The school-based cop had been called to the Algebra 1 classroom that momentous morning in 2015 to help remove a student who educators reported was being disruptive and refused to put away her cell phone. The violence that ensued ended with two students under arrest and Fields without a job. 

Other Spring Valley High School students used their phones to capture a viral video and, almost instantaneously, spurred a national debate about whether police should be stationed in schools and the factors behind stark racial disparities in school-based arrests. Federal officials launched a civil rights probe into Fields’s use of force, and the disgraced cop — who was fired days later — became the latest white officer to face national scrutiny for manhandling a Black teenager. 

The high-profile incident in Columbia, South Carolina, which unfolded amid an early wave of national Black Lives Matter protests, is one of 285 documented incidents in the last decade where school-based police subjected students to physical force or misconduct. They are detailed in that calls attention to the frequency that campus officers place students — and Black teens in particular — in harm’s way. 

Black students were the recipients of force in 84% of campus incidents between 2011 and 2021, researchers found, while just 3.2% of incidents involved white youth. , Black students make up 15% of public school enrollment while white students account for 46%. 

Yet, in reflecting on the incident more than seven years later, Fields is not persuaded that longstanding racial disparities in student discipline reveal an underlying problem in his actions or those of any other school-based police officers. Instead, he said he was victimized after being cast on the national stage as a racist cop with a penchant for violence. He told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ that Spring Valley High, where nearly half of students are Black, is situated in a “crime-infested county” and that schools are “burning to the ground in this country” because of fights and drugs, but nobody — including educators and cops in schools — are willing to stop it because they’re too busy “worshiping at the church of race and race ideology.” 

“I don’t care if someone disagrees with what I did,” he said. “I’m not here to defend it because I really don’t care anymore.”

In his seven years of school policing, he claims he never once had to arrest a white student for fighting on campus. Nationally, Black students are about than their white classmates to get arrested at school yet Fields denied that implicit — or even explicit — racial bias is a factor in the stark gap. People should visit schools firsthand, he said, and “look for yourself where the problems are coming from.” 

“The problem is, if I tell you that Black girls are more prone to fight than white girls, then guess what, I’m racist,” Fields said. “I’m racist. You can’t even say something like that — that’s factually true — without being racist.”

It’s this precise disposition, critics of school policing said, that make armed police officers a poor fit to create safe and welcoming learning environments. It represents a policing culture, researchers said, that’s led to hundreds of student injuries over the last decade and, in a handful of cases, student deaths. 

Students sustained serious injuries in more than 60% of documented police use-of-force or misconduct cases since 2011, Russ Skiba, professor emeritus at Indiana University who has spent years researching racial disparities in school discipline, found in his latest research. For the report, he teamed up with The Advancement Project, a nonprofit racial justice group that in response to the situation at Spring Valley. The report is based on an analysis of news reports and likely presents a significant undercount of use-of-force incidents. Meanwhile, the use-of-force cases represent just a fraction of interactions that school-based police have with students. 

Among those documented in the report, five students were killed — three by gunshot. 

Cops tased students in nearly a quarter of incidents. Students were sprayed with pepper spray in more than 10% of documented cases and sexually assaulted by police in more than 8% of incidents. Student injuries include broken bones and concussions while more than 10% of student hospitalizations were required to remove taser prongs lodged beneath a young person’s skin.

Researchers have long struggled to document clear benefits of having officers patrol school hallways, with the latest report adding fodder to a growing body of research that suggests campus cops may actually do more harm than good.

Still, in the face of mass school shootings, their presence in schools has grown exponentially in recent decades with support from educators and the general public despite little evidence they’re effective at thwarting or mitigating such attacks. An August poll by the education group PDK International found an overwhelming 80% of people support school resource officers, including 94% of Republicans and 70% of Democrats. 

While the Advancement Project began to map police misconduct in schools after the Spring Valley incident, multiple school districts embraced calls to remove police from schools in 2020 after George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer. Since then, several districts have and reinstated campus law enforcement amid concerns of pandemic-era student misbehavior. 

Raw video footage from Spring Valley in many ways brought the police-free schools campaign into the national discourse, Skiba told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, crystalizing it as an exemplar of “the problem of school police assaults.” But the problem remains present tense, he said, and “this is not in any way an isolated incident. There is at least one of these cases happening in schools across America every week — and it’s not surprising that some end in death.” 

‘Officer Slam’

Even before Fields became the subject of national scorn, he had developed a bad reputation at Spring Valley — and — for being confrontational with students. On that brutal day, his reputation wasn’t lost on senior Niya Kenny, who recorded Fields on her phone and confronted the veteran officer about the way he was treating her classmate. 

At the time, Kenny wasn’t trying to be an activist, she told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. She was simply reacting to what she was seeing with her own eyes. Kenny and the student in the video, who couldn’t be reached for comment, were both criminally charged with “disturbing a school function.” Both teens disenrolled from Spring Valley soon after and the about a year later. 

