School police officers' roles: The influence of social, developmental and historical contexts.

Amid national protests over police brutality, debates over law enforcement in schools have been reignited. Though research has focused on the consequences of police presence in schools, few studies have investigated the roles of school police officers (SPOs) and whether the larger contexts influence them. Using a bioecological framework (Bronfenbrenner and Morris, 2006), we examined how historical, social and developmental contexts shape SPOs' views of their roles and the challenges and opportunities they encounter. Nineteen 90-min focus groups with 45 SPOs from one large school police department were conducted. Analysis revealed that SPOs perceived their roles as multifaceted, encompassing both formal (e.g., law enforcer, educator) and informal (e.g., confidante, counselor) roles. These roles were enacted differently depending on the school level and neighborhood context. Furthermore, the challenges and opportunities SPOs reported were also contextualized emerging from changes in school policies, the rise in technology and social media and increased professionalization of their police department. Implications for theory and research as well as for training and policy are discussed.

Introduction

Debates about school-based law enforcement have been renewed amidst ongoing national and even global protests over police brutality against African Americans and people of color more generally. Proponents of school-based law enforcement argue that law enforcement is best equipped to respond to threats and prevent crime in order to create safe spaces for students to learn. They support their position by citing highly publicized school shootings such as Sandy Hook in 2012 and Parkland in 2018 and national polls revealing that 1 in 4 middle and high school students are very worried about a shooting happening at their school (Pew Research Center, 2018). Critics, by contrast, argue that school police officers criminalize developmentally typical behavior, resulting in increased numbers of arrests, suspensions and expulsions –especially for youth of color and students with disabilities (ACLU, 2019). Recent high-profile cases of excessive use of force by school-based law enforcement such as the body-slamming of an 11-year old African American boy in North Carolina lend credence to critics' concerns.

These national debates raise critical questions about the function of school police, namely, what, if any, should be their role in ensuring the safety and well-being of all students. Empirical research on school-based law enforcement has tracked these debates focusing primarily on its consequences (e.g., Javdani, 2019). These studies have generally attended to the role of school-based law enforcement in terms of school safety (e.g., Anderson, 2018; Rosiak, 2015), level of crime (e.g., Na & Gottfredson, 2013; Theriot, 2009) and discipline disparities (e.g., Hirschfield & Celinska, 2011; Pigott, Stearns, & Khey, 2017). The results have been mixed (see review in Javdani, 2019). Some studies document improvements in students' perceptions of school safety when school-based law enforcement is present (e.g., McDevitt & Panniello, 2005) and a lower likelihood of referrals for minor offenses when school police rather than municipal police respond (e.g., May, Berranco, Stokes, Robertson, & Haynes, 2018). Others find that school-based law enforcement contributes to higher rates of arrests and suspensions (e.g., Skiba, Mediratta, & Rausch, 2016) although a direct causal link between school-based law enforcement and disparities in discipline has not yet been established. Still other studies show no meaningful difference, for example, in the number of student-reported crime incidents when school-based law enforcement is present (e.g., Kann et al., 2014).

Far less research has examined what officers actually do in the schools. Knowing how officers spend their time is essential for understanding when their presence in schools may be beneficial or harmful. Of the few studies that have examined the roles of school-based law enforcement, a majority show that officers engage in a “triad of roles”: teaching and informal counseling in addition to law enforcement (e.g., Canady, James, & Nease, 2012; Coon & Travis, 2012; Rhodes, 2014; Weiler & Cray, 2011). Missing from this work is a consideration of the larger contexts that shape policing in schools, for example, the school characteristics or features of the surrounding neighborhood. To begin to address these research gaps, we focus on school police officers' views of their roles and draw on a bioecological perspective (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006) to examine how social, developmental, and historical contexts shape what school police officers do, how they do it, and why.

School-based law enforcement officers: who are they and how did they get there?

School-based law enforcement is a general term used to describe sworn peace officers, with arrest powers, who are assigned to a school or a cluster of schools to ensure the safety and security of students and school personnel (King & Bracy, 2019). According to the U.S. Department of Education (NCES, 2017), 48% of all U.S. public schools have a sworn law enforcement officer, with high schools (75%) being more likely than middle (65%) and elementary (36%) schools to have at least one law enforcement officer on campus.

How law enforcement officers are assigned to schools varies significantly across school districts as well as within them (e.g., King & Bracy, 2019). In general, school districts employ two types of school-based law enforcement personnel. The most common type is school resource officers (SROs). A school district or an individual school enters into a memorandum of understanding with a local law enforcement agency to have an SRO assigned to schools either permanently or on a temporary basis. The second type involves school police officers who are employed by an independent school district police department. These school police departments are under the direct control of the school district and are accountable to the district superintendent, Board of Trustees, and/or their designees (McKenna, Martinez-Prather, & Bowman, 2016). Some school districts employ both SROs and school police officers, suggesting that the two types of law enforcement are not mutually exclusive. In addition, many schools hire security staff, and while these staff are not considered law enforcement, they are often grouped in national statistics, making it difficult to know how many schools have police officers, how many have security guards, and how many have both (King & Bracy, 2019).

The function of school-based law enforcement has evolved over time. Most scholars trace the origins of SROs to Flint, Michigan's Police School Liaison program in the 1950's (e.g., Girouard, 2001) though law enforcement was present in schools as early as 1939 as “special investigators” (Brown, 2006). Early on, school-based law enforcement officers served to reduce delinquency through fostering positive interactions between police and youth, educating youth on the law, and counseling those who exhibited poor behavior. Beginning with school desegregation in the 1950's, followed by the Civil Rights movement of the 1960's and 70's and the rise of crime and gangs in the 1980's, the function of police in schools shifted to emphasize the security and safety of students and school staff (American Civil Liberties Union, 2017). Legislation such as the passage of the Safe Schools Act of 1994 led to the largest increase in the number of officers in schools (e.g., Ryan et al., 2017). More recently, mass school shootings such as Columbine and Sandy Hook motivated policies to further increase those numbers.

Empirical research on roles of school-based law enforcement

Until recently, school-based policing was purportedly the fastest growing segment of law enforcement (NASRO, 2020). In spite of this, empirical knowledge about what school-based law enforcement officers actually do on a daily basis is limited in important ways. Chief among these limitations is an exclusive focus on SROs. In fact, most studies do not make a distinction between SROs and school police officers. This is a significant limitation because nearly 40 out of the 100 largest school districts in the U.S. have their own independent school police department (NCES, 2017) and populous states such as Texas have over 200 independent school police departments. While overlap between SROs and school police officers exists, variations in their organizational structures can lead to meaningful differences in the socialization, training, and experiences of officers. Furthermore, given that school police departments operate under an infrastructure dedicated entirely to youths' school safety, school police officers are likely to be socialized into the educational context. Hence, their behaviors are more likely to be governed by a set of standardized guidelines about roles and responsibilities in schools.

The nature and scope of the law enforcement roles of school-based officers come from both federal (e.g., 34 U.S.C. § 10389(4)) and state (e.g., California Penal Code §830.32) statutes as well as the needs of the schools. Although SROs and school district police officers both engage in law enforcement, their responsibilities extend beyond that. The National Association of School Resource Officers (NASRO, 2020) has suggested that school-based law enforcement officers act as counselors and conduct educational programs and assemblies in addition to performing their law enforcement duties. Most empirical research on officer roles has focused exclusively on documenting the extent to which officers engage in these three roles: law enforcer, teacher, and counselor (e.g., Coon & Travis, 2012; Rhodes, 2014; Weiler & Cray, 2011). In one line of work, researchers used the U.S. Department of Education Common Core of Data (Common Core of Data, 2006) to document how much school officers were perceived to engage in this triad of roles. As a case in point, Coon and Travis (2012) focused on the views of chiefs of police employed by the schools and documented that 90% of the chiefs reported that school officers engaged in law enforcement activities such as preventing crime, arresting, and protecting students and staff. Over 70% of chiefs reported that officers acted as counselors to students and families, while 30–50% reported officers engaging in teaching activities by visiting classrooms to give presentations related to preventing crime.

In a second more recent line of work, researchers focused on the views of school-based law enforcement officers themselves. These newer studies employed qualitative interviews (e.g., Mckenna et al., 2016) and mixed methodologies (e.g., Rhodes, 2017) to examine the roles of SROs and school-based law enforcement more broadly. Irrespective of the type of law enforcement personnel, these studies show that school officers engage in a wider range of roles than the triad model of law enforcer-teacher-counselor. Using telephone interviews with 26 officers primarily from rural Texas, Mckenna et al. (2016) documented that officers also serve as surrogate parents and social workers, engaging in “nurturing behaviors that include emotional support” in addition to making “home visits and encouraging parental involvement” (p. 435).

