Amid distrust in the police at both a local and national level, leaders from the Hamden government, police department and Board of Education spent months drafting an updated memorandum of understanding for school resource officers in Hamden’s public schools. SROs are police officers that are stationed in schools in case there is a potential threat. The BOE unanimously voted in favor of the MOU’s approval, and it was put into place at the beginning of the 2022-23 academic school year.
The document establishes the roles of SROs in an attempt to limit student-officer interactions with discipline and improve the relationship between students and legal authorities. It additionally updated officer uniforms from a standard police uniform to a polo shirt, and mandates anti-racism, anti-bias, neurodiversity and other additional training.
There has been controversy around SROs in Hamden since former Hamden Mayor Curt Leng first proposed it in 2019. Many residents had concerns about police officers being overly involved in disciplinary action while being an intimidating presence in schools.
Over the years since the induction of SROs into the Hamden school system, there have been several violent incidents around the school including fighting, a stabbing of a student and the arrest of a student whom police found with a gun in his backpack.
“The police were consistently at the school and there was animosity in the town,” said Jacqueline Beirne, facilitator of Strengthening Police and Community Partnerships at the Hamden Police Department.
“This is a direct relationship to the pandemic,” said Hamden Board of Education chair, Melissa Kaplan. “The majority of students have greater access to mental health support at schools. Oftentimes in different households, students’ only safe space actually is in their schools. In terms of the pandemic, with the lockdown, we’ve never seen such high rates as intimate partner violence, and abuse in the household.”
According to the crime analysis unit of the Connecticut State Police Department, there has been a significant spike in arrests for violence against family and children over the past few years.
“We were seeing a lot more need of students who were really being traumatized by everything that went down with the pandemic of losing relatives, of losing family, watching people get sick, people losing their jobs and that trauma carried over into the schools and I think that really does contribute to the uptick of these behavioral issues that the schools are now having to work with,” Kaplan said. “Never before have we had such a huge demand and shortage of special ed teachers, and school psychologists and school social workers, all which are very much needed to undo a lot of the harm that was a byproduct of COVID.”
According to Beirne, the SPCP initiated the process of updating the MOU in January. In order to properly value the perspectives of all parties involved, Berine said it was necessary to consider any potential pushback that could be brought up.
“There’s a faction of our population that wants a cop at every school and there’s another faction of the town that doesn’t want cops in schools at all,” Beirne explained.
Beirne says the key for officers to protect the children is to ensure they are properly trained. As the mother of a neurodiverse son, she understands the importance of having SROs educated on how to handle various situations.
“When there’s not drama, a school resource officer… has extra training that other officers don’t always get,” Beirne said.
The additional training for officers in schools, according to the updated MOU, includes sessions on bias, de-escalation of situations, neurodiversity, racism and LGBTQ+.
Studies conducted about the treatment of neurodiverse students have shown an increased likelihood in neurodiverse students being apprehended in comparison to students who are neurotypical.
Kaplan said that it is essential for SROs to work “with our neurodiverse students, who have social-emotional and behavioral issues to recognize coping strategies, and not mistaking them for students who are misbehaving, but actually doing the very opposite of regulating their behavior.”
When Beirne investigated the previous MOU for the Hamden school system, she found it was “exceptionally old and very vague.” In an attempt to reference guidelines from surrounding school systems, she found Hamden was not alone.
“The town attorney helped me find some MOUs in other towns, and the scary thing is there’s not a lot of them, and the ones that are out there are very old, and again very vague, like ours was,” Beirne said.
Kaplan shared a similar mindset to Beirne, saying “that’s very disturbing because we need to make sure there are safety measures in place in our schools to protect our students.”
The updated Hamden MOU lays out clear guidelines for the roles of school resource officers, as well as social workers and psychologists employed by the school. Beirne described a “matrix” that was agreed upon in the document that outlines specific situations, and who is to be called.
“A school resource officer is first and foremost a cop, and a cop shouldn’t be called unless a crime is being committed,” Beirne said, “therefore holding the district and the school administration accountable for disciplinary issues.”
“While they might have de-escalation training, they shouldn’t ever be in a position where they need to de-escalate,” Kaplan said. “It should be the school counselors, the school therapists. They are the ones who should be working with the students to de-escalate.”