Still, confronting Fields “was one of the best decisions I could have made,” said Kenny, now a 25-year-old substitute teacher in Atlanta. “I’m always so hard on myself about my impulsive decisions, but that one impulsive decision changed the entire trajectory of my life.” 

With support from the American Civil Liberties Union, Kenny went to court to challenge state laws against disturbing schools and disorderly conduct. Last year, a federal judge struck down the vaguely written statutes, which allowed police to slap students with criminal sanctions for cursing, engaging in undefined “disorder” or being otherwise “obnoxious” at school and were used overwhelmingly to punish Black youth. Meanwhile, the South Carolina legislature rewrote its disturbing schools law so that students could no longer be arrested for disrupting their own schools.

In the interview, Fields portrayed himself as a man who was simply following the law, enforcing rules created by lawmakers against two “bad girls” who had gotten into trouble before. But the laws offered police discretion — wiggle room that made them impossible to enforce objectively, said Sarah Hinger, the staff attorney at the ACLU Racial Justice Program who represented Kenny. 

“They violate due process because they don’t give an objective way of determining when someone is disturbing or disorderly or obnoxious,” she said. “That means that every single time a police officer, or somebody else, has to look at a child and make their own subjective judgment about whether they should be arrested or not.”

Not only did Kenny’s arrest make clear the subjective nature of the law, Hinger said, but the footage that she and other students uploaded to the internet was instrumental in the public’s understanding of police misconduct in schools. 

“The degree of violence that’s visible in the video likely is what sets it apart for the public perceptions, and I think that’s why our client Niya was arrested because of the recognition of what it means to shed public light and scrutiny on those types of police actions,” Hinger said. 

Similar incidents have been documented in schools across the country. In one, a 17-year-old student was in 2013 after getting tased while attempting to break up a fight between two of his classmates. Officials had accused the student of acting aggressively and failing to listen to their commands. 

Last year, a former school resource officer from Farmington, New Mexico, was after he was caught on camera in 2019 slamming a disabled 11-year-old girl against a wall and wrestling her to the ground. 

In 2018, five students from suburban Pittsburgh reached a $500,000 settlement after accusing school-based police of assault, intimidation and filing false criminal charges to justify excessive force. In 2019, with sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl in his office at a local high school. 

Even as such confrontations unfold, Kenny said that her arrest — and the video of her classmate getting manhandled — ultimately led to progress, not just in changing laws locally but changing the national conversation around school policing. 

“I never expected it to be this big and I never expected to have such an impact on the world,” she said. To this day, she recounts what happened to her nieces and nephews. “I told them, ‘you know, I’m a part of Black history in South Carolina.’ ” 

Accountability remains elusive

Despite the public outcry and a sheriff who said that Fields failed to follow procedures, the former cop, who now works in sales, never faced criminal charges. 

In dropping its federal inquiry, it failed to identify sufficient evidence to charge Fields with a crime. Federal civil rights law required prosecutors prove that Fields “willfully deprived an individual of a constitutional right,” an exceedingly high bar that excludes mistakes, misperceptions, negligence or poor judgment. 

Such a reality is commonplace in use-of-force incidents at schools, the report found. In nearly 60% of the 285 documented cases in the last decade, officers were cleared without facing any consequences. Officers generally faced penalties in instances of sexual assault but punishment was rare in other contexts, with only 6.9% of officers suspended or fired and only 7.4% arrested or charged with a crime. 

While previous research has found that school policing leads to a and , Skiba said the physical injuries and deaths highlighted in the new report are the most extreme harms of campus policing. 

“We can expect that without accountability — for these incidents with a very low rate of accountability — that there really isn’t any incentive for change,” Skiba said. “There isn’t any incentive for schools or districts or police departments to monitor this, to stop this.” 

For Fields, the lack of criminal charges left him feeling emboldened. To him, it’s proof that he didn’t do anything wrong. 

“People calling for cops to be removed from schools or society are the very people who are probably committing crimes and standing up for criminals,” he said. “Schools did not get better the day that Ben Fields was fired.”

Just two days before students returned to classes at the coastal district east of Orlando, Ivey plans to equip his team of school-based deputies with collapsible rifles strapped to their chests. The move was a direct response to the mass school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, which resulted in the deaths of 19 children and two teachers and brought a tragic end to the last school year. Now, as students file back into classrooms across the country, this back-to-school season has come with a heightened focus on school security, with districts increasing the presence of police, installing new and, in one district, bringing in a gun-detecting dog. 

Ivey took the back-to-school security rush further than most, arguing in the video that “if you do not meet violence with violence, you will be violently killed.” 

To help campus cops fight back against any would-be gunmen, Ivey announced that his department with collapsible stocks. Kel-Tec, a Brevard County-based firearm manufacturer, says semi-automatic 9mm rifle “picks up where handguns leave off,” utilizing a folding carbine with “more pistol magazine options than a cat has lives.”  The weapons retail for about $600 each. 

