this point - there is no data showing that the placement of School Resource Officers actually lowers the rate of school violence.
While some research has shown a reduction in violence rates when Police Officers are placed in schools - a claim used by proponents of placing Police in schools - violence rates across the country have been declining for the past decade, and it is impossible to separate these two effects. In fact, one study comparing the relative drop in school violence rates found that schools with Police Officers experienced a smaller reduction in their violence rates than schools without Police Officers - a finding that could be cynically interpreted to mean that Police Officers actually slow violence reduction.
According to the Justice Policy Institute, schools are far safer places than homes. For example, children are 23 times more likely to be killed in a gun accident in their homes than from all forms of death at school. This rate doesn\'t include car accidents, poisonings, and the multitude of other ways kids die outside of school. According to the study\'s researchers \"Media coverage of dramatic killings has created a misperception that schools are dangerous\" (5).
A more extensive discussion of the decline in violence throughout the United States can be found in the pages of the Journal of the American Medical Association (6):
Between 1991 and 1997, the percentage of students in a physical fight decreased 14%, from 42.5% (95% confidence interval [CI], 40.1%-44.9%) to 36.6% (95% CI, 34.6%-38.6%); the percentageof students injured in a physical fight decreased 20%, from 4.4% (95% CI, 3.6%-5.2%) to 3.5% (95% CI, 2.9%-4.1%); and the percentage of students who carried a weapon decreased 30%, from 26.1% (95% CI, 23.8%-28.4%) to 18.3% (95% CI, 16.5%-20.1%). Between 1993 and 1997, the percentage of students who carried a gun decreased 25%, from 7.9% (95% CI, 6.6%-9.2%) to 5.9% (95% CI, 5.1%-6.7%); the percentage of students in a physical fight on school property decreased 9%, from 16.2% (95% CI, 15.0%-17.4%) to 14.8% (95% CI, 13.5%-16.1%); and the percentage of students who carried a weapon on school property decreased 28%, from 11.8% (95% CI, 10.4%-13.2%) to 8.5% (95% CI, 7.0%-10.0%). All of these changes represent significant linear decreases (7).
Given the lack of research demonstrating any lessening of violence due to Police liaisons being placed in schools, and the detrimental effect these police officers have on student perceptions - and especially minority students perceptions - of their schools, if your goal is to benefit the students of Urbana, I would strongly recommend against the placement of Police officers in our schools.
(1) Busby-Sham Choy, Claire Annette. Interpersonal trust in teacher-student relationships: Meaning for black students (14--16 years) of Caribbean background in secondary schools in the
Greater Toronto Area. Dissertation Abstracts International, A (Humanities and Social
Sciences). Vol60(10-A), May, US: University Microfilms International. 2000, 3602.
(2) Hewstone, Miles; Hopkins, Nicholas; Routh, David A. Cognitive models of stereotype change: I. Generalization and subtyping in young people\'s views of the police. European Journal of Social Psychology. Vol 22(3), May-Jun 1992, 219-234.
(3) Hopkins, Nick. School pupils\' perceptions of the police that visit schools: Not all police are \"pigs.\" Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology. Vol 4(3), Aug 1994, 189-207.
(4) Hopkins, Nick; Hewstone, Miles; Hantzi, Alexandra. Police-schools liaison and young people\'s image of the police: An intervention evaluation. British Journal of Psychology. Vol 83(2), May 1992, 203-220.
(5) For further information see the American Youth Policy Forum website: www.aypf.org.
(6) Those interested in school violence prevention should check out the multiple resources available at: http://www.noviolence.net/links.html
(7) For the full text of the article see the Journal of the American Medical Association webpage:
http://jama.ama-assn.org/issues/v282n5/rfull/joc90430.html
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