School Security Personnel and Student Arrests Tim Servoss Canisius College 10/22/18 servosst@canisius.edu

Research Questions Is the presence of security personnel (SROs and/or guards) associated with an increase in overall student arrests? Is the presence of security personnel (SROs and/or guards) associated with an increase in Black student arrests? Not the usual language regarding disparities which I’ll discuss later

Data and Measures 2015-2016 Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) Universe of schools (n = 96,360) Arrests disaggregated by race and sex Underreported Cleaned at both the district and school level School security personnel FTE law enforcement officers and security guards Due to processing error set to missing for 69k schools 2015-2016 School Survey on Crime and Safety (SSOCS) Nationally representative sample Middle and high schools (n = 1500) Security: personnel and non-personnel School characteristics: urbanicity, region, SES, neighborhood crime, academics, misbehavior and crime in the school Most of the analyses are based on a merged datasets

Measures Security Arrests Personnel: Each school categorized as having None (23%), Guard Only (7%), Police Only (46%), Both Guards and Police (24%) Non-personnel security scaled using dichotomous Rasch model Arrests Low frequency outcome 89% of schools in sample have none Size Cat Arrest Group Zero Low High Small (1-474) 1-2 >2 Medium (475-870) 1-4 >4 Large (>870) 1-7 >7 N 1063 85 43 Avg. Arrests 2.38 20.64 Arrests are tricky because not a lot of them overall arrest rate well below 1%

Arrest Group (COLUMN %) Personnel and Arrests Personnel Arrest Group (ROW %) Category ZERO LOW HIGH NONE 90.9% 8.2% 0.9% GUARD ONLY 80.2% 16.3% 3.5% POLICE ONLY 79.1% 14.5% 6.4% BOTH 67.6% 19.6% 12.8% Personnel Arrest Group (COLUMN %) Category ZERO LOW HIGH NONE 27.5% 13.8% 3.5% GUARD ONLY 6.6% 7.4% POLICE ONLY 45.8% 46.6% 45.9% BOTH 20.1% 32.3% 47.1% 79% of schools with police only have no arrests 67.6% of schools with both police and guards have no arrests 80% OF LOW ARREST SCHOOL HAVE POLICE OR BOTH 93% OF HIGH ARREST SCHOOLS HAVE POLICE OR BOTH

Multiple Regression (multinomial) Low vs Zero Arrests High vs Zero Arrests Urbanicity (town < rural) Urbanicity (No) Region (South 2.7x > Midwest) Region (No) Neighborhood crime (No) %Free lunch (No) % students <15th percentile (No) School misbehavior (No) School misbehavior (Yes; 1.26) School crime (Moderate 3.0x > Low; High 4.3x > Low) School crime (Moderate 4.1x > Low; High 7.7x > Low) Security measures (No) Security personnel (No) Security personnel (Yes) --No effect of Guards only --Police only 3.8x > No personnel --Both 4.6x > No personnel Talk about DV contrasts Low vs Zero

Hi Arrest vs. Zero Both vs. Police Only Roles that SROs play and their relationship to student arrests Hi Arrest vs. Zero Both vs. Police Only Motor vehicle traffic control Security enforcement and patrol Maintaining school discipline Coordinating with local police and emergency teams Identifying problems in the school and proactively seeking solutions Training teachers/staff in school safety or crime prevention Mentoring students Teaching a law-related education course or training students Recording/reporting discipline problems to school authorities Providing information to school authorities about the legal definitions of behavior for recording/reporting purposes NO NO NO NO YES! (3.62) YES! (1.47) NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO Recall that 79% of police only schools and 67.6% of both school have no arrests, so something is different/working Let’s look at the 70% of schools that have police (46% police only; 24% both) Hi arrest vs 0 (maintain discipline = 85%; record/report discipline = 92%; define student behavior as crime 95%) Police vs Both NO NO YES! (3.42) YES! (1.44) YES! (5.40) YES! (1.83)

Racial/ethnic disproportionality From 2015-2016 CRDC Group % Arrested OR vs White % of arrests % of pop Black 0.26 3.59 36.1 15.3 Hispanic 0.11 1.46 24.0 25.0 White 0.07 -- 33.1 50.1 Imbalance within schools 92.3% of schools arrest the same proportion of Black and White students 3.2% (n = 2462) of schools arrest a greater proportion of White than Black student 4.5% (n = 3526) of schools arrest a greater proportion of Black than White students 114 of these schools have no White students 39% of these are 1-0 schools About 25% of these schools arrest the same or more White students but proportionally more Black students. So ideally we would have a measure of disproportion that we could calculate for each student but particularly once we merge the CRDC with the 1500 schools with SSOCS there’s not much variability

Predictors of Black student arrests Low vs Zero Arrests High vs Zero Arrests Urbanicity (City 2.4x > rural) Urbanicity (No) Region (South 2.5x > Midwest) Region (No) Neighborhood crime (High 3.0X > Low) Neighborhood crime (No) %Free lunch (No) % students <15th percentile (No) School misbehavior (No) School crime (High 7.7x > Low) School crime (High 4.5x > Low) Security measures (No) Security personnel (No) Security personnel (Yes) --No effect of Guards only --Police only 4.8x > No personnel --No effect of Police only --Both 4.6x > No personnel --Both 5.0x > No personnel Questions: What’s

Unanswered questions/issues What is the dynamic in schools with both police and guards that appears to be particularly related to arresting students? Is the absence of arresting students sufficient rationale for having police in schools? Data issues Underreporting of arrests School-level measure of disproportionality for arrests