“Sun Tzu says in The Art of War that every battle is won or lost before it is ever fought,” said Ivey, a group of extremist law enforcement officers with . “What Sun Tzu meant was that you must outsmart, out strategize, outtrain and out prepare your opponent long before the battle is ever fought.” 

Mass school shootings have long motivated efforts to bolster the ranks of campus cops and school security, yet as the tragedies continue unabated, there’s little evidence to suggest the strategies are effective in mitigating or preventing bloodshed. Ben Fisher, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin whose research focuses on the intersection of education and criminal justice, questioned the efficacy of rifle-toting school resource officers and other school-hardening measures.

“It seems to me like yet another overreaction to the issue of gun violence in schools, one that feels like putting a Band-Aid on a problem that keeps happening rather than addressing the source,” Fisher said. 

In Uvalde, a close-knit, predominantly Hispanic town still reeling from the May rampage, to buildings with 8-foot “non-scalable” perimeter fences, new surveillance cameras and upgraded doors and locks after the security apparatus at Robb Elementary School was criticized for a fatal collapse at multiple levels. Meanwhile, the state Department of Public Safety in Uvalde schools at the district’s request.

The changes come after a into the Uvalde shooting found “systemic failures and egregious poor decision making,” including a culture where doors were routinely left unlocked and a disorganized, chaotic police response. In total, 376 law enforcement officers from the local, state and federal levels — many of them heavily armed — descended on the campus but failed to subdue the gunman for more than an hour, a delay that may have cost lives. Last month, the Uvalde school , the disgraced chief of the district’s tiny police force, and officials “intruder detection audits” at every district across Texas. Last week, state officials announced an investigation into the actions of five Texas Department of Public Safety officers who responded to the shooting, two of whom have been suspended. 

The school security rush this summer stretched across every corner of the country. In Ohio, lawmakers passed a policy that allows teachers to carry guns in class after just 24 hours of training. In Marion County, Florida, the sheriff’s office — a German short-haired pointer that was trained to sniff out firearms and ammunition on campuses. At America’s largest school district, in New York City, officials last week and training of additional unarmed school safety agents and enhance emergency preparedness training for school leaders. It also conducted audits of 1,400 campuses, identifying some 1,300 issues with security features like door locks, panic buttons and public address systems, pledging all would be fixed when schools opened Sept. 8. 

In late June, President Joe Biden signed into law the nation’s first new gun control measures in 30 years, which include an additional $300 million in federal grants for campus security while also allocating more money for student mental health services. 

Meanwhile, Ivey said the in-your-face weaponry being deployed in Brevard County Schools was meant to send a message, offering a “tactical appearance that clearly signifies that we mean business.” 

Yet, the rifles were nowhere to be found on students’ first day of school on Aug. 10. Activists with the local group Families for Safe Schools surveyed parents from across the county about whether they’d seen school-based officers with the new rifles and “so far it’s been a resounding no,” said Jabari Hosey, the group’s president and a father of three elementary school-aged children in the district. 

“It’s just a joke,” said Hosey, who favors armed police in schools but believes the move to equip them with rifles is a step too far. “He put the cart before the horse. Apparently they don’t have all of the equipment they need.”

In an interview, sheriff’s office spokesperson Tod Goodyear acknowledged the rifles hadn’t yet been implemented but will “probably roll out in stages.” 

“It may have been announced out a little bit before everything was really ready,” said Goodyear, who blamed the delay partly on the need to train deputies on how to use the weapons. “All of the rifles weren’t produced and all of that, so that may be a little bit of the holdup.”

‘Do something’

The rush to harden schools post-Uvalde is, in many ways, the continuation of a decades-long trend. Mass school shootings — which are devastating but statistically rare — have consistently prompted increases in school-based police and security infrastructure. 

School security and policing measures generally see widespread support from the public. A recent poll by the education nonprofit PDK International found a resounding 80% of adults favor the presence of armed police in schools, including 94% of Republicans and 70% of Democrats. 

Whether such efforts make kids safer, however, remains a contentious debate. Existing research “does not, as a whole, yield support for school policing as an effective strategy to improve safety and security,” the National Institute of Justice, the Department of Justice’s research arm, . Similarly, there’s a dearth of research to suggest that school hardening efforts have made schools safer, of security technology by researchers at Johns Hopkins University. As the tragedies generate headlines and fierce political debates, local education officials often face significant pressure to act — often on quick timelines. 

“If horrific enough, these incidents can lead to increases in funding with a short spending window,” the Johns Hopkins report notes. “This curbs the ability of districts to conduct even limited evaluation and frequently results in the purchase of technology to demonstrate a strong commitment to ‘doing something.’” 

The school security industry was with business growth largely dependent on the frequency and severity of mass school shootings, according to a recent report by the market research firm .

