School safety and resource officers

Opinion

A teenager allegedly stabbed another student with a sword at Brandon’s École secondaire Neelin High School. The student suffered serious injuries and remains in hospital in stable condition. A 16-year-old male student has been charged with attempted murder.

Days following the attack at Neelin High, Manitoba’s Premier Wab Kinew has renewed calls for the reintroduction of school resource officers (SROs) into the Winnipeg School Division. SROs are armed uniformed police officers, just like those who patrol the streets.

The first SRO program was introduced in Flint, Mich. in the 1950s. Media coverage of violent incidents in schools in the 1990s contributed to the expansion of SROs. Manitoba established its SRO program in 2002. Funding for Winnipeg’s SROs was cut in 2021 following criticisms of the program and budgetary constraints.

Schools on balance continue to remain among the safest places for children. But public perception of school safety is another matter. A popular belief is that SROs make schools safer for children, but the research evidence is inconclusive.

A report commissioned by the Louis Riel School Division in Winnipeg, among the largest and most diverse school divisions in Manitoba, found that the presence of SROs increased concerns of discrimination and fearfulness among Indigenous and racialized students. The report was completed in August 2021. A redacted version was publicly shared in March 2023.

Following the release of the report, former Winnipeg Police Service chief, Danny Smyth, was quick to call it “problematic” and “misleading” because, in Smyth’s view, the report was “based on a small number of hand-picked, non-representative interviews,” while seemingly ignoring the 3,000 survey responses from students, parents, teachers, and administrators.

According to Dreams Delayed: Addressing Anti-Black Racism and Discrimination in Ontario’s Public Education System, a March 2025 report published by the Ontario Human Rights Commission “police in schools may subject Black and other racialized children, particularly Black boys, to a higher level of surveillance that could ultimately significantly impact their mental health and education.” The report further stresses, that even in the absence of SROs, school policies and practices often target racialized children for harsh punishments and surveillance.

A 2025 systematic review of the literature on student perceptions of SROs on their impact and outcomes published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, a multidisciplinary scientific journal, found “the majority of studies that included outcomes data found associations between SROs and negative outcomes.” The authors conclude that the evidence does not support the claims that SROs improve student safety. Furthermore, they find that SROs could be widening racial and ethnic disparities in educational outcomes.

Another highly cited study published in 2020 in Criminology & Public Policy, one of the top academic journals in the discipline of criminology, concluded “that increasing SROs does not improve school safety” and that the incorporation of police into school disciplinary incidents increases the likelihood that young people will be criminalized.

The evidence from academic research studies and commissioned reports supports the argument that SROs do more harm than good. There is a better way to help students.

New research from the University of New Mexico argues that a better alternative than SROs for keeping students safe are more school psychologists. The evidence indicates that the presence of psychologists, who are trained in mental health, contributes to student’s everyday needs, connects them with necessary resources, and helps students build resilience — all of which better ensure student safety by reducing the likelihood of violent or aggressive outbursts.

In response to the stabbing at Neelin High, Brandon Police Service Chief Tyler Bates said that “we need to understand and know why (this happened) and dissect what contributed to this so we can prevent future incidents of this nature.”

Bates is correct; however, police are not the experts to engage this analysis.

A proactive strategy to prevent such incidents from happening is to increase school psychologists and counsellors in Manitoba’s high schools who could better recognize early mental health concerns and render the appropriate interventions, thus thwarting escalations in violence before they occur.

Christopher J. Schneider is professor of sociology at Brandon University. He has published eight books and more than 100 scholarly papers and essays. His most recent book is Policing and Social Media: Social Control in an Era of Digital Media.