While a small but growing number of studies paint officer roles as multifaceted, we still know very little about the actual practice of policing in schools – how officers perform their roles and why. Policing is dynamic and the demands of the situation and officer response can change rapidly during the course of an interaction, in part due to contextual factors such as the characteristics of the individual or the neighborhood (Barlow & Barlow, 2018).

To identify which contextual factors are most relevant to school policing, we draw attention to the school setting as a unique context that is comprised of students from different age groups and diverse communities. To our knowledge, no studies have systematically assessed the role of developmental context (i.e., school level) or neighborhood characteristics (i.e., level of resources and access to opportunity structures) in school policing. Furthermore, the historical contexts of school policing remain under-examined as we do not yet fully understand the extent to which changes in laws and policies may affect officer roles (e.g., Brown, 2006).

A bioecological framework for understanding school police officers' roles and practice

A bioecological framework (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006) provides a promising starting point to develop a more contextualized understanding of school police officers' roles and the factors that influence them. Originally created to explain human development, the bioecological framework posits that a range of contextual factors affect development. These factors arise from contexts both immediate to the person, such as the family and neighborhood, and more distal, such as cultural forces and historical events. Bronfenbrenner described these contexts as nested systems of influence that include the microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem and chronosystem.

This nested perspective is useful for examining the experiences of school police officers, specifically their roles and how they enact them. A graphical depiction of the bioecological model as the framework for organizing our findings is presented in Figure1. At the level of the microsystem, or the most immediate context, students, parents, school personnel, and community members are expected to influence officer roles. Next, the mesosystem represents the interactions among these elements in the microsystem, in this case, how interactions among constituents affect officer roles. The third layer, the exosystem, refers to indirect forces that shape officer roles, for example, structural components of school policing such as district policies. The broader cultural context, including societal views about law enforcement, are depicted by the macrosystem. Finally, the development of officer roles takes place along a temporal spectrum, or the chronosystem. This level is characterized by significant historical events (e.g., school shootings) affecting officer roles and practice.

In the research reported here, we apply the bioecological framework to examine the roles of school police officers as they see them. We conducted focus groups with 45 officers in a school police department associated with a large urban school district. Key to a bioecological framework is the idea that individuals engage in ongoing, complex, reciprocal interactions with their immediate environment (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006; Jaeger, 2016). We argue that roles form the basis of how these officers come in contact and interact with their constituents –students, parents, school personnel, and community members. While school police officers perform these roles, the content and the practice of them are influenced by a range of social, cultural and historical factors. Documenting officer roles and identifying the nested contextual factors influencing these roles can offer insights into key processes that either promote or hinder positive development for school police officers and their constituents, most importantly students.

Method

Research site: Pine school police department

The Pine School Police Department (PSPD)1 is situated in a large urban school district in southern California. The district schools are spread across diverse communities. The median household income for families residing across these communities ranged from $33,000 to over $200,000 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2019). Differences in household income are reflected in student need such that between 5% to nearly 100% of the district students qualify for free/reduced lunch (district average = 80%). A substantial number of district schools are majority Latinx students and are located in neighborhoods with large immigrant populations. The remaining schools are more racially/ethnically diverse, although a few schools are majority African American or white and are located in neighborhoods with relatively few immigrant families.

PSPD began as a security section in the late 1940s and became certified in the early 1980s. Today, roughly 1% of the school district's budget is allocated to the department. Its organizational structure is hierarchical and resembles that of a municipal police department. Heading the department is a district-appointed chief. The rank-and-file officers are directly supervised by sergeants who are overseen by the division lieutenant who, in turn, is overseen by the regional deputy chief who reports to the chief.

According to the PSPD's official documents, 344 sworn police officers are employed at the department. The PSPD is divided into six areas or divisions across the school district and a “police station” is present in each division. Each officer is assigned to a marked black and white car, wears a badge, carries a handgun and works either on a campus (assigned to a high school for 2–5 years) or on patrol. The patrol officers are generally responsible for two to three middle schools (“complex” units) or a cluster of elementary schools and they patrol the surrounding areas of those schools. In addition to regular assignments, officers can participate in specialized units such as the Mental Health Evaluation Team (MHET) or various youth programs.

Recruitment of study participants

The Internal Review Board (IRB) of the school district and the University approved all procedures. After obtaining IRB approvals, the two principal investigators (PIs) met with the school police chief to introduce the project. Subsequently, the lieutenants of each of the six divisions were contacted to ask permission to attend a morning roll call session to recruit officers. All lieutenants agreed. Across the six divisions approximately 15–30 officers were present for roll call on the days we attended. Each interested officer was then contacted to confirm participation date and time. A total of 53 officers signed up and 45 participated. The officers who did not participate either received a late call, had to make an arrest, or experienced family emergencies; four officers did not respond to reminders.

Pine school police officer participants

The 45 officers represented all six divisions of the PSPD. They self-identified as male (89%) or female (11%) and were racially/ethnically diverse with 52% Latinx, 22% Black/African American, 13% White, 9% Asian/Asian American, 2% Native American, and 2% Biracial. Officers ranged in age from 26 to 66 (M = 42.26, SD = 11.41) and varied by level of reported education: 46% a bachelor's degree, 17% some college, 15% an associate degree and 11% did not provide an answer. An additional 11% of officers had achieved a Masters' degree. Most participants (70%) self-identified as police officer with 13% sergeant, 9% senior/training officer, 2% detective and 6% did not provide answer. On average, officers reported 12 years of service (SD = 7.38 ranging from 1 to 27 yrs). Nearly half of the officers (47%) reported being graduates of the Pine School District.

Focus groups with pine school police officers

Because so little is known about school police officers' roles and experiences, we chose a focus group methodology. The interactive nature of focus groups (Morgan, 1997) allowed officers to be highly involved in the discussion process and to offer insights into school policing from their own perspective. Following the guidelines set forth by Morgan (1997), Roller and Lavrakas (2015), and Toner (2009), we chose very small (“dyad” focus groups) or mini-focus groups (3–4 people) to allow for an active and deep discussion of school policing. We conducted the focus groups between Fall 2018 and Summer 2019. In order to capture the daily lived experience of officers and to center what was important and meaningful to them, we used three broad open-ended questions or prompts to guide our focus groups: 1) Tell us about your typical day on the job, 2) What have you seen change since you started here at PSPD?, and 3) What are some of the challenges you face on the job and how do you address them?

Each focus group was conducted by the PIs, audio recorded, and professionally transcribed with officer demographic information de-identified. These focus groups took place at each of the six divisions of PSPD. Active consent was obtained from each participant, and on average, 3 officers (min 2 officers and max 6 officers) attended each focus group. Two participants were interviewed individually because the other interested participants had family emergencies or late calls. We used a semi-structured interview protocol to conduct 19 focus groups that lasted 75–90 min. Each participant received $50 in cash.

Data reduction

A diverse six-person team consisting of the authors and three undergraduate researchers coded the transcripts. To systematically reduce and code the data, a qualitative content analysis method was used (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005; Miles & Huberman, 1994). To capture emic or insider perspectives on the phenomenon of school policing, we used an inductive approach. As a first step, we randomly selected three transcripts for open coding. Team members read each transcript line by line and individually coded segments of each using different types of coding such as pattern coding, emotion coding, and in vivo coding (Saldaña, 2013). The team met weekly and engaged in pattern coding –grouping or clustering similar codes together –to create categories and code trees. The team then analyzed four additional transcripts, applying the preliminary codes and categories. The team continued to meet weekly in order to refine the coding scheme and new codes were created when data did not fit the existing ones. The second author took the lead in creating a codebook with all team members contributing to its development until a group consensus was reached and data saturation emerged. The remaining 12 transcripts were each coded by a pair of coders using this codebook.

During the coding process, team members wrote analytic memos to track their decision-making process and their overall impressions of each transcript. Weekly meetings were used to engage in reflection about our positionalities in relation to the data. An independent coder coded four randomly selected transcripts. As a final step, we used Dedoose to assess intercoder reliability among all coders. We obtained an α = 0.77 which is deemed high, given the complexity of the coding scheme and the number of coders (Marques & McCall, 2005).

In order to establish credibility and trustworthiness, we triangulated various sources of information including district meeting minutes, district documents and internal memos, an official PSPD job posting, and four ride alongs the PIs conducted with PSPD. These ride alongs took place across four different PSPD divisions and were conducted by a sergeant, two training/senior officers and one rank-and-file officer. We also conducted member checks with 11 officers, on average two officers from each of the six divisions, during which they provided feedback on the emerging findings. This triangulation aided in establishing internal generalizability (Maxwell & Chmiel, 2014) and was especially valuable in selecting the bioecological model (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006) as the theoretical framework to help identify contextual factors that shape roles and experiences.