While armed police have become a regular presence in U.S. schools, officers are generally equipped with pistols, a reality their proponents argue leaves campus cops at a tactical disadvantage during active shootings. That has led to a push, in Brevard County and elsewhere, to fight firepower with firepower. Leading supporters of school-based police say the development is necessary to ensure officers aren’t out-gunned, but critics say it’s the latest escalation of school militarization and could put students at greater risk of harm. 

The collapsible stock on the rifles being deployed in Brevard County schools puts the deputies “on par with what we’re facing,” without being overly cumbersome, sheriff spokesperson Goodyear said. Goodyear went a step further in contemplating the everyday drawbacks to arming school police with heavy weaponry, including AR-15s, the assault-style rifle favored by many mass shooters. 

“Unless you go down to a submachine gun, maybe you could carry that, but then now you’re talking about putting an automatic rifle into somebody’s hands,” Goodyear said. “But with an AR-15 or along those lines of that type of weapon, it’s a fairly large weapon and the only way you can carry it is on a sling over your shoulder. It’s not practical, your hands aren’t free, it’s going to get in the way.”

In Madison County, North Carolina, the sheriff found a compromise, AR-15 rifles in safes at each of the county’s six campuses — a move that gun control advocates “absolute insanity.” But Sheriff Buddy Harwood said the semi-automatic rifles were critical to keep kids safe. 

“Having just a deputy armed with a handgun isn’t enough to stop these animals,” Harwood said in . With the AR-15s, “my school resource officers will not have to wait, retreat or have to leave the situation to get the weaponry to deal with the threat.”

The approaches in Brevard and Madison counties each have pros and cons, said Mo Canady, executive director of the Alabama-based National Association of School Resource Officers. 

“I’m not sure that, as a society, we’re generally ready to see law enforcement officers on a consistent basis walking around with a long gun strapped onto one shoulder” while patrolling school hallways, he said. Storing rifles in safes gives school-based police additional weaponry during an active shooting — but only if they have a chance to retrieve them. While he opposes giving school-based officers an “overly militaristic look,” he said a collapsible rifle like the Kel-Tec could be a “happy medium” if it’s “not something that’s sticking out there obvious all of the time.” 

But he said that rifles, which are generally more accurate than pistols, could grow more common as schools continue to be confronted by heavily armed gunmen. 

“If you have to take a shot in a school environment,” he said, “you’d darn well better hit your target.” 

‘A militarized vibe’

Kel-Tec markets its collapsible SUB2000 rifle for its convenience, noting on the company website that “it tucks away nicely in situations where space is limited, but it’s quick to deploy in situations where time is of the essence.” 

But the same features that could make it an attractive option for school-based police could be exploited by mass shooters. In fact, the weapon has already made an appearance at . After a gunman opened fire on an Independence Day parade in Highland Park, Illinois with an AR-15 style semi-automatic rifle, authorities found the suspect also had . Last year, a student at Daytona’s Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University — just 60 miles north of the Kel-Tec headquarters in Cocoa —  was to “enact a Columbine” on campus. When police stopped the suspect outside his apartment, he reportedly had a SUB2000 concealed in his backpack that he’d recently purchased on Facebook Marketplace. 

Kel-Tec executives didn’t respond to requests for comment. 

Hosey, of the Brevard Families for Safe Schools group, said he generally supports school-based police, but he and other parents were caught off guard when the sheriff announced the new Kel-Tecs. 

“It gave us a militarized vibe,” he said, and could lead students to fear their school resource officers because people often associate heavily armed police officers with active-shooter situations. “What we don’t want is kids to see this and assume that they’re in danger and that there’s an imminent threat.” 

When asked about the presence of rifles in Brevard County schools, district spokesperson Russell Bruhn said in an email that “the sheriff’s office is our security expert,” and declined to comment further. 

School-based police have long been positioned as members of school communities who foster positive relationships with students. But having a rifle so visibly present on deputies’ chests sends “messages about aggression and the potential for violence when we know that violence in schools, especially with guns, is exceedingly rare,” said Fisher of the University of Wisconsin.  

In fact, there’s a lack of research to suggest that a school shooting was particularly fatal because campus police lacked “military weaponry,” said attorney Miriam Rollin, a director at the National Center for Youth Law. Despite the police failures in Uvalde, she said the push to arm school-based officers with rifles is just the latest escalation in campus hardening and isn’t a far leap from “tanks going down school hallways.” 

“Generally with an arms race, nobody wins,” Rollin said. “I have to say, this is no exception.”

By that point, the 18-year-old perpetrator had already killed 19 fourth-graders and two teachers. The decision to wait, state law enforcement officials announced on Friday, was made by the head of the Uvalde school district’s small, six-person police department. Now, as the initial accounting has been retracted and a far more damning narrative has emerged about the officers’ response, they’ve come under fierce criticism for the delay in storming the classroom. 

