School Resource Officers: ‘Momma Bear’ and the Human Rights Approach
/School Resource Officers: ‘Momma Bear’ and the Human Rights Approach
By: Peter Marina, Ph.D.
Many people ask why children cause so many problems for adults. But with juvenile arrest rates so high, maybe we need to ask why adults cause so many problems for children.
Police don’t choose to put kids in cages — it is a spineless act that society forces upon them. It’s part of the larger cowardly practice of a society that uses police to solve structural problems embedded in institutional contradictions, like pervasive relative deprivation rooted in social inequality, unequal access to housing, high costs of health care and exclusion from profitable sectors of the economy. The United States government criminalized our children and made them a police problem instead of solving the real root problems children face.
The privileged elite’s answer to defund police (but only when they are not put in danger) not only exacerbates the problem but also purposefully scapegoats police and ignores the real problems young people face in an increasingly troubled social world.
Actions to defund School Resource Officers (SROs) take away important resources from kids who look for mentors and “old heads” to guide them to make positive life choices. Either these privileged elites are too lazy to conduct their own research about SROs, willfully ignorant or virtue signalers hoping to advance their careers.
I developed and teach a human rights policing course to undergraduate students in Wisconsin, but this course looks much different than my better-known Human Rights Policing Certificate Program offered to law enforcement professionals. I’m a professor in La Crosse, WI, the cultural hub of the driftless region, which at one time held one of the highest juvenile arrest rates in the United States. My university students conducted community-engaged research projects with community organizations and members on policing and human rights.
One group of students worked with SROs. Like me, those students were skeptical about having people with guns and arresting power in schools where learning purportedly takes place. The concept seems, at first, absurd. Of course, arresting or putting children in jail is absurd. I've worked in juvenile jails in Brooklyn, in a neighborhood where Mike Tyson learned how to fight, and I found that if you want to create violent, aggressive adults, the best thing to do is arrest children and put them in jail. Only a sick, demented society arrests and incarcerates children.
Despite our skepticism, we kept an open mind.
What we found surprised us.
The La Crosse School Board threatened to cut the funding of SROs. But they did not, to my knowledge, do their due diligence and go into the schools to qualitatively research the impact of SROs on kids — unwise practice. My students did the hard work for them.They conducted extensive ethnographic research in the schools on the impact of SROs. Here is one of their findings:
Through interviews, literature reviews, and local news updates, our research group discovered that the SRO program in La Crosse has become a political matter. Although we found that SROs in the La Crosse School District are playing a positive role as a mentor and protector and adequately implementing human rights policing by avoiding citations and suspensions, the La Crosse School Board and members of the School Resource Officer Advisory Committee in La Crosse believe that the SRO program provides little benefit to students due to an increase in juvenile arrest rates and an increase in suspensions and hopes to cut down on the number of police officers in schools.
They also found the SROs who protected and nurtured students, and who backed the students over administration and even some teachers, were the most supportive role models.
One SRO, who we dubbed "Momma Bear" in class, defended her students from arrests and citations. Momma Bear protected her students from people who wanted officers to punish students and introduce them into the juvenile justice system. She served as a role model, defended the students, advocated on their behalf, cried with them, loved them, listened to their stories, allowed herself to become vulnerable to them and gave them her heart and soul. She didn't follow the social script of the job. Rather, she utilized her agency and invented her own script to better serve students and to protect their enjoyment of human rights.
And guess what? The La Crosse School Board recommended cutting the funding, spreading Momma Bear too thin across too many schools. The students lost an advocate, a friend, a resource, and an essential support network.
My students and I changed our minds about SROs. We now believe that only highly specialized, trained, genuine and empathetic people should become SROs. They need human rights training, among other things, and to receive all the necessary resources to be student advocates, to serve that Momma Bear role. Their main function should be, to the greatest extent legally possible, to make sure that all children enjoy the human rights that belong to them and to defend those rights from people (e.g., teachers, parents, or administrators) who want to prevent them from enjoying them. What's more, these SROs need more funding and higher pay to defend and advocate for these students who need genuine Momma Bear resources now more than ever.
For those concerned with race, cutting SROs is not the answer to disproportionate racial disparities in arrest rates. That only takes away resources from students. Rather, transforming police officers in our schools into student human rights protectors helps protect students of every race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation.
Let’s stop arresting kids, and instead, transform highly trained police officers to protect their human rights and help set them on a positive path in life.
A human rights approach to policing is the best path forward.
Dr. Peter Marina is a sociologist and criminologist at the University of Wisconsin – La Crosse. Along with his father, (retired) Lieutenant Pedro Marina, he teaches human rights policing to law enforcement professionals throughout the United States. He is author of the Human Rights Policing: Reimagining Law Enforcement in the 21st Century with Routledge Press (2022).