Results

We begin our main analysis by returning to our conceptual model (see Fig. 1 ) to understand PSPOs' roles and how they enact those roles. In developing our model using an emic approach, officers' views populated the layers of our model in a way consistent with the bioecological framework. We present our findings within this model of nested contexts highlighting the ways in which these roles inform proximal processes.

Fig. 1

A bioecological model of school police officers' roles and the contexts that shape those roles.

Constituents PSPOs serve

We start at the center of the model, or the microsystem, to identify key constituents PSPOs interact with and to delineate the scope of PSPO's jurisdiction. The PSPOs identified their main responsibility as the district schools and the students who attend these schools followed by school personnel as well as the district properties. Importantly, PSPOs included the communities in which these schools are embedded. In their view, the school and the community are connected and work together to influence school safety –what goes on in the community affects the schools and vice versa. To capture this interconnectedness, one PSPO explained:

Our main focus is on the schools and the surrounding area. Anything that has to do with or affects the school. That's really what it is. Like a robbery at 7-Eleven. Why? Because kids go to that 7-Eleven. Their parents go to that 7-Eleven. I'm sure the teachers and everyone else have their best interest in mind and the district wants their communities to be safe (PSPO#2).

To ensure the safety and security of schools and students, PSPOs take a broad and contextualized approach. This involves attending not only to the school but also to the community surrounding the school and serving multiple constituencies –students, staff, parents, and community members.

The nature and scope of issues

The connection between the school and community contexts expands PSPOs' jurisdiction beyond school sites and increases the likelihood that officers will encounter issues from a variety of sources. As one veteran PSPO sergeant explained, “we are the ‘catchall’ and get called in for everything” (PSPO#4). In our analysis “getting called in for everything” translated into a range of issues officers encountered both on and off campus or were called in to address by school administrators, teachers, parents, community members, or even students (See Table 1 for the range of issues PSPOs reported).

Table 1

PSPOs' reports of types of issues and threats (N participants = 45).

By virtue of their job as law enforcers, the largest and most differentiated category of issues was crimes and criminal activities. As Table 1 shows, officers responded to personal crimes (e.g., battery), property crimes (e.g., vandalism), and possession of weapons as well as domestic violence and child abuse. PSPOs also encountered status-based offenses of underage drinking or drug use by students.

A second category of issues concerned interpersonal conflicts which refers to conflicts between two or more parties (e.g., student-to-teacher, parent-to-parent) that are not categorized as crimes or have not yet escalated to the level of crime. A common type of interpersonal conflict involved parents. Parent-initiated conflict included issues such as child custody or fighting with or threatening school administrators, teachers or other school personnel. We also included student misbehavior in this category. Officers referenced receiving calls from school personnel about students throwing tantrums in class and/or not complying with a teacher's directions, even though these misbehaviors do not necessarily constitute a crime and responding to them is not part of PSPOs' official responsibility.

According to PSPOs, student mental health concerns and social media threats have more recently emerged as significant concerns. Calls about students harming themselves –cutting, attempting suicide or other psychiatric concerns –have also become common. With the technological advances of the past decade or so, calls to investigate online threats such as students posting about “shooting up the school” or incidents of cyberbullying have increased. Taken together, PSPOs respond to a complex set of issues on a regular basis –issues originating from multiple contexts and involving various constituencies.

The nature and scope of roles

The scope and complexity of the issues PSPOs encounter call for a multifaceted set of roles. To capture the breadth of these roles, we triangulated information obtained from the official job description for PSPOs posted on the school district's website with officers' own accounts of their duties, responsibilities, and roles. We then organized responses into two broad categories of roles–formal and informal –as shown in Table 2 . Formal roles encompass duties and responsibilities listed by the department as part of their official job description. The largest category of formal roles was the law enforcer-protector. As shown in Table 2, this category includes a wide range of activities such as crime assessment, investigation and deterrence as well as co-responding to crisis situations. Here, we highlight two aspects of the law enforcer-protector role to demonstrate how the unique needs of students coupled with PSPOs' broad jurisdiction shape this role.

Table 2

PSPOs' reported formal and informal roles (N = 45).

Role category	Definition	Frequency, n (%)
Formal roles	Official duties or responsibilities of PSPOs according to their formal job description or those that officers themselves recognized as part of their official job
Law enforcer and protector	Law enforcer-protector includes enforcement activities such as a) prevention, b) detection, and c) investigation of crime as well as the d) apprehension and detention of individuals suspected of law violation (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2019). PSPOs also served as protectors of children through the lens of law enforcement.	41 (91%)
Safe passages	PSPOs are tasked to ensure that students go to and leave campus safely
Traffic-related activities	PSPOs address a range of traffic issues including traffic violations as well as interpersonal conflict during pick up and drop off
Staffing school-related events	PSPOs provide protection, safety and security at a school-related even such as football games or “back-to-school” nights.
Co-responder to students in crises	PSPOs respond to student crises as part of an interdisciplinary team
SARB	School Attendance Review Board consists of district officials, PSPOs and other health care and community agencies who are tasked to address student attendance issues.
MHET team	The Mental Health Evaluation Team (MHET) consist of a PSPO and a social worker tasked to assess student mental health issues
Educator/teacher of children and youth	PSPOs serve as classroom teachers in special magnet programs as well as serve to educate parents and students about issues that affect children, such as vaping	14 (31%)
Teaching classes at the police academy magnet schools	PSPOs serve as teachers in police academy magnets as well as providing formal education to students on issues such as law and consequences law violation, safety, etc.
Anger management workshops	PSPOs educate elementary school students about anger management and criminal threat
Mentor for children and youth	Any formal mentorship where the officers teach or mentor a group of students as part of the PSPD or the Pine school district-sponsored program	5 (11%)
PAL/explorer program for youth	PSPOs formally mentor children and youth on issues related to a law enforcement career and foster developing a positive relationship with police.
Coach	PSPOs serve as coaches for sports such as football or wrestling.
Trainer of other PSPOs	PSPOs provide formal training or professional development to other officers, for example, through teaching classes such as implicit racial bias, firearms, and CPR.	15 (33%)
Informal roles	Roles that may not be identified as official duty or responsibility of PSPOs' job but that the officers nevertheless identified them as being a significant part of their job
Advocate	PSPOs reported speaking on behalf of students and their families with school administrators or teachers.	6 (13%)
Confidante	PSPOs reported students trusting them and sharing private matters with them.	12 (27%)
Counselor-liaison (to parents and students)	PSPOs reported providing advice, guidance, or counseling, for example, helping students develop the academic and social skills necessary to lead successful lives.	20 (44%)
Mentor/role model	PSPOs reported sharing information about his or her own career path, as well as providing motivation & emotional support. Also, PSPOs reported helping students with exploring careers, setting goals, and identifying resources.	28 (62%)
Surrogate parent	PSPOs reported acting as a substitute parent/caregiver for a student – informally looking after, taking care of or nurturing a student – in this case, serving as a parental figure.	21 (47%)

The practice of safe passages arises out of a recognition that the safety and security of students do not start when they walk on campus. To that end, officers patrol a 5-block area in the vicinity of the school for about an hour before and after school to ensure that students safely make it to and from school. One PSPO described the purpose as follows:

We're looking to make sure that kids get to and from school safely. That involves a lot of things. You're looking for traffic issues. For a potential danger of kidnapping, child abuse, lewd and lascivious conduct by creepy guys. Maybe there's an argument on social media that happened at the end of the school day, where kids arranged a fight in an alley. Anybody that's looking to take advantage of our students. Our presence acts as a deterrent (PSPO#1).

Through the practice of safe passages, officers tailor their law enforcement role to the school context –they expand their “watch” during critical transition hours and make themselves visible across the school and community contexts to meet the safety needs of the students.

As law enforcer-protector, PSPOs also address student health and well-being by serving as a co-responder to crises such as a student threatening suicide. Because of the complex nature of these types of crises, PSPOs collaborate with a diverse group of stakeholders and/or health professionals to address the specific academic or mental health needs of students. As a case in point, the PSPD established an interdisciplinary mental health evaluation team (MHET) in light of recent spikes in student mental health concerns. According to a PSPO:

In the past 12 months there has been a significant number of mental health issues and our department deployed a mental health unit where an officer is paired with a psychological social worker. Whenever there's a concern of a student wanting to take their life or do harm to themselves or others, we can call our mental health unit and kind of streamline the process of getting that individual the assistance that they need (PSPO#1).