Squarely in the middle of that is the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Department and its chief, Pedro “Pete” Arredondo, now into their handling of the deadly incident. School district police departments, in particular their training, capabilities and readiness to confront lethal threats, are being scrutinized like never before and a long-running debate about the harms and benefits of campus cops has reignited. 

Schools have bolstered the ranks of armed school officers in the last several decades — largely in response to mass school shootings like the one that unfolded in Uvalde. Police now have a presence in about 43 percent of public K-12 schools and the Texas massacre — despite what appears to be disastrous decision-making on their part — could further accelerate the trend. Just hours after the Uvalde gunman was neutralized, Sen. Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, argued that campus cops are best positioned to stop mass school shootings, stating that “we know from past experiences that the most effective tool for keeping kids safe is armed law enforcement on the campus.” 

Yet beyond the anecdotes of heroic cops who successfully saved students from being killed and of officers who failed to live up to their sworn duty to protect innocent lives, research on their efficacy remains mixed. Whether they’re helpful when someone shows up to campus with a gun remains elusive. 

As districts nationwide respond to the Uvalde shooting, they should be cautious when adding new officers to schools to prevent future attacks, said Lucy Sorensen, an assistant professor of public administration and policy at the University of Albany, SUNY, who studies school policing. While school shootings are tragic and politically galvanizing, they remain statistically rare. But officers’ daily presence in schools, she said, could carry negative implications for students — particularly Black youth, who are more likely to be thrust into the school-to-prison pipeline.

“We’ve seen this in response to prior shootings — Columbine, Sandy Hook — where there is this push to harden schools, to add more police officers, add more guns, and the efficacy of these investments is not well established at this point,” Sorensen said, adding that the costs of a full-time police presence in schools could outweigh the advantages. School leaders and lawmakers, she said, “need to think hard about whether this is the right investment or whether it’s a reactionary investment.” 

Last year, Sorensen concluded in a report that having an officer on campus “marginally increases the likelihood of a school shooting,” and suggested that officers failed to prevent school shootings and other gun-related incidents. Yet upon further review of the underlying federal data, she backtracked. In an interview Tuesday with ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, Sorensen said she has now reached a markedly different conclusion. While firearm-related incidents including weapons possession were more frequent in schools with police, the finding could be the result of officers successfully detecting and responding to campus gun incidents. 

“This could be an actual increase in gun violence, but we think it’s more being driven by an increase in the detection and reporting of guns that’s happening from police in schools,” she said. If school-based officers are able to identify and confiscate guns from students that would have otherwise remained in their possession, she said it’s “likely a good thing if it potentially prevents gun violence.” 

Still, a separate report offers caution. Once mass school shootings occur, researchers at the nonprofit Violence Project found that officers may be ineffective at preventing bloodshed. In an analysis of school shootings over four decades — a total 133 incidents —  researchers found that fatalities were three times higher in attacks where an armed guard was present compared to those that unfolded without a security presence. Because the perpetrators of mass shootings are often suicidal, researchers speculate that the perpetrators could even be drawn to places with armed security. 

George Floyd’s murder at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer in 2020 led some school districts to cut ties with the police before COVID-era student behavioral challenges prompted some to reverse course. Through it all, a , according to a recent Education Week survey. Among them is Jake Heibel, the principal of Great Mills High School in Maryland, which suffered a school shooting in 2018. In that incident, a 17-year-old student shot two classmates, one fatally, before taking his own life. The shooting ended when the gunman fatally shot himself as a school resource officer simultaneously shot him in the hand. 

The school officer’s actions “certainly saved lives that day and we’re eternally grateful,” Heibel said in an interview after the Uvalde shooting. “He did what he needed to do to protect others and he certainly did that day.” 

‘The wrong decision, period’

In the immediate aftermath of the Uvalde shooting, the responding officers as “heroic” and “courageous,” but the tenor shifted after more information became publicly known. Turns out a school-based cop did not engage the shooter before he entered the school, but one was there: He responded to the scene but drove past the gunman as he crouched down next to a car in the parking lot, officials said.

On Friday, that Chief Arredondo, of the Uvalde school district police department, was the incident commander who ordered officers to stand back instead of storming the Robb Elementary School classroom where fourth-graders and educators were locked inside with the gunman. Officials said that Arredondo believed erroneously that the shooter was barricaded inside the classroom and that students’ lives were no longer at risk. Ultimately a tactical team of Border Patrol agents , opened the classroom door using a janitor’s keys and fatally shot the gunman. 

“From the benefit of hindsight, where I’m sitting now, of course it was not the right decision,” Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw said during a Friday press conference. “It was the wrong decision, period. There was no excuse for that.” 

Arredondo’s decision to wait has faced similar rebukes from proponents of school-based policing, including school security consultant Kenneth Trump, president of the Cleveland-based National School Safety and Security Services. Prior to the notorious 1999 school shooting at Columbine High School in suburban Denver, standard law enforcement procedures called on police to secure the scene’s perimeter and call in the SWAT team. But Columbine “completely changed that,” Trump said, and in recent decades officers are trained to respond to the threat immediately, even if they’re alone on the scene. 

