"Softening" School Resource Officers: The Extension of Police Presence in Schools in an Era of Black Lives Matter, School Shootings, and Rising Inequality

• In Event: Moscone Center West Roundtable Session 14
  In Roundtable Session: Birds of a Feather? Examining the Connections Between Restorative and Punitive Practices

Abstract

Objectives
Drawing on a qualitative case study of policymaking and community advocacy for equitable educational change in one U.S. city, this paper examines how and why the city continuously reaffirmed its decision to maintain and expand the School Resource Officer (SRO) program in its four high schools. This study demonstrates how even ostensibly equitable alternatives to punitive discipline, including restorative practices, can become reincorporated into the school to jail nexus.

Theoretical Frameworks
We emphasize the connections among the school to jail nexus (Meiners, 2007), the carceral state (Sojoyner, 2013; Vaught, 2017) and the broader constellation of racial capitalism (Melamed, 2011; Robinson, 2000). The framing of the school to jail nexus illuminates “the tentacles in policies, practices, and informal knowledges that support, naturalize, and extend relationships between incarceration and schools” (Meiners 2007, 4, italics in original). We view the school to jail nexus within a broader framework, emphasizing its connections to the carceral state and racial capitalism, to illuminate how shifting and contradictory recent trends such as restorative practices, anti-gun control measures, and a shortage of teachers of color in schools, which are not typically considered part of the school to
jail nexus, nevertheless can play a role in its expansion.

Methods and Data
The findings are based on three years (2015-2018) of ethnographic data, including: observational field notes of school board, SRO committee, and community meetings; 33 semi-structured interviews with diverse educational advocates (e.g., youth activists of color, a conservative
commentator), members of the SRO committee, and school board members; and documents (e.g., meeting minutes, reports, news coverage).

Findings
Two primary discourses emerged to make sense of how minoritized students’ experiences of trauma, “disruptive” student behavior, racially disproportionate school discipline data, and SROs should be understood: (a) a race radical discourse, which argued that SROs enacted harm and racism against low-income students of color, especially Black students, and should be removed from schools, and
was largely disregarded by committee members charged with making recommendations about the SRO program and (b) a neoliberal therapeutic discourse, which argued that individual SROs benefitted low-income students of color through their care for students and involvement with
restorative practices. This notion of the “restorative” SRO justified the extension of the SRO program in the district. We argue that SROs became an “easy” fix to racial capitalism in the school district and city.

Significance
While research to date has demonstrated the importance of racial capitalism to school discipline policy and policing, it leaves unexplored policymaking in action. In this study, we examine the contested discourses at play in a debate about one SRO program as a way to understand how— through these discourses—racial capitalism works to expand the school to jail nexus.

Authors

• Erica Owyang Turner, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Abigail J Beneke, University of Wisconsin - Madison