Issues involving students often arise out of an array of social, developmental, and behavioral concerns that are not necessarily criminal in nature. To respond effectively, PSPOs are required to go beyond traditional law enforcement and use additional strategies which often include informal roles. Informal roles are a set of activities that, while not listed as a formal duty, are brought on by the unique demands of the school and community contexts.

Informally, PSPOs reported serving as advocates, confidantes, counselor-liaisons, mentor/role models and surrogate parents (see Table 2). As an advocate, officers highlighted instances where they used their status as a school police officer to speak on students' behalf to the district, school administrators, or parents. For example, a senior officer (PSPO#9) discussed a situation where they asked district officials for space and additional resources to keep open an afterschool program for at-promise youth. As a confidante, PSPOs emphasized building trusting relationships with students so that students feel comfortable coming to them with problems. To illustrate, one PSPO described:

I have one kid who I thought I was going to arrest. He’d gotten into a fight and the next day he committed a theft. I ended up not arresting him and we ended up talking. Now, he comes and tells me everything. He told me today he found somebody's wallet. He talked to me about his mom's boyfriend who is beating her up and he was like, “I don't know what to do.” And now he tells me about things that are going on around the school. He's like, “Hey, these two guys are expected to fight over here.” If we had arrested him, he would never have come to talk to me (PSPO#15).

Here, the officer combines multiple roles. This PSPO started the process as a law enforcer “going to arrest,” and then, through talking and presumably building trust, the officer's role shifted to being a confidante. This example captures an instance in which formal and informal roles mutually inform each other and are used flexibly to meet the demands of the situation.

PSPOs also tailored their informal roles to students' social and emotional needs. PSPOs identified informal mentoring and counselor-liaison as a substantial part of their daily activity where they offered advice or helped students set goals. Nearly half of PSPOs reported serving as surrogate parents for students who have limited or inconsistent contact with their own parents. For example, an officer stated, “kids get attached to us sometimes. They like our attention because that may be the only attention they get” (PSPO#5). Another PSPO echoed this sentiment, “some of these kids do not have parents around. So they show us the report card and then you give them a high five – oh cool!” (PSPO#45).

PSPOs' roles and decision-making process in context

Thus far, we have focused on the center of our nested model and charted the issues officers encounter regularly as well as the roles they enact to address those issues. While this overview provides a window into the everyday realities of school police officers, it does not fully capture the complexity of officers' decision-making process. To better understand those processes, we move to the mesosystem in consideration of context and examine how elements within the microsystem interact with one another to shape officer roles and practice. Based on the officers' own accounts, we focus on the PSPD's mission as well as the developmental, neighborhood, and family contexts. These factors contextualize officer roles and influence how they address a given situation.

PSPD's mission

We identified two guiding principles for the practice of officer roles –the nature and definition of the job as well as PSPD's philosophy of policing –which together constitute what we categorize as the mission of PSPD. We place PSPD's mission in the mesosystem because it emerges out of the interaction between officers and their department's policies and practices, which in turn, affects all officers and their roles, sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly.

A key aspect of PSPD's mission is the nature of the job. PSPOs repeatedly underscored the unique focus of their jobs (students, parents, and administrators) and how the needs of their constituencies shape what they do, how they do it and why. As one PSPD sergeant put it:

I say to my officers all the time, “Hey, you know you signed up to be a school cop, you're going to be dealing with kids, you're going to be dealing with parents, you're going to be dealing with administrators. If that's not what you signed up to do, then go up the street, put your application with [municipal police]. There, you can go jump off the roofs and repel helicopters and be on the bomb squad–you're not going to do that here” (PSPO#7).

In addition, because PSPOs are assigned to one school or a cluster of schools for an extended period of time, students are able to interact with officers throughout the day, and often in situations that do not involve law enforcement-related interactions. As one PSPO explains:

We're not like the [municipal agency] that just goes from call to call. With us, students see us when they're walking into the school. They see us during lunch. They see us talking to other kids and maybe playing around. They see us after school. We're, in a sense, more approachable than [municipal] officers. Students can come to us as a resource, some see us as a mentor (PSPO#10).

Most officers endorsed a relationship-based policing philosophy wherein they viewed building relationships with students and school personnel as well as with parents and community members as an important conduit for performing both formal and informal roles. As a philosophy, relationship-based policing emphasizes building relationships with the community through transparency, accountability, respect and trust with the goal of improving the health, well-being and safety of that community (e.g., Rice & Lee, 2015). A senior PSPO summarized:

We are always trying to form relationships to better serve the students and parents. It's not just about enforcement anymore. That's the old days. But in the modern era, it's about relationships. It's about looking at the totality of circumstances surrounding why an individual is doing what they're doing. Before, it was ‘you fight, you get a citation. You fight, you get arrested.’ Now, it's like ‘Why are you angry? What's going on? What's happening?’ (PSPO#18).

A relationship-based approach moves away from a “law-enforcement only” mindset to an approach that looks to the “totality of circumstances.” Asking questions such as “What's going on? What's happening?” can generate information which is useful in determining the best course of action, including which roles to enact. According to one PSPD sergeant:

One day, [we are] a guardian, next day, [we are] a warrior. That day, we figure it out. Let's say there's a stolen car, we're going to act like warriors because we got a stolen car with guns in it. We're going to make sure that we do what we need to do to get these bad guys. But then there's days that we become the guardians. As a guardian, we ask ‘What is the best solution?’ And it's often a multi-disciplinary approach (PSPO#22).

Taking a “multi-disciplinary approach” and moving between roles flexibly guides officers to arrive at “the best solution.” How an officer decides on the best course of action is determined by the unique features of the situation and the individuals involved in it.

Developmental context and school policing

How schooling is structured in K-12 schools interacts with characteristics of the students to shape the unique developmental context of school policing. PSPOs near unanimously identified the school level (i.e., elementary vs. middle vs. high school) as influencing the practice of policing and the roles they enact. A first difference focuses on their assignments, specifically that elementary and middle schools have patrol officers whereas high schools have campus-based officers. This distribution of officers is determined by both the nature of problems encountered in each school type, but also by the shortage of officers at PSPD. Simply put, according to PSPOs, there are not enough officers for every school to have one.

In elementary school, the types of issues that occur tend to be less severe, though PSPOs did report instances of “a kid stabbing another kid with a pencil” or “two second graders fighting and beating each other up” (PSPO#41). When crimes do occur, they mostly involve adults (e.g., parents and community members). As one patrol officer described:

They call me for anything. It can be a 5-year-old that's out of control, not listening, tearing up a classroom to a domestic violence situation to an adult who's looking at kids through the fence. You never know what it's going to be and you have to take every situation seriously (PSPO#26).

In the elementary school context, PSPOs' formal roles took the form of safe passages, addressing traffic issues and conflicts at drop-off and pick-up or officers serving as teachers in programs such as anger management workshops for elementary school children. When PSPOs were called in to address a student's misbehavior, it often involved students receiving special education. According to PSPOs, administrators routinely call them to respond to these situations, in part, because they are afraid of the legal ramifications of “putting hands on a student” to physically restrain them or because they cannot physically control the student:

We have a lot of kids under the Special Ed umbrella or considered emotionally disturbed. Sometimes, these kids are just beyond what [the school] can control and the parent isn't answering the phone and they've exhausted all their options. We get kids that go into classrooms and start throwing chairs and kicking stuff. And the admin won't allow anybody near the kid, so they call us for the authority. Maybe if they see you here, they'll calm down. We try and do our best to reason with the student – it's the most we can do (PSPO#25).

In the above situation, the PSPO was utilized as an “authority figure” to de-escalate the situation –gain control, slow down the process and “reason with the student.” The officers are being asked to respond to a child's behavior that has escalated to a developmentally atypical level but that may be a manifestation of a developmental disability. In responding to these situations, PSPOs generally emphasized informal roles and used strategies such as “hanging out with the kid, talking to him and calming him down so he can go back to class” (PSPO#26).

Parent-on-parent conflicts represented another common type of issue in the elementary school context. PSPOs used a similar approach and took on a counselor-liaison role. As one PSPD sergeant shared:

We have parents that get into child custody battles and we end up dealing with it. Say the kid's 7 or 8 years old. And now dad wants to show up and mom has never gone to court for visitation rights. Mom ends up crying because dad has come in to take the kid. So, we advise mom: ‘You've got to go to the children's court. They have people there that will sit down with you and help you through the whole process.’ We'll advise her on what needs to happen (PSPO#43).