After the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, which resulted in 17 deaths, the school resource officer stationed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Scot Peterson, was charged with criminal negligence after he failed to engage the gunman. While Trump said that Peterson became Parkland’s “second-biggest villain,” after the shooter, he said the law enforcement response in Uvalde was far worse.

“Here you have numerous people who, it would appear, did not follow the best practice for the last two decades,” Trump said.  

For Blaine Gaskill, the school resource officer who rushed to stop the armed student at Maryland’s Great Mills High School in 2018, the fear of losing his own life didn’t even cross his mind. In fact, he told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, “I didn’t feel anything.” 

“I had a job to do and I did it,” he said in an email Friday.  Though Gaskill declined to comment on the Texas shooting, he expressed support for campus police, saying they “play a big role in preventing any tragedy.” 

“Just our presence alone makes students, parents and staff feel safer,” he said. “We have the ability to respond to any incident very quickly, whether it’s an active threat or a fight in the school. We are seconds away from stopping or intervening in any incident.” 

In fact, instruction on a quick response had been provided to officers at the 4,100-student Uvalde school district, which despite its small size maintains its own police force and an , including “threat assessment” teams, a visitor management system that limits access to school buildings and a digital surveillance tool that sifts through social media posts in search of violent threats. In December, Arredondo completed an active-shooter training course that taught participants how to distinguish an active shooting from “a hostage or barricade crisis.” Just two months ago, on how to respond to an active shooting. The training was based on materials by the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, according to The New York Times, which inform officers they may need to put themselves in harm’s way and “display uncommon acts of courage to save the innocent.” 

“As first responders we must recognize that innocent life must be defended,” according to the training materials. “A first responder unwilling to place the lives of the innocent above their own safety should consider another career field.”     

While Arredondo served as the incident commander, Trump questioned whether his small campus police department was equipped for an emergency of this scale. Many school district police departments lack tactical training, he said, and often defer to larger agencies following major incidents.

“When you form an incident command structure, there is nothing that says that the initial incident commander on scene cannot pass that torch to the representative of another agency, a tactical team that may have more expertise, experience and tactical knowledge,” Trump said. “It can be done. You can pass the torch.”

Why that didn’t happen, and which department was responsible for released right after the shooting, remains unclear. 

While Trump maintained support for campus cops, proponents of police-free schools said that police shortcomings in Uvalde speak to the policy arguments they’ve been making for years. Among them is Maria Fernandez, managing director of campaign strategy at the Advancement Project, a racial justice group. A national movement to remove police from schools landed major policy victories after Floyd’s murder, but the political tides shifted back in favor of policing as students returned to schools during the pandemic and educators reported an uptick in classroom disruptions. The Uvalde shooting is proof that the strategy doesn’t work, Fernandez said. 

“The narrative that is so entrenched in our communities is that police equals safety or that they can stop the evil that is moving outside of the school door — and that’s not what happened and they lied about it,” she said. The school district was served by its own police department, “hardened” security measures, a municipal police department that receives about and federal Border Patrol agents. It all failed to save 21 innocent lives. 

“This is our nightmare,” Fernandez said. “We know for a fact that police don’t actually generate safety in the face of incredible violence. It’s just so devastating that this had to happen.”

Shootings bolster school policing

The attack in Uvalde is the deadliest mass school shooting in nearly a decade. In 2012, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, resulted in the deaths of 20 children and six educators. If history tells us anything, the Uvalde shooting will precede a rash of local and federal spending on campus policing. 

In 2013, a noted a limited body of research on the effectiveness of school resource officers, stating flatly that existing reports did “not address whether their presence in schools has deterred mass shootings.” Yet the Sandy Hook tragedy — and the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida — led to an infusion of local and federal money for school-based policing. In the last several decades, the federal government has spent roughly $1 billion to station police in schools. Responding to shootings with school policing and beefed-up security reflects the country’s “neoliberal approach to solving social problems,” said Benjamin Fisher, an assistant professor of criminal justice at Florida State University whose research focuses on campus policing. 

“Rather than talking about the one thing that all school shootings have in common — which is the presence of a gun — we are instead focusing on how to make schools different in some way. We’re putting the problem on schools rather than on gun access and availability.”

Since Sandy Hook, researchers have scrutinized the role that police play in schools, and in some cases have found , including an increase in student discipline for low-level offenses and a drop in high school graduation and college enrollment rates. Research has found that the negative outcomes are particularly dire for Black students, who are disproportionately subjected to campus arrests.

In her more recent research, Sorensen of the University of Albany, SUNY, found that placing officers in schools leads to an increase in campus safety, but at a great cost to students — particularly those who are Black. The research, which relies on figures from , found that officers effectively combat some forms of campus violence including fights, but their presence also correlates with an increase in student suspensions, expulsions and arrests. Students, especially those who are disabled, are chronically absent more when campuses are staffed by cops, she found. 

