School districts that had voted to eliminate school resource officers amid the summer 2020 “defund the police” movement are backtracking and bringing back armed security.
In June, the Denver School Board voted 4-3 to permit the “persistent presence of school resource officers” in the city’s schools, a stark reversal from 2020 when the board voted to eliminate all SROs.
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In the nation’s capital, a similar story unfolded. During a May meeting, the D.C. Council scrapped plans to eliminate school resource officers that had been enacted in 2021 following pressure from Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser.
“When we surveyed our school leaders, they overwhelmingly opposed removing School Resource Officers,” Bowser said in a 2022 statement. “We know, and people who spend time in schools know, that there are times when support is needed to keep all students safe. We want that support to come from trained SROs who know and have built trusting relationships with our students and who know the school administration and teachers.”
The restoration of school resource officers has come as Democratic politicians, including President Joe Biden, have attempted to distance themselves from the defund the police movement, which rose to prominence during the summer 2020 riots following the death of George Floyd.
Max Eden, a research fellow in education at the American Enterprise Institute, told the Washington Examiner that an increase in crime forced some school districts to reassess their plans to eliminate police presence in schools.
“Because education governance has fallen under the sway of a mind virus, some urban education leaders decided that they needed to remove school resource officers because of George Floyd,” Eden said. “As violence, theft, and weapons incidents increased, some school districts reconsidered their positions on this. Others are still keen to sacrifice student safety for social justice virtue signaling.”
But because schools were closed during most of the 2020-2021 school year, the defunded school resource officers were largely absent from campuses that were closed. This, Eden explained, allowed districts to give the false impression that incidents had declined without resource officers.
“It’s easy to pull SROs out of school when there are no kids in the school,” Eden said. “Then, voila, they bragged, ‘Look, we took SROs out and school-based incidents went down!’ But then the kids come back, incidents skyrocket, and then some school leaders decide, ‘Yeah, maybe we need them after all.’”
The public broadly supports the return of school resource officers. A survey from the Colorado Polling Institute asked voters their opinion of the Denver School Board’s decision to restore school resource officers, and a whopping 63% of voters said they supported having SROs.
In Congress, there have been efforts to fund school resource officers in schools. Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), who was the governor of Florida during the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, introduced the School Guardian Act earlier this year to fund armed security for schools.
“This commonsense bill will establish a grant program to provide federal funding to support the placement of armed law enforcement personnel at every K-12 school in the nation that wants better school security,” the senator told the Washington Examiner in a statement, noting the widespread support from the law enforcement community the bill has received. “This is something Congress can pass today to help keep our kids safe.”
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Scott also blasted efforts to turn the funding of law enforcement into a partisan issue and said backing school resource officers would help ease the minds of parents concerned about their child’s safety at school.
“Protecting our kids and supporting law enforcement should not be a partisan issue — our brave law enforcement officers put their lives on the line daily to protect our communities. We cannot allow Democrats to demonize them with dangerous defunding attempts,” Scott said. “Having a trained school resource officer at every school in America will help deter dangerous criminals and give parents peace of mind that someone is protecting their kid.”