In comparison to the elementary school context, PSPOs in high schools regularly encounter more complex issues that vary in type and severity. Two PSPOs discussed the typical issues they face:

PSPO#26: In terms of campus-based, you're going to get calls for narcotics, alcohol, weapons. It may not be an active shooter thing, but knives, anything that can be deemed a weapon. Maybe the administration does a random search and finds something, you're going to get called or it could be students jumping the fence, either coming in or going out. It could also be transients. Trespassers.

PSPO#25: Yeah, we get a lot of calls for that. They're either loitering around the campus or somehow making it onto campus. And a lot of what we call 5150 calls, mentally incapable individuals, especially now with the big transient population in the area I work.

In addressing criminal issues, including crimes involving students, PSPOs acknowledged the need to utilize a variety of formal and informal roles. Importantly, PSPOs' decisions were also shaped by district policies. A PSPO described their response to a student smoking marijuana:

Yesterday, I was driving around the perimeter of campus before school and I saw him lighting up. I knew it was marijuana because he was holding an apple. I said ‘Just leave what you've got there, don't do anything stupid, give me your ID.’ He hands me his ID, I grabbed the marijuana and I dumped that stuff out. I tell him just walk over to the main office and meet me there. I end up not giving him a ticket, but a restorative justice referral. So, he's not going to have a criminal record. I've never had any issues with this kid and he did what I told him to do. So, I talked to the principal and I said I've never had issues with him. So, we let him stay in summer school (PSPO#31).

In the above example, the officer begins by undertaking a law enforcer role –noticing and assessing the situation, investigating the issue and making a decision about how to enforce the law. When enforcing the law, however, the officer applies the existing district policy about juvenile crime (i.e., restorative justice) but combines that with their own experience regarding the student. This process ultimately led to diverting the student into counseling instead of “giving him a ticket”– shifting from law enforcer into an advocate.

PSPOs described middle school as a transitional period and characterized it as a “challenging period” when students are “very influenced and very impressionable by what they see out in the community” (PSPO#9). These reflections are consistent with developmental research on the period known as early adolescence which typically begins in middle school when students are 11 or 12 years old. During this developmental stage, youth experience both biological (e.g., the onset of puberty) and psychosocial changes (e.g., identity negotiation) along with a growing influence of peers that renders them more vulnerable to engaging in risky behaviors such as experimenting with drugs (Steinberg, 2020) or being bullied (LeMenstrel & Rivara, 2016). In our sample, officers stated that, in middle school, serious criminal activity is in the nascent stages but can set the stage for students' possible future involvement in gang violence, selling and using drugs, and even sex trafficking and intimate partner violence.

Given this unique developmental period coupled with the PSPD's policy prohibiting the arrest of students under the age of 12 (except for felonies), middle school makes officers' job more complicated. The following exchange between a sergeant and an officer highlights how working in a middle school context makes the boundaries of PSPOs' law enforcement roles less clear and often calls upon officers to use their informal roles in what one PSPO called “a dance”:

PSPO#21: Some people may not want to be at middle schools because of that age group. They're really kind of full of a lot of energy, testosterone and anything else.

PSPO#22: Because you know what it is, it's a dance. When you look at demographics, there's not as much police action in there but there's a lot of interaction together.

PSPO#21: Counseling, talking him out of doing things. I feel that they're more moldable in a middle school setting than a high school. Some of the high school seniors, they're set in their ways. I like to make a little deeper impression so I kind of became a middle school specialist.

A final set of developmental differences that shaped officer roles were variations in youths' attitudes toward law enforcement. In the words of one PSPO:

When they're in elementary school, they still like you and high five you and all that stuff. And you get to middle school, they don't really care for you much anymore and they're giving you the finger. And then you get to high school, and they pretty much tell you to “F” off (PSPO#34).

Attitudinal differences, according to PSPOs, pose challenges for how they do their job. Students' shift from “liking” the police to telling them “F off”, could be, in part, a reflection of a developmental change from childhood to adolescence that is characterized by an increased need for autonomy and the questioning of authority figures, including PSPOs (e.g., Steinberg, 2020). When attitudes are positive (e.g., in elementary school), it is easier to connect with students, establish relationships and serve as a role model or a mentor. However, when attitudes are negative, positive interactions may be more difficult to initiate and maintain.

Neighborhood and family context and school policing

Developmental differences were further contextualized in the broader neighborhood and family contexts that were closely intertwined in our data. This interconnectedness shapes the nature of issues officers encounter. One PSPO explained:

Everything that is off campus ends up coming onto the campus. What happens out in the street, just walking to and from school, you're going to see it in the school in some way, shape or form. Something's going on at home and you're going to have to deal with that (PSPO#8).

While PSPOs acknowledged “that no matter where you are, you've got a handful of kids that are not going to follow the rules and always get in trouble” (PSPO#32), many officers identified neighborhood socio-economic status (SES) as contributing to the issues they encounter. One sergeant offered a broad view of how SES is reflected in these issues:

In [neighborhoods with higher household income] you have a huge prescription drug issue. Money's not an object there…Everybody's a lawyer in that area. Everybody's going to be like, “Well, do you know who my dad is?” Compare that to [neighborhoods with lower household income], where you have a mix of things. Sex trafficking is going to happen in our schools. Burglaries are going to happen in our schools. We're going to deal with parolees, we have gang violence there (PSPO#22).

In high income neighborhoods, officers reported enacting their law enforcer roles but typically for non-violent crimes such as use of or selling prescription drugs. Officers were less likely to enact their counselor, confidante, or advocate roles. By contrast, in low income neighborhoods, officers reported encountering more violent and personal crimes (e.g., gang violence/activity, sex trafficking) which required them to enact their law enforcer role more regularly. In these neighborhood contexts, officers also regularly engaged in a range of informal roles such as being confidantes, advocates, and counselors depending on the presence of adults in youths' life.

PSPOs also pointed to the roles that family context and parenting play in the issues students present –both in terms of misbehavior and criminal activity –by offering such explanations as “it all starts at home” (PSPO#44). Nevertheless, PSPOs also acknowledged that family context and dynamics are multifaceted and that sometimes what appears to be a lack of parenting or inconsistent parenting may be due to external stressors. One common stressor identified by PSPOs involved the acculturative challenges associated with being a new immigrant. In support of this view, an officer stated:

We have a lot of kids who've just arrived to this country. The culture shock – not only culture shock, but the fact that they probably were raised by grandparents, by uncles, by aunts in [their home country]. Now, they come and live with mom and dad and it's a complete stranger. Parents are not available because they work 12-h shifts. You have all these dynamics with these kids, so you're a little bit more compassionate and try to be a mentor (PSPO#10).

As these examples demonstrate, the issues PSPOs frequently encounter across diverse neighborhoods were not exclusively criminal in nature. These issues, from the perspective of the officers, emerge out of a range of experiences including social stressors and exposure to trauma that occur both inside and outside of the school.

It is noteworthy that none of the officers spontaneously discussed race or ethnicity. As noted by several participants, our sample of officers largely matched the demographics of the constituents they serve, potentially explaining the lack of prominence of race and ethnicity in officer discussions. Nevertheless, what students and families in diverse neighborhoods experience (including experiences with racism and bias more generally) comes on campus and affects what roles –formal and informal –officers take on.

Opportunities and challenges: the impact of policy, technology and professionalization

So far, we have painted a complex picture of the roles PSPOs enact and the ways in which the immediate contexts shape their roles. A deeper analysis, however, suggests that this is only part of the story. Officers' roles are also affected by the broader social, cultural and historical contexts. These distal contexts are illustrated in the outer circles of our conceptual model in Fig. 1: the exosystem, macrosystem and chronosystem. In the views of PSPOs, three contextual factors present both opportunities and challenges when enacting their roles: (1) changes in district policies and state laws, (2) the growth in technology and social media use, and (3) increased professionalization of PSPD. According to many PSPOs, these factors have fundamentally transformed what they do, how they do it, and why.

Changes in district policies and state Laws

As illustrated in the exosystem, one significant policy change in the Pine School District in the last decade concerned the adoption of restorative justice practices. According to the Pice School District, restorative justice is an approach to discipline that emphasizes collaborative problem-solving and positive behavioral intervention rather than punishment or criminalization (e.g., suspension, expulsion and arrest) of youth.

To understand how restorative justice was translated into PSPD's practice, we combined public documents on restorative justice put out by the school district, the school police department, and PSPOs' own accounts. We found that the primary change to PSPD's policies as the result of restorative justice was diversion referrals. Diversions are used as an alternative method to the arrest and citation of students who commit minor law violations such as possession of tobacco or engaging in fights. This policy change, according to PSPOs, shifted the primary responsibility of handling student misbehavior from school police to school administrators. For example, prior to diversions, fighting was considered a citable offense under the Penal Code 415(1) and 415.5(a) and was, for the most part, the responsibility of school police officers. Since the institution of diversions, a fight is designated as an administrative handle. If an officer determines that diversion is appropriate, the student and their parent or guardian agree to attend meetings at a designated resource center. Not attending and following through will generally result in a citation for the student.

