Final Thoughts

I recently had a thought that isn't sitting with me well. It wasn't until recently that schools have been integrated inside of schools, but the amount of shooting has gone up since police have entered them. I don't have enough information on what schools were like without police in them but I have never heard of a very deadly shooting that has occurred. I'm sure that there have been some instances of a few casualties but no mass casualty shootings. If we are having police in the schools aren't they supposed to be safer and prevent all shootings from happening? I think that the short answer to this is no because police can't prevent bad people from being bad.

To answer my original research question: Are Student Resource Officers making schools safer? I think that this answer is generally a yes but in a few scenarios no. Generally, violent crime in America has been decreasing since the 90's and this includes violence in schools as well. Despite school shooting, schools are one of the safest places to be in, for most at least. Racial discrimination and hyper criminalization of black and latino youth is still a phenomena that exists especially in inner city areas. Are these black and latino youth committing real crimes or are they being overly policed? I think the answer could be somewhere in the middle, but for this group of people the new era of police in schools has been very negative for them.

Now that I'm more knowledgable about this issue I may want to argue if racism hasn't really gone away at all? It is touchy subject but are black and latino's still at a great disadvantage in schools? And if so in what ways specifically.

Something I will still wonder about in the weeks ahead is what our school systems will look like 20 years from now? Will police be in every single school? How many more school shootings will there be? And can we find a solution to school security that doesn't hyper criminalize students but also protects them at the same time?