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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?
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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?
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
Measures • Security • 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
NO NO NO NO YES! (3.62) YES! (1.47) NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO YES! (1.44) YES! (3.42) YES! (1.83) YES! (5.40)
Racial/ethnic disproportionality • From 2015-2016 CRDC • 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.
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