Implications of restorative justice and diversion for PSPOs' roles and interactions with students

Restorative justice and diversion practices have far-reaching implications for how PSPOs make decisions and enact their roles. Some PSPOs believed that restorative justice has brought positive changes to both the district and PSPD, lining up school policing practices more closely with the behavioral, social, and emotional needs of students. One PSPO explained:

I guess it's a good thing that it's changed because a lot of kids, in some cases, learn a lesson. A lot of times, I find that kids do stuff in the spur of a moment not realizing the consequences. Or pressure from their friends. I see it all the time. A kid will have a nice iPhone and steal a piece of crap just for the sake of it, because it's sitting there, and is there for the taking. Kids do a lot of stuff in the spur of the moment. But when you look at it, it's a crime (PSPO#33).

Here the officer contextualizes the benefit of this policy change in the developmental context and highlights the age-related characteristics of students –being impulsive and not realizing the consequences of actions –that necessitate a different approach than criminalizing. In addition to addressing misbehavior in a developmentally appropriate manner, restorative justice practices facilitate a more culturally attuned approach. According to one PSPO, restorative justice more effectively facilitates student-officer interactions:

I come from a family of immigrants. My parents came here with nothing. A lot of the community I work with are in that same situation. It's just knowing who you're dealing with, talking to them so you can address the issues in the right way. Some start crying because they start to realize what they've done and how it's going to affect others. That's when you do more than just responding to the call and saying, “I have a crime.” We have the option. We have the flexibility (PSPO#10).

Connecting with the students and allowing them to reflect on their behavior does exactly what restorative justice is supposed to do (see Fronius, Darling-Hammond, Persson, et al., 2019 for a comprehensive review). Nevertheless, while PSPOs acknowledged the benefits of restorative justice, almost every officer highlighted significant challenges associated with it, particularly when it comes to law enforcement. One set of challenges concerned the effectiveness of diversion and restorative justice practices for crime prevention among youth. Specifically, some PSPOs explained that these practices minimize the consequences of student misbehavior and criminal activity to such an extent that they do little to prevent youth from repeating these behaviors. The following exchange demonstrates the potential impact of diversions on consequences for youths' behavior:

Officer: If there are no consequences, having laws and rules are kind of pointless. Here's an example. You're on your way home today, you're going on the freeway and the freeway is jam packed, but the carpool lane is completely empty and you're by yourself. What is one of the reasons you don't go into that carpool lane?

Interviewer: I don't want a ticket.

Officer: You don't want a ticket because that's like $370. How about if we lower that fine to $3?

Interviewer: Oh, I'll totally do it.

Officer: Exactly. Because now it's convenient. And that's what's going on with these kids. “Hey, if I get caught, what happens to me? I'm going to get talked to.” It's getting to the point where now you can break into somebody's house and you are not going to get arrested (PSPO#36).

Some PSPOs voiced the opinion that diversions “have gone too far” where “you can do anything and everything but murder and rape and get diversions” (PSPO#14). In their views, these policy changes pose significant challenges to school and public safety.

A group of PSPOs suggested that the effectiveness of diversions and restorative justice practices depend on the “who,” “what,” and “where.” Many PSPOs expressed the belief that restorative justice does not work for “the 10% that commit 90% of the crimes” (PSPO#42). Nevertheless, some believed that it could work for certain students and for certain crimes. As one PSPO expressed, restorative justice may work “for the elementary school students, maybe even for some middle school students. It works with kids that it's their first time making a mistake” (PSPO#38). Another PSPOs stated that:

I don't think it works for drugs like marijuana, cocaine and methamphetamine. I really haven't seen the changes. I see it work the most with fights or batteries. When you get two students sitting in front of each other in a Restorative Justice circle and they talk about their problems and why they did what they did. I've seen miracles happen where we had two enemies shaking hands by the end of the day and I have no issues with them whatsoever until graduation (PSPO#14).

Other PSPOs added that cyberbullying is also amenable to restorative justice circles where the “bullier” gains perspective on the impact of cyberbullying not only on the victim but also on the family of the victim.

Some PSPOs criticized restorative justice for not fully attending to the complex realities of social life in the diverse communities they serve. For example, many raised the issue of parental involvement in restorative justice circles and noted that “some parents just don't care to show up” while others “have multiple jobs and work 12-hour shifts” which makes it “impossible to get the parent in those meetings” (PSPO#25). Other PSPOs who worked in communities with high levels of gang activity described the challenges gang culture pose for these practices—it takes more than bringing members of rival gangs together in a restorative justice circle to make it work. PSPOs also pointed to unintended consequences of diversions in high gang activity areas. According to one PSPO, adult criminals may exploit youth when the consequences are minimal:

It's a slippery slope where, ‘the more serious a crime, you just need more counseling.’ In this neighborhood, gang members understand adults get in trouble for doing [crime] but kids don't. Now, you see kids becoming pawns and doing crime (PSPO#13).

In sum, PSPOs' accounts of the impact of policy changes on their roles are nuanced and complex. Nevertheless, some of the issues PSPOs raised about the feasibility and efficacy of restorative justice practices are consistent with some empirical findings (e.g., Fronius et al., 2019). For example, while several descriptive reports highlight decreases in discipline disparities, fighting, bullying, and suspensions in schools with a restorative justice program (e.g., Brown, 2017; González, 2012), other studies have shown mixed findings. Augustine et al. (2018), for instance, employed a randomized control trial and showed that while overall suspension rates were reduced in schools with restorative justice practices, suspension rates for male students or students with IEPs were not reduced. In addition, results failed to document reductions in incidents of violence, weapons violations or arrests in schools with a restorative justice program. Taken together, the issues PSPOs identified along with the mixed findings of the current empirical studies raise questions about the utility of restorative justice practices in addressing all crimes and for all students.

Implications of restorative justice for PSPOs' sense of efficacy

According to some PSPOs, recent policy changes about restorative justice have expanded opportunities to form partnerships with stakeholders in the school and the community. Expressing frustration, by contrast, many PSPOs believed that these policy changes have called into question their legitimacy and social standing, ultimately reducing their effectiveness with youth. As described by one PSPO:

I've been in situations where the first thing that comes out of a kid's mouth is, “You can't touch me.” A lot of times, we have a reason, a very lawful reason, but we don't want to touch the kid because of everything that's going on and policies changing. That gives the kids more power. Then something happens, they don't get arrested and they tell their little buddies, “You see? They don't do anything to me. I can do whatever I want,” and that kind of trickles down (PSPO#2).

In response to these limits on their authority and social standing, some officers expressed that their “hands are tied” (PSPO#41). Some PSPOs resisted these changes by reasserting authority. One PSPO described their reaction:

I used to tell those kids, “I'll be your best friend or your worst enemy. You can come to me or my office when you want to eat lunch. But you mess up or you want to play games, I'm going to screw you over with my pencil. I'm going to get creative in my reports and make you look really bad so that the chances of you being held accountable are a lot higher. I'm not here to bust your chops unless you do something (PSPO#42).

This PSPO reacts to constraints on their authority by attempting to establish control in ways that appear questionable–using their reports so that the student is more likely to be held accountable even when the current policies say otherwise.

Changes in district policies also affected PSPOs' efficacy and standing with school administrators. This compromised sense of effectiveness stemmed in part from the inconsistent implementation of restorative justice practices in schools. As one PSPO explained, “every school is kind of interpreting this a little different” (PSPO#26). Other PSPOs pointed out the shift in responsibility of handling student misbehavior from school police to school administrators sometimes results in role confusion on the part of administrators. Before the change, PSPOs acted as “disciplinarians”–the school administrators knew it and the officers knew it. Now that PSPOs have minimal formal involvement in disciplinary issues, some school administrators still expect officers to get involved. As one PSPO put it, “You have a lot of old school administrators who still think it's like it was in the past so we have to educate them that is not the way it was anymore” (PSPO#14). These dynamics can lead to power struggles between the officers and administrators. One PSPO shared their experience:

Principals and assistant principals say, “Hey, this is my campus, you do what I say.” They really can't separate the fact that I'm working for a police department that has certain guidelines that I need to follow as far as my legal standing to do what you're asking me to do. They say, “Hey, we walked into the restroom and it smelled like marijuana. These two kids were in there, search them.” I say, “No, the constitution still applies. I can't just violate their rights and go around searching people” (PSPO#25).