The research isn’t yet peer-reviewed. In fact, it was during the peer-review process that researchers identified a problem, Sorensen said. The Civil Rights Data Collection relies on every school in the U.S. to self-report data on a range of student outcomes and has long been criticized for including inaccuracies. For example, districts have been accused of underreporting campus arrests and instances of sexual misconduct. 

When researchers triangulated the federal data on school shootings against news reports, they found that the rate of school shootings appeared to have been overreported, which Sorensen said could be the result of an administrative data error. As a result of unreliable data, she said it remains unclear whether campus cops have any effect on the likelihood of a school shooting. 

Still, Sorensen said that the negative outcomes of school policing, like the student suspensions, “aren’t costless.” 

“Every child who gets killed in a school shooting is too much, it’s too many kids,” she said, yet such tragedies remain statistically rare and most communities will never have to experience what Uvalde just endured. “I do think it’s important to weigh more heavily the day-to-day impacts of having police officers in schools and what those costs and benefits are.”

The risk of ‘cherry-picking’ anecdotes 

As the apparent police failures in Uvalde and officers’ delayed response are dissected, Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, said in this situation, the officers may have simply been outgunned. 

School resource officers are generally equipped with handguns, while the gunman reportedly carried out the attack with an AR-15-style assault rifle. Campus police should have the same equipment as cops assigned to patrol the streets, Canady said, but added that his group is “not involved in politics around the gun debate.” 

“Here’s what I know: If gun sales stopped today, there are still millions of guns out in our society, that’s just a fact” he said. “So we have to continue to prepare to defend our communities, which for us is our schools, against the potential for these types of attacks and the potential for us to be outgunned.” 

Even as some districts have equipped campuses with rifles and gun safes, he questioned whether that was an effective solution. 

“Here’s the thing, unless you’re sitting in that office or right next to it, you’re not going to waste precious seconds to go get the long gun when there’s someone killing babies,” he said. “That is a dynamic that is very difficult to resolve.” 

To bolster his argument, Canady pointed to multiple tragedies where the responses by school-based police were credited with saving lives. In March, for example, administrators at a Kansas high school called an officer to help them search a . When the officer arrived, the student removed a gun from his bag and shot both the officer and a school administrator. The officer, who has since been described as a hero, returned fire and struck the student. All three survived. 

Meanwhile Trump, the school security expert, said it’s important to consider school shootings that may have been prevented due to a police presence on campus. Despite a lack of research, he pointed to anecdotes where officers identified students with weapons and uncovered concrete plans to kill. Yet anecdotes also exist of officers failing to uphold their duties. 

Fisher, the criminal justice researcher, said there’s reason to be cautious of anecdotal evidence in place of scientific research because it “risks cherry-picking.”

“Anecdotes allow us to craft a narrative because we don’t have to subject our beliefs to systematic and reproducible inquiry,” he said. “We can pick the pieces of evidence that we want — and that’s on both sides of the argument.”

This time, the conversation has centered on an armed Long Beach Unified School District safety officer accused of fatally shooting an unarmed 18-year-old girl as she fled in a car near the high school where he worked. The safety officer was once a police officer, but at the time of the shooting, he was working directly for the school district handling security and did not have the status of a sworn school resource officer employed by the police department and assigned to Long Beach schools. School policing proponents were quick to highlight the distinction and advise educators against arming school staff who lack badges.

But civil rights advocates said said the difference is meaningless and the case reinforces a need to eliminate school security officers who serve police-like functions and carry guns.

After the shooting, the National Association of School Resource Officers sought to set apart school-based police from safety officers, noting in a statement that the trade group “strongly recommends that armed personnel on school campuses” be sworn law enforcement officers who are “carefully selected and specifically trained in school-based policing.” The group, which offers a training course for school resource officers, has advocated for armed officers but opposes policies that allow teachers and other school staff to carry guns — a scenario that is often put forth after mass school shootings.

Mac Hardy, the association’s director of operations and a former school-based officer in Alabama, said the stress of carrying a gun inside a school “took years off of my life.”

“Every day, I put on that gun belt to wear inside the school and knew I was going to be in a school with 3,000 adolescent children and another 200 staff members. It was a lot of pressure,” he told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, explaining that he underwent regular firearms training. “It’s a huge responsibility to carry a weapon and we just believe it’s best that a trained law enforcement officer carries the weapon.”

The since-fired Long Beach safety officer, 51-year-old Eddie F. Gonzalez, and charged with murder in the shooting of Manuela “Mona” Rodriguez near Millikan High School a month earlier. Gonzalez was reportedly patrolling an area near the school when he observed a fight between Rodriguez, who was not a student, and a 15-year-old girl. Gonzalez, on the job for less than a year, shot Rodriguez in the head as she rode in the passenger seat of a fleeing car, authorities said. The incident was captured on video and went viral online. The shooting left Rodriguez, the mother of a 6-month-old boy, brain dead and she died Oct. 5. 

