Although the number of sworn police officers in schools, or school resource officers, increased steadily following the 1999 Columbine High School shooting, few academic studies have evaluated the effectiveness of SROs. Researchers found that putting police in schools increased in-school arrest rates, mostly for drug-related charges, but studies did not investigate whether SROs reduced the threat of school violence.
Following the widely criticized response by the Uvalde School District Police to a school shooter who killed 19 students and 2 teachers, questions about the effectiveness of SROs in preventing and mitigating school shootings have been raised. To answer these questions, Lehigh PhD student Nathaniel Rhoads and economics professor Chad Meyerhoefer obtained restricted-use data from the National Center for Education Statistics. They merged this restricted data with information on SROs and school shootings from databases at the U.S. Department of Justice and Homeland Security. To complete their research, Rhoads and Meyerhoefer utilized the new Health Data Warehouse, a joint venture between the Colleges of Business and Health, to provide a secure computing environment necessary for the analysis of HIPAA-protected or otherwise restricted health data.
Rhoads and Meyerhoefer closely examined federal grants used to increase funding for SROs and compared those school districts using that funding for SROs with school districts without SROs. They found that schools with SROs were just as likely to experience school shootings as schools without, suggesting the presence of police officers in schools did not deter shooters. Further, those schools with SROs present didn’t have fewer victims when a shooting occurred than those schools where a shooting occurred without SROs in place. These findings will help policy makers best determine how to allocate limited resources to prevent or mitigate shootings in schools.