Growth in technology and social media use

A second source of opportunities and challenges has emerged from changes in technology and social media, as depicted in the macrosystem (Fig. 1). Officers' law enforcement roles have expanded to include not only the school context but also the cyberworld which brings about newer issues. Technology and social media have allowed officers to see crime instantly, as it is happening and to track criminals' digital footprints more readily and rapidly in order to solve crimes or prevent them from happening in the first place. Nevertheless, PSPOs also described significant challenges arising as a consequence of social media. In the last two decades, issues such as (cyber)bullying, sexting, photo-sharing and video recordings as well as cyber-threats on social media have skyrocketed. Because these “new” types of issues occur at the intersection of the physical and online contexts, it complicates officer jurisdiction. Given that these issues unfold in cyberspace, the boundaries of what is considered a crime and how an officer should respond become less clear. Here a PSPO describes a common situation:

We get a lot of this. Two 13-year-olds are dating and the boy says, “Girl, send me a picture of your boobies.” And she does. Now they have pictures on their phones. They break up, they get mad and post the pictures on Instagram. The crime here would be, ‘Who is distributing this?’ He’s in possession of the pictures. He legitimately received them from her but he's sending them out. He's in possession of child porn and so is she because she's got pictures that he sent. Now, you end up possibly arresting two 13-year-olds for possession of child porn (PSPO#34).

This example captures the challenges associated with assessing and investigating crimes committed by youth in cyberspace. If one of the parties were an adult, this situation would constitute a crime of child pornography. Here, the students are 13 years old and engaging in what some might call “developmentally typical behavior” –you break up, you get mad, and you act out or retaliate. This behavior, though inappropriate, is not so clear cut and poses a dilemma from a law enforcement standpoint—Is this a crime? And how should the officer respond? Because existing laws were developed for adults with little attention to the emergent developmental needs of students, PSPOs are left with inadequate guidance but much discretion to make a decision.

In other instances, PSPOs reported handling a range of cyber threats, including the threat of a school shooting, setting in motion a series of investigative actions. As a case in point:

This young lady got hold of one of her daddy's weapons and put it on Instagram and said she was going to shoot up the school. We went to the residence to do a threat assessment and did a welfare check to make sure that there're no weapons at the house. When we got there, daddy didn't lock it in the safe. That's called criminal storage of firearms and parents can be arrested for that. When a kid says, “I'm going to shoot up a school,” then the school becomes the victim (PSPO#9).

Here, the overlap between the online and home contexts requires PSPOs to enact their law enforcement role by visiting the student's home, talking to the parents, and assessing whether a crime has been committed –either by the student or by the parent.

PSPOs also linked the rise in technology and social media use to challenges to their legitimacy and social standing more broadly. These challenges, PSPOs believed, are in part due to heightened public scrutiny in the current cultural climate. Officers reasoned that events in the broader context of policing in the U.S. (e.g., police brutality against racial/ethnic minorities) coupled with the increased visibility of PSPD in the school and community link school police to law enforcement in general. According to PSPOs, negative public opinions of law enforcement are perpetuated by the use of technology and social media. As one PSPO described:

Cell phones and social media are everywhere. Things get out faster than ever, and no one cares about facts. They just care about what's popular. So sometimes we're doing the right thing and it's just a snapshot. It's not the beginning, it's not the end. It's just what's going on at that specific moment. It could be a video or a picture and then it's spread all over social media, all over the world, and it perceives us doing the wrong thing. And no one cares about facts (PSPO#27).

According to PSPOs, negative public perception affects not only their interactions with students, parents, and teachers but can also affect who wants to join the force:

The truth is there's not enough of us. Nobody wants to be a police officer nowadays because of all these other problems that we've been talking about, just all the negativity and all the changes. Even though we're here, we're short every day (PSPO#37).

Increased professionalization in PSPD

The last source of opportunities and challenges stems out of the chronosystem, the outermost layer of our model. The chronosystem contains historical events such as the increased professionalization of PSPD. To more fully capture the nature of these changes, we triangulated archival documents (e.g., district minutes and correspondence) about the department with officers' own accounts. Starting with PSPD's departmentalization in the early 1980's, PSPD became more formalized in their practice, broadening their jurisdiction in the 1990's and fully adopting a uniform. According to PSPOs, the convergence of these changes led to an increase in visibility and accountability as well as an expansion of policing powers. A sergeant summarized these organizational changes:

When I started in '91, we were not in uniform. You had to be in a suit and tie every day. And they really did want you there but not seen. It was looked upon as a little too aggressive for kids in the community. After '92 riots, we got in uniform because people needed to know who we were. It was easier for us to do our job. Our police powers also grew from just the campuses to encompass the outside community. Community policing allowed us to go further into the neighborhood. Then we got patrol cars, allowing us to even go further and do more policing (PSPO#2).

Here the sergeant describes how the social and political contexts at the time (i.e., the '92 riots) worked together to bring about the ‘need’ for PSPOs' presence in the community. As the sergeant highlights, the expansion of police powers translated into a broader jurisdiction of responsibility –one that encompassed both the school and the community contexts. Thus, a combination of philosophical (i.e., community policing) and logistical (i.e., patrol cars) changes led to a stronger police presence in district schools. At the same time, starting in the early 2000's, the department moved to change its image to become more like a municipal police department by creating divisions and placing officers on a four-day,10-h schedule among other things.

While many PSPOs discussed potential benefits associated with the increased professionalization, others noted challenges that arose from it. One such challenge concerned increased public scrutiny of PSPOs and the PSPD more generally. In light of more visibility of PSPD and the anti-law enforcement climate, PSPOs believed that many advocacy and civil rights groups want to “tie our hands” and “spew a lot of hateful and incorrect information…to get rid of us” (PSPO#33). These social and political dynamics represent a dramatic shift away from the expanded police powers of the 90's to what PSPOs believe are their constrained powers today.

Discussion

Against the backdrop of dual tensions between school safety concerns and advocacy groups' calls for school police reform, including the possibility of disbanding them altogether, we conducted the first study on school police officers' own views on the types of issues they encounter and the roles they enact to address them. In our analysis, PSPOs encounter a wide range of issues, including criminal activities, interpersonal disputes, mental health concerns, and social media threats. Officers encountered these issues both on and off campus or were called in to address them by school personnel, parents, community members, or even students. To respond to these complex issues, PSPOs exercise both formal and informal roles that they use flexibly and in combination.

Drawing on a bioecological model (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006), we identified social, developmental and historical contexts that influence these issues and roles. The role of context in examining school-based law enforcement has been largely ignored. To begin to redress this neglect, we offer an important framework from developmental science to understand and organize the multiple forces –both proximal and distal –that can interact to shape school police officer roles. Application of the bioecological model tells us that context matters and it matters in meaningful ways. The immediate context shapes the content of roles, more distal contexts such as policy changes influence the availability of and the constraints on those roles, while the larger sociocultural and historical contexts meaningfully shape how and why officers enact their roles.

Another notable contribution of the current study is its focus on school police officers as opposed to school resource officers (SROs). While resource officers are employed by municipal police departments that have contracts with school districts, our participants were recruited from one independent school police department located in a large and diverse urban school district. These officers are remarkably diverse themselves–comprised mostly of racial/ethnic minorities, with a majority identifying as Latinx. Our sample also represented a wide range of officer rank and years of service, providing not only a rich and nuanced perspective about the everyday experiences of school police officers but also offering insights into the historical changes in that department. Given that the school police department assigned these officers to elementary, middle, and high schools across a wide range of neighborhoods, we were able to examine how school level as well as neighborhood context shapes their roles. Documenting contextual factors is challenging, if not impossible, when studying the experiences of SROs who are contracted at either the district or school level, sometimes for only one semester. Given that the difference between SROs and school police officers is more than just in their name, we call on researchers to make distinctions between the two groups moving forward.

Implications and future directions for research

While officers provided nuanced views of their own roles, it is imperative to investigate whether these same roles are perceived by youth, and if so, what are the implications of youths' perceptions. For example, do students perceive that school police officers enact a combination of the formal and informal roles that we documented? And, if so, are they more likely to report feeling safe or connected to school as a result? Additionally, given that studies often focus on the consequences of school police for youth outcomes in terms of disciplinary practices (e.g., Skiba et al., 2016), future studies should consider how the presence of school police affects youths' peer relationships and intergroup attitudes about youth who may be more vulnerable to disciplinary actions by police.

