School Resource Officers and Students’ Feelings of Safety at School

Abstract

The number of school resource officers (SROs) placed at schools has increased dramatically. These officers are tasked with making schools safer, yet the effect of interacting with SROs on students’ feelings of safety needs more investigation. To address this need, 1,956 middle and high school students were surveyed. Latent class analysis identified two groups of students, one who felt safe and another who did not. Regression showed that interacting with SROs was unrelated to these feelings of safety; instead, African American students and victimized students felt less safe while males, students with more school connectedness, and students with more positive attitudes about SROs felt safer.