School Resource Officers Essay

Across the country, we have many K-12 schools. Lots of those have school resource officers (SROs). But what are school resource officers? How did we end up with school resource officers in schools? What purpose do they have? How do students feel about school resource officers? As we will be able to tell, school resource officers are important part of our society today, and understanding how the program came to be, as well as how they became integrated in our schools will help us understand what will be considered as one of the most important pieces of policing in today’s society.
So, what are school resource officers? According to Anfara (2011), school resource officers, or also known as school police officers or school liaison officers, are …show more content…
There are many differences between security and school resource officers. They do not have the same level of training and are not prepared in the same way as school resource officers (Theriot and Cuellar, 2016). According to Theriot and Cuellar (2016), official school resource officers have more training and are expected to focus on more than just general law enforcement activities, in contrast to many of the general security guards found within schools. Some of the training that school resource officers get include topics such as working with juveniles, being a positive role model, adolescent development, investigative skills in child abuse, public speaking, instructional techniques, classroom management, counseling skills, and emergency management (Anfara, …show more content…
This followed by the Los Angeles school police department in 1948 (Gulen, 2010). It is a consensus that the start of the official school resource officer program originally started in Flint, Michigan in 1958 (Gulen, 2010). The purpose of these school resource officers in Flint schools were to deter school crime through a proactive crime control philosophy (Theriot and Cuellar, 2016). It is also stated that the purpose of the school resource officers in Flint, Michigan in 1958 was to create a better relationship between the police and students while also in the process help them become better citizens (Crawford, 2016). In the years that followed the official school resource officer program in Flint, Michigan, the term school resource officer was coined and these school resource officer programs began to be implemented. However, there was not a rise in popularity of the program until the early 1990s (Theriot and Cuellar, 2016). This rise was the result in the rapid increase in youth violence and homicides within school districts (Theriot and Cuellar, 2016). The overall goals of the school resource officer programs that spread across the nation over the years following the first implementation of the school resource officer was security, citizenship building, and relationship creation (Crawford, 2016). When the school resource