The district’s unsworn but armed safety officers are required to complete a 664-hour basic peace officer training academy that includes firearms instruction, district spokesman Chris Eftychiou said. They’re also required to complete a firearms course through the Long Beach Police Department twice per year. Gonzalez was up to date on those requirements at the time of the shooting, Eftychiou said in an email. Officers also receive training in de-escalation techniques, how to work with adolescents and suicide prevention, he said.

Though the school safety officers , they can detain suspects pending a police investigation. Following the shooting, the Long Beach Board of Education voted unanimously to fire Gonzalez for violating the district use-of-force policy. His attorney didn’t respond to requests for comment. 

School policing has been a topic of national discussion since Floyd was murdered in 2020 at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, which caused a reckoning on police brutality and led dozens of districts to cut their longstanding ties with police departments. Some districts, including Minneapolis, replaced the officers with unarmed security staff. Some critics have worried, however, that the approach swaps campus police for district officers who serve a similar policing function.

The Long Beach district its school resource officer program in 2020 but local activists have to cut ties with all armed security staff and redirect funding to student support services like counselors.

One Long Beach activist, Najee Ali, told a local newspaper the shooting is a deadly example of the harms of armed safety officers “who are one step above a security guard and don’t have the training of a police officer.” 

“It’s a recipe for disaster,” Ali . “Unfortunately, Mona Rodriguez paid for it with her life. Until Long Beach Unified takes a second look at these flawed policies, we believe there will be another shooting.” 

Eftychiou, the district spokesman, said the school system continually examines its school safety practices and the criminal case against Gonzalez may spur reforms. 

“We have also heard from many community members about what school safety should look like going forward,” he said. “We have, and will continue to provide opportunities to listen and engage in critical discussions with our local community and national experts about safety and well-being.” 

As districts across the country examine police presence in schools, armed security must be part of the discussion, said Harold Jordan, the nationwide education equity coordinator at the ACLU of Pennsylvania whose advocacy focuses on campus cops. The national resource officer group’s efforts to draw a line between Gonzalez and campus cops is “patently absurd” because school resource officers and school safety officers are “a distinction without a difference.” Both are required to complete peace officer training, carry guns and have law enforcement duties. 

“The central element of what led to this young woman’s death exists no matter what his job title is,” Jordan said. “He’s able to carry a firearm because he is a school safety officer with probably the most serious power that an officer — sworn or unsworn — can have: That is the power to carry a firearm and discharge a firearm.”

Jordan said that armed officers — whether they work for school districts or as sworn police — shouldn’t be stationed in school full time and should only be called to campuses during rare emergency situations.

“It creates an inherently threatening environment,” he said. “It sends the message that the kids are the problem there and it increases the expectation that something may go wrong in a school.”

Prior to becoming a district safety officer earlier this year, Gonzalez served as a cop with two nearby police departments between January 2019 and July 2020. Details about his departure from those departments remain unclear, but Eftychiou said he passed a district background check that explored issues such as previous excessive use of force, consistently poor judgment and dishonesty.  

Floyd’s murder resulted in some districts cutting ties with police, but another recent tragedy — the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida — led some to bolster the presence of armed security. In Florida, a law required school districts to station at least one armed official, including civilians, on every K-12 campus. Some districts created their own police departments and others hired armed “guardians” without law enforcement backgrounds. Several of them have gotten into trouble involving their official duties. In 2020, was arrested and charged with stashing cocaine inside his vehicle on a high school campus. A year earlier, police accused of pawning his service pistol and body armor for gas money. The allegations came to light following the guardian’s arrest on domestic battery and false imprisonment charges. 

After the Long Beach shooting, retired emergency management specialist Ted Zocco-Hochhalter was among those who sought to distinguish Gonzalez from school resource officers. To him, the issue comes down to mentality. Zocco-Hochhalter’s two children survived the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in Colorado, but his daughter was left paralyzed after being shot during the rampage. 

Gonzalez previously worked as a police officer, but it’s important not to lump in school resource officers with “rank-and-file police officers,” Zocco-Hochhalter said in an interview. Simply having law enforcement experience shouldn’t be enough to get a job inside a school, he said. Though there are no national training requirements for campus police officers, he said it’s critical that officers receive specialized instruction before working inside schools and must approach the job with a mentality that places mentoring and relationships first. Gonzalez’s decision to fire at the fleeing vehicle, he said, suggests he lacked “the proper mentality going into that job.”

“If his first reaction on a fleeing vehicle like that from the scene of a fight was to fire his weapon, that tells me that he was a rank-and-file law enforcement officer before he became this safety officer,” Zocco-Hochhalter said. “That’s what kicked in instead of trying to de-escalate or call for help.”