Implications for training

In our sample, PSPOs indicated that they “go to the same academies as [municipal police] and county Sheriffs” (PSPO # 16). Triangulating information from the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training (P.O.S.T), PSPDs' documents and official website as well as PSPOs' own accounts, we found that PSPOs receive the regular basic training along with all the mandated trainings for peace officers in the state of California. In addition, like other CA peace officers, PSPOs complete P.O.S.T-certified advanced officer training every two years. PSPOs receive an additional P.O.S.T-mandated 40-hour specialized training on policing in schools once during their careers. Finally, PSPOs receive annual in-service training to get legal updates and information on such topics as Education Code school safety mandates.

PSPOs in our study voiced concerns that the training they received was inadequate and did not prepare them fully for working with students. Consistent with their concerns, a systematic review by Counts, Randall, Ryan, and Katsiyannis (2018) highlighted the lack of federal guidelines and clear training criteria for police officers in schools. Our analysis enabled us to make the following two distinct but interrelated training recommendations.

Increasing knowledge about child and adolescent development

Because officers enact a variety of formal and informal roles, appropriate and targeted training is key. Training for PSPOs must cover information on child and adolescent development, including both typical and atypical development, with an emphasis on aspects of development that directly impact officers' interactions with youth. PSPOs in our sample demonstrated some knowledge about typical development by acknowledging that, for example, “kids do things in the spur of the moment” without thinking about the consequences. But many stated that they learned what they know about young people on the job. Systematically increasing awareness of adolescents' behavioral tendencies such as impulsivity, risk-taking, difficulty in delaying gratification, and inadequate weighing of the consequences holds important implications for the ways in which officers interpret youths' behavior and make decisions. For instance, many PSPOs described interactions with youth who defied their orders, resisted, or challenged them. To what extent are such behaviors a manifestation of typical adolescent developmental experiences vs. defiance? Given that school police officers spend more time with youth than do their municipal counterparts, asking such questions helps illuminate the best course of action in a developmentally appropriate way.

Our analysis also revealed the need for training in atypical development. Some PSPOs displayed an awareness of disability and used special education terminology such as “IEP” (Individualized Education Program). However, their use of these terms was at time outdated, suggesting the need for updated training. Given that officers reported being called to address situations involving students with disabilities and given that they may have varied understandings of disability, it is critical that training addresses atypical developmental concerns.

Bias reduction at the intersection of developmental and neighborhood contexts

Youth do not develop in a vacuum –neighborhood, family, and socio-cultural contexts shape development. Existing bias training is limited in that it exclusively focuses on race/ethnicity without taking into account the roles of neighborhood and family contexts, access to resources or opportunity structures. In fact, the PSPOs in our sample who led the racial bias training classes for other officers expressed that the content of these trainings did not situate racial bias within the developmental or the family and neighborhood contexts.

Research has shown that stereotypes about racial/ethnic groups at the intersection of socioeconomic status (SES) influence beliefs, set up expectations, and guide behavior (e.g., Goff, Jackson, Leone, Culotta, & Ditomasso, 2014). Therefore, bias training should include examining the stereotypes school police officers hold about youth based not only on their race/ethnicity but also youths' SES, sexual orientation, gender identity, and age. This intersectional approach (Ghavami & Mistry, 2019; e.g., race & SES) will more effectively address the diverse needs and experiences of the students whom officers encounter.

Relatedly, PSPOs often discussed neighborhood and family contexts concurrently. Officers commonly highlighted lack of or insufficient parenting as a key source of youth misbehavior. This association was particularly salient in their discussions about families in low resourced neighborhoods, even though many PSPOs acknowledged the additional burdens many parents face as a consequence of social and structural inequalities. While we recognize that, by virtue of their job, school police officers frequently come on the scene when things go wrong, a purely deficit view of families is likely to interfere with relationship-based policing which entails developing mutual respect and building relationships. Thus, we recommend that bias trainings challenge stereotypes about families and highlight strengths within diverse communities.

Stereotypes also contribute to biases outside of conscious awareness and control, or what has been labeled “implicit bias” (e.g., Devine, 1989). Research suggests that implicit bias affects routine, everyday interactions between municipal police officers and civilians. For example, Voigt et al.'s (2017) analysis of Oakland police officers' body camera footage demonstrated that officers spoke with consistently less respect toward African American than white individuals. Assuming implicit biases affect everyday interactions of school police officers, investigating whether and how they affect officer formal and informal roles is key. Reducing biases could lead to stronger relationships between school police officers and their various constituents.

Implications for policy

School districts in urban contexts often serve remarkably diverse groups of students and families who come from a range of communities. This diversity requires an awareness of the complex realities of youths and communities including exposure to stressors resulting from social, political, and historical trauma. To that end, adopting trauma-informed policing, one that enhances officers' understanding of trauma and its effects through a greater awareness of an individual's needs (Gill, Gottfredson, & Hutzell, 2016), is essential. In our focus groups, officers expressed some awareness of these realities. Increasing officer knowledge of the association between trauma (e.g., Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) and youth “acting out,” could help officers appropriately interpret youths' behavior and effectively connect youth and families to resources through the enactment of informal roles such as being a resource-liaison.

As school districts debate the role of school police and consider implementing policy changes that limit the authority of police in schools, officers' input is rarely considered. As Lipsky (2010) argued, frontline agents like officers essentially perform policy-making roles such that they actually shape the meaning of policies and their implementation through their attitudes, beliefs, motivations, and actions. Even with constraints on their power following changes such as restorative justice, PSPOs in our study still exercised discretion in various ways when making decisions. Because officer buy-in is critical for a successful policy, school districts, advocacy groups, and policy makers would benefit from working collaboratively with school police. Finally, current policy debates about whether school police should be eliminated need to be informed by data-driven research. These decisions should also include the voices of students, parents, and school personnel as well as school police officers so that any gaps in safety resulting from the removal of such programs as safe passages can be addressed.

Limitations

Although we focused on the roles of officers in this paper, we recognize that the officers themselves –their personalities, political ideologies and motivations, among other things–also inform what roles they choose to enact and how they enact them. Because of the types of questions asked and the sample size, we were not able to examine these person characteristics. While our sample was diverse, our analysis focused on one school police department in southern California. Therefore, we were not able to consider important regional differences, not only within the state, but also across different states that have their own unique demographics. Nevertheless, in keeping with recommendations regarding transferability of qualitative research (e.g., Schwandt, 1997), we provided ample details about our methodology, analysis and findings so that other school police departments as well as policy makers can assess the extent to which our work can be generalized to other settings and contexts.

As we noted in the analysis, discussions of race/ethnicity were not prominent in the focus groups we conducted. However, even if the racial/ethnic demographics of officers match their constituents, the potential for identity-based biases and systemic racism in policing still exists and merits deeper investigation. Because our study was voluntary, it is possible that those who elected to participate represent a unique sample. For instance, they may be particularly involved in implementing the mission of PSPD or they may be especially disgruntled with the department. These limitations notwithstanding, our general findings about the multifaceted nature of PSPO roles falls in line with studies conducted in the Midwest (Rhodes, 2017) and Texas (McKenna et al., 2016). In addition, our findings align with an analysis of the national data from the Common Core of Data (Coon & Travis, 2012) assessing the perceptions of both chiefs of police and principals of school police officers' roles. Therefore, the findings give us additional confidence in the credibility and potential generalizability of our work to other school settings.

Conclusion

We conducted the focus groups analyzed here in the Fall of 2018 and Summer of 2019. As we were writing this article, life as we know it was thrown off course – first by the novel coronavirus that reached pandemic proportions, then an economic downturn that left millions of Americans unemployed, and finally the social unrest precipitated by the brutal murder of George Floyd at the hands and knee of a Minneapolis police officer. That event and the other senseless murders by police of unarmed African American men, women, and youth have brought about a nationwide reckoning that systemic racism runs deep in our civic institutions.

Much of the discourse on this reckoning has correctly centered on law enforcement. Some critics have called for defunding or even abolishing municipal police departments. Because law enforcement in schools is often associated with municipal policing, the call to ban police officers in schools has gained traction. For example, the Minneapolis school district ended its contract with the city's municipal police department within days of Floyd's death. Several other school districts across the country quickly followed suit. For many, excessive use of force with minors in school and racial disproportionality foreshadow what later happens to adults on the streets. Therefore, the revenue spent on supporting school police, they argue, could better be spent on nurses, counselors, and other specialists with expertise on the physical and mental health of children in school. In the long run, that may be wise policy as long as the impetus for change is balanced with the critical need to keep schools and their neighborhoods safe. Our analysis suggests that a useful first step in this balancing act is to better understand the multiple formal and informal roles enacted by school police officers and whether a more narrowly defined law enforcement role can successfully be decoupled from other more contextualized roles.