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Law Enforcement Presence In Schools

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Law enforcement presence in schools is a topic that has been spoken about by many researchers throughout the years and has brought up a lot of controversial thoughts and ideas. Many researchers that have conducted research that is related to this topic have mentioned how they came across studies that made them come up with conclusions about school law enforcement officers that were rather mixed than geared towards one side of the spectrum (Bracy, 2010). The studies that I looked into were very similar in that many of them looked down upon the idea of having law enforcement officers present in schools, while a small handful felt that it has more pros than it does cons. Na and Gottfredson (2013), for example, conducted a study in which they …show more content…

Beger (2002) utilized various studies that were conducted by other researchers in order to support his argument. According to Beger (2002), the increase in the number of law enforcement officers in schools has caused the disciplinarian role of the school administrators to be shifted over to them and because they have no other type of training other than what they learned while working as police officers, SROs feel the need to use force and disciplinarian methods that tend to violate the fourth amendment rights of students that protect them against unreasonable searches. Students are no longer considered as being legally safe while in school (Beger, …show more content…

He utilized ethnography in order to see how the rights of students, including those that are listed in the fourth and fifth amendment, are dealt with in twos public high schools that have full time SROs in them. The two high schools that were selected for the study were Central High School and City High School. Two ethnographers paid random visits to each one of the schools and looked at the way the students interacted with their SROs. They then took field notes of what they observed at the end of each school day. 26 in person interviews were also conducted on parents, staff members, and the SROs that worked at the schools. Bracy (2010) found that having SROs present in schools is not necessarily a good thing. The SROs and school administrators that were took part in the study followed the law and did not ignore the rights of their students, but they were able to work their way around the law at times when it came questioning the students and performing searches on them (Bracy,

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