Paul Bass Photo
Ricardo Rodriguez: We helped prevent arrests.
Ricardo Rodriguez believes that policing can change for the better — with cops remaining in schools.
Rodriguez was one of those cops, known as “school resource officers” (SROs). For 19 years. First he was stationed at his alma mater, Wilbur Cross High School. Then he spent 15 years overseeing the city’s SROs.
Responding to demands of organizers of recent “Black Lives Matter” protests , New Haven’s school board is weighing whether to get rid of SROs. (Click here for a recent story about the different opinions on the subject from board members and school officials.) Communities across the country are considering the same question; Oakland last week became the latest to decide to defund school-based cops.
“There are many great interactions that helped the kids during critical times in their lives. Eliminating this program will only hurt the children and families in the city. Please take a minute to help the children in New Haven by signing this petition,” Rodriguez’s save-SROs petition reads in part.
Click here to see the full petition, which as of mid-Wednesday afternoon had 634 signatures.
Proponents of ending the program argue that cops don’t belong in schools. That they fuel the “school-prison pipeline” by arresting young people rather than addressing underlying problems. That unarmed social workers, counselors, and other trained professionals can better handle challenges that lead to conflict inside schools.
The Citywide Youth Coalition listed eliminating SROs and funding more school counselors as one of eight core demands of the 5,000-person march it led to the police station on June 5.
“It’s a no-brainer,” U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy said of removing SROs, during a public discussion this week about how to change the criminal justice system.
“We are too used to policing black and brown children. I think that norm is very dangerous,” Board of Education student member Lihame Arouna told her colleagues at a June 8 meeting. “When we talk about SROs being in schools that need more help, what other ways can we get that help to them?”
In an interview Wednesday, Arouna stressed that her position isn’t a personal criticism of individual cops. “I’ve met nice school resource officers,” she said. Rather, she said, It’s a policy question: Whether to spend money on cops or more social workers to help kids. Whether a student acting out in class should, say, be referred to the principal’s office to cool out or to a counselor; or to a cop. “Now you’re in the system. You’re criminalized. It’s easier to criminalize black and brown students when school resource officers are in school,” she argued. She said most of her fellow students are “indifferent” to in-school cops.
Rodriguez, who’s now retired and working for the state, argued that the choice isn’t an “either/or.” He said in his experience SROs prevented arrests by working as a team with those other professionals.
He said he and other SROs knew kids through everyday contact as well as programs like the Police Athletic League (PAL). Through earned trust, they were able to intervene with, say, an upset kid who was about to throw a punch at an administrator. Or when Latin King members at Cross would tell him a big fight was brewing, and he could intervene to try to lower tensions. If kids did get arrested, SROs could help shepherd them through the Juvenile Review Board to give them a second chance without a record.
“Do I think policing needs to change? Absolutely,” Rodriguez said during an interview outside Cross, which he graduated in 1984.
He said, for instance, that he’d like to see statutes rewritten to prevent arrests for many minor offenses like vandalism or certain motor-vehicle violations. He said officers should be trained to solve problems before making arrests, to deescalate tensions. He agreed with increasing public support for mental-health workers and counselors.
But he argued that cops play a key role in that mix in helping all students feel safe in a school environment and making some connections that other professionals sometimes can’t. Principals or school counselors would often invite him to participate, for instance, in certain cases involving troubled teens. “We do it together,” he said. “Kids have been saved from stuff on the street by having conversations with officers in the schools. We were icing beefs within the school system.”
Through Hoops
James Baker: It’s a team effort.
New Haven currently has six SROs, according to school system Chief Operating Officer Michael Pinto: Two assigned to Cross, two to Hillhouse High School, one to Career High School, one to Clemente Academy.
The program began around 27 years ago, in the early years of New Haven’s community policing effort. The concept was to have officers working on foot, not in cars, out in the community, in conjunction with other agencies to get to know people, especially young people, and solve small problems before they became bigger problems.
SROs received special training that included working with Yale Child Study Center clinicians, Rodriguez said.
He chose cops based on their interest in working with young people. For instance, he recruited James Baker to work as an SRO.