Beirne hopes that the updated guidelines will allow SROs to have more positive interactions with students. As opposed to being brought into disciplinary manners, officers can provide beneficial experiences such as accompanying students at lunch, going into health classes to teach drug and alcohol awareness and having officers with confidential information on students advise administration and counselors to provide extra support.
“We want our administration to understand what the social workers and school psychologists are there for, and in the case of our middle school and our high school, what the security guards are there for,” Berine said.
Hamden Mayor Lauren Garrett agreed it is important to build the relationship between SROs and students, and appearance is a factor in that equation.
“There’s language in there about their uniforms being more casual and approachable, which I think is another measure that needed to be taken,” Garrett said.
The key to regaining the trust of the community is to build positive relationships with students however it is possible.
Hamden High School installed metal detectors in December 2021 due to online threats against the school, causing it to close for three days. Since then, there have been concerns with the amount of time it takes students to pass through security.
“Now that we have metal detectors, Hamden High is about as messed up as it gets in the morning,” said HHS senior Matt Pexioto. “Officer Brewer helps keep everything in line.”
He cited both the assistance in the morning, as well as the decrease in “fights this year from previous years, and having a cop on school grounds definitely seems to make students feel safer.”
Jamie Mangini, a father of two HHS students, and husband to a teacher at the school has “always felt that having at least one SRO in Hamden High School, or any high school and middle school for that matter, is a necessity in the world we live in. The recent issues at the high school have only cemented that belief.”
With the amount of police activity at HHS in recent years, a solution to better protect the children must be found. Even those, like Kaplan, who are concerned with SRO intervention, acknowledge the state of the area and country.
“I have a lot of reservations about SROs, and the way in which power can be abused, but the alternative to having SROs in schools, who know students, who have this kind of training, is that if the school were ever in a position where they needed to call the police, anybody who answers that call, any police officer in the area would be the one to go to that school, who might not have any of that training whatsoever,” she said.
Across the New Haven region and the country, with the rise in school shootings over recent years, there is reason for the presence of officers at schools. Cheshire High School alumni Jack Surato thinks of an instance in 2018 when another student at the school was arrested after posting threats online when discussing the need for SROs.
“I think it is so important to have resource officers. Having someone there to protect our kids every day that go to school is essential,” Surato said. “These kids are the future and we need to protect them from the crazy things in this world.”
After years without an updated MOU, the participants in writing the new guidelines made it a point to ensure this mistake would not happen again. It states that there will be an annual review, which allows them to make alterations to the document as needed.
“An annual review gives us the ability… to build faith and trust in the community… especially the population that never wanted cops in schools and now… gives them a piece of mind to say ‘well we’re gonna be able to see data. We’re gonna be able to analyze it. We’re going to potentially make reviews going forward,’” Beirne said.
Garrett agreed that regularly reviewing is valuable.
“I think that it’s important for us to carefully watch the data because statistics have shown that more black and brown students get arrested when there is a resource officer in the school,” she said.
Pew Research Center conducted research across the country about the distrust of police at the beginning of 2022.
The research found that there is a discrepancy between races and ages on their trust levels of police officers. The statistics show that older, and white audiences are more likely to trust the police than any other demographic.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People conducted research into how SROs can negatively impact schools, especially upon minority groups.
It points out that, “many school districts allow SROs to switch from being law enforcement officers to administrators. This intentionally ambiguous policy allows officers to conduct activities such as searches and seizures, stop and frisk, or interrogations as administrators that would otherwise be prohibited as officers, and then use evidence collected to instigate criminal proceedings, potentially creates constitutional violations that the average child would not be aware of or have the wherewithal to defend against.”
The website adds that, “much more needs to be done to ensure that parents know what SROs are doing on a regular basis; and parents certainly deserve the right to intervene prior to their children being questioned in relation to an alleged crime.”
Despite all those concerns, people like Kaplan from Hamden’s Board of Education, see the potential value to having school resource officers, such as when there is an incident at the school.
“When reports have to be made, there’s a very important distinction between a report written by an SRO officer who has the training, who knows those students, who is in that school all the time, and any police officer who’s on the beat and is walking into that school and writing the report, and that means everything when you’re talking about the school-to-prison pipeline,” she said.