Building Community Trust

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The story below is from our July/August 2023 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you! 

School resource officers don’t only protect and serve our community and schools, but they act as mentors, educators and role models, too.

There has been an uptick in K-12 school shootings in recent years—303 in 2022 according to the K-12 School Shooting Database. Given that alarming trend, many are looking more closely at school safety.

The reliance on school resource officers, or SROs, to protect students and staff is growing. However, the job of an SRO extends far beyond simply providing safety.

Curtis Hicks, superintendent of Salem City Schools, explains SROs accomplish two important objectives: providing safety and building community trust. The division has had SROs in its schools for over three decades. It currently has six officers, one assigned to each school.

“Over the last several years with school shootings and concerns about school safety, I think nothing is a better deterrent for school violence than when they drive by and one of the first things they see is a police car sitting out front,” he says. “Nothing is better than having an armed resource officer on the premises.”

Students who have positive law enforcement figures in their lives, like SROs, from kindergarten through 12th grade are more likely to view law enforcement as being helpful, not harmful, he says.

“Kids start to look at police officers different because they’ve had so many interactions with them over the years and almost 100% of those interactions have been positive,” he says. “Then you fast forward to when they’re teenagers or young adults and they have an interaction with a police officer, it starts from the foundation that they’re there to help and solve problems. It automatically deescalates.”

Given the fact that the officers are a constant presence in the lives of school children, Hicks views them as being “more counselor than cop.”

Salem Chief of Police Mike Crawley approaches the issue of school safety in a very personal way because his children are currently in school. While he wears a badge, he feels he’s a dad first and a law enforcement officer second.

“When you’re a parent and you’re dropping your kid off to school, that’s a very helpless feeling after you hear of a school shooting in another community,” he acknowledges. “Seeing an officer when you drop your kid off in the morning, we want to make sure we do everything we can to make parents feel comfortable.”

The SROs who service Roanoke City Public Schools are provided by both the Roanoke Sheriff’s Office and Roanoke Police Department.

There have been SROs in the division since the late 1980s when Chief M. David Hooper started putting them there as part of his community policing initiative.

“Human beings love what they can see, touch, feel and smell—we go off our senses. The school resource officer addresses that,” Chris Perkins, chief operations officer for the school division, says. “It’s essential in today’s society to incorporate our public safety professionals into our schools.”

He’s quick to admit he’s not a big fan of placing too much reliance on security gadgets, like metal detectors, because they’re only as good as the people who operate them. “A gadget isn’t going to make us safer. People are going to make us safer. It is critical for the school resource officers to be in our schools and to build relationships with our kids,” he says.

Research indicates, he notes, that the vast majority of school shooters tell someone what they’re planning. The hope in having SROs build relationships with students is that they’ll feel comfortable going to them with the information. “We can bring to bear a number of resources to be proactive and potentially preventative for a tragedy happening in our schools,” he says.

Perkins echoes Hicks’s feelings about the versatility of SROs.

“They’re part of the fabric of our schools,” he stresses. “They’re mentors. They’re educators. They’re role models. They will go from pastor to social worker if they need to depending on the situation.”

Matthew Kelly, an SRO at Highland Park Elementary School, is proof of that. A law enforcement officer since 2011, he’s been an SRO since 2018. His desire to become an SRO dates back to the late 1980s and early 1990s when he was a student at Fallon Park Elementary School. Bryan Lawrence was the SRO at the time. “He’s legitimately one of the first positive male influences I can remember outside of my household,” he remembers.

Kelly approaches his job through the lens of “kids don’t care how much you know, they want to know how much you care,” which he saw on a board when he went through D.A.R.E training.

He demonstrates how much he cares by opening his office during lunchtime to students who’re observing Ramadan. “We’ve got Disney movies going. You’re fasting, it’s hard for you to be around other people eating. Here’s a safe place for you to come practice your religion judgment free,” he says.

His efforts to show the students at Highland Park that he cares don’t end when the last bell of the day rings. Even when he’s at home at night with his family, he immediately checks his laptop to see if one of his students is impacted when he hears of a police matter in Southwest Roanoke.

“I’ve got three children of my own at home, but I tell everybody I’ve got over 400 kids. I mean that,” he says.

Many of the relationships he’s built with students last long after they’ve moved on to middle school. The strength of those relationships is evidenced by the fact that former students frequently come up to him at the Kirk Family YMCA when he’s working out and ask if they can join him.

Roanoke Sheriff Antonio Hash, who himself was an SRO for four years before being elected to his position, says he won’t stop until he has an officer at each school because he doesn’t want to be asked why he didn’t do something beforehand to prevent a tragedy. His office supplies 13 SROs for the elementary schools, as well as two support personnel.

He is quite strict in his selection of potential SROs. Liking children and the ability to build relationships are two of the top attributes he looks for.

“When you get up in the morning, you have to put your cape on because you aren’t just showing up with a weapon … you’re showing up to be somebody’s big brother, somebody’s father, somebody’s mentor or resource,” he says.

The job of an SRO, he adds, extends far beyond the school building. When he was an SRO, he made it a habit of driving through the neighborhoods where the students lived instead of taking a more direct route in the hopes of seeing them out and about. “I’m very adamant about community engagement,” he stresses.

Despite the positive aspects of being an SRO, there’s no denying that it’s a stressful job.

“It’s difficult being an SRO because everybody depends on you,” Hash admits.

Given that reality, he regularly tells his officers to speak up when they aren’t in the right mindset because they must be mentally strong enough to run head-first into danger at a moment’s notice.

“The first thing I do every morning when I arrive at the school … I pray over my building, I pray over my staff, my students. That’s how I get my head right,” Kelly explains.

The Roanoke Police Department supplies nine SROs, one at each middle school and two at each high school.

Daisy Ball, an associate professor at Roanoke College and coordinator of its criminal justice program, cautions that although she has personally observed strong relationships between SROs and students through her work with law enforcement, the research suggests the impact SROs have is complicated.

“Forty-plus years of research shows that it doesn’t appear to improve conditions and it may actually make situations worse for specific demographics,” she explains. She points to research that indicates the presence of an SRO leads to more suspensions and expulsions for non-white students, contributing to the school-to-prison pipeline.

Those who think SROs are going to be a silver bullet for both protection and community goodwill, she notes, should adjust their thinking. Adding more SROs should be used as a supplement, not an alternative, to building stronger connections with stakeholders, cultivating positive school environments and increasing access to mental health services, she says.

“If done right, their presence can be really fantastic,” she adds. “Our approach to SROs needs to be informed by the research that has been done.”

Crawley advises those with concerns about having officers in schools talk with individuals such as himself. “Police departments are specific to the communities that they serve. Get involved,” he says.

The story above is from our July/August 2023 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!