Officer Baker was already running mentorship and after-school programs in Dixwell when Rodriguez tapped him for the squad nine years ago.
“You already know the kids,” Baker recalled Rodriguez telling him at the time.
Baker spent the next eight years mostly stationed at Hillhouse, then at Riverside Academy, before retiring in 2019 and joining University of New Haven’s police force.
He signed on to Rodriguez’s petition drive when he heard people wanted to eliminate the SRO program.
“I thought that was crazy,” Baker said during an interview outside Hillhouse. “I’m upset.”
Known as “Shake and Bake,” Baker took pride in rarely arresting people. (Read about that here.)
“People don’t understand the role of resource officers. You wear a lot of hats,” Baker said. For instance: He recalled seeing a kid who he knew in the nurse’s office. The kid needed to go to the hospital, but it wasn’t urgent. The nurse was going to call for an ambulance. Baker knew the family, knew they couldn’t afford the ambulance bill. So he suggested the nurse call a parent instead to transport the student.
He spoke of finding outlets for kids in danger of getting in trouble. He organized PAL teams for high school kids who didn’t make the basketball squad. He’d drive them to games in other cities, he said, and return them home afterwards, and require them to keep up grades. He saw his job as believing in kids and helping them succeed, he said.
Often an arrest can make that harder, he said. A trained cop can help avoid that, he argued. He spoke of a time at Riverside when an upset student started threatening to punch people and started swinging.
“He was off the wall. He wanted to fight. He hadn’t hit anyone yet,” Baker recalled. He said he brought the student outside. “I had to hold him” tight to stop him. Baker recalled explaining to the student that he had almost reached a point where he would have been arrested, setting off a series of problems. He said he and the student developed mutual respect, and the student was able to avoid getting in trouble after that.
Baker likened SRO work to the broader idea of serving as a “community” cop: When you know someone, you don’t automatically assume they’re up to no good if, say, you see them running. You don’t assume you have to chase them, and escalate the situation. He said he knows so many young people are scared of police. That saddens him. He argued that the model of community policing, of cops getting to know young people early, can alleviate that fear.
Policing’s Future
Thomas Breen Photo
Lihame Arouna at Black Lives Matter protest: Cops don’t belong in schools.
The debate over SROs seems to come down to the question — whether community policing, at least as understood in New Haven, can make cops more accountable, can reduce both police and community violence.
New Haven officials have operated under that assumption for decades. So have reform-minded federal officials. That model of community policing formed the basis of the Obama administration’s efforts. The idea of more, better-trained, police walking the beat in communities and getting to know people and working alongside other institutions remains a core philosophy of improving law enforcement.
The Black Lives Matter protests this past month have highlighted a different assessment: That policing can’t be reformed. That policing itself is the problem, leading to militarization and a ratcheting up of core mental-health, poverty, and community problems that are better addressed by professionals without weapons or arrest powers and with different training. That police forces should dramatically shrink and do less. That police forces should be reconstituted as small, specially trained “guardian” (rather than “warrior”) units to respond to a small subset of violence-related 911 calls.
Money now spent on “community policing” is better spent on social services and, as local Black Lives Matter organizer Ala Ochumare told the mayor last week, a different kind of SRO —single-room occupancy housing.
How New Haven decides the fate of school resource officers will reflect how it decides that larger community-policing question.
Following is a video prepared to support the school resource officers:
The SROs in New Haven are NOT funded by the boars of Ed. They are a group of individuals that
1) are minorities, Spanish speaking and can well relate to the students. Some graduated from NH Highschools.
2) leave it up to young people to "know" everything. A student is NOT in the system if a counselor request that a SRO speaks to them.
3) Sros diffuse tons of incidents before they happen. If a call log was pulled from dispatch center everyone will see that administration and counselors constantly call because they need the assistance of an officer. So look into that.
4) Sros run a free camp for 5 weeks with trips included. Always full to capacity. People have no issues leaving their kid there 8 hrs of the day. Many youth at work workers request to work with the PAL camp.
Instead of focusing on a few that want the officers out how about talking to the many that have benefited from having a officer around.