Sgt. Daniel Porché, of the Madison County Sheriff’s Office in North Carolina, trains inside a school with other school resource officers.Sgt. Daniel Porché/Madison County Sheriff's Office
School resource officers are on the front lines of preparing to thwart the next school massacre, or end it once it starts. So, what lately has been the focus and what are the trends for placing SROs in schools?
Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers (NASRO), says the Columbine massacre is still the one that is most discussed by potential school shooters and the one many want to try to emulate. But then there is the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, which again brought attention to the need to end the threat as soon as possible.
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“I’m a former law enforcement officer and I’m pretty defensive of law enforcement officers, but I’m never going to defend this blindly,” Canady says of the Uvalde response. “We all have to agree that it was an epic law enforcement failure. It is one that still is gut-wrenching. It makes me sick if I think about it too deeply.”
April 20, 1999 – Columbine Response
The day of the Columbine shooting, Canady was an SRO supervisor. That afternoon, he says, changed how his department did everything from that point forward.
“That afternoon all my guys were telling me, and I was with them, ‘Sergeant I'm not waiting. I'm not waiting on the calvary. If there's a shooting at my school, I'm going to find the shooter’,” recalls Canady.
Moving forward to Uvalde, Canady qualifies that there was not an SRO at the school at the time of the 2022 shooting, and frames that by saying that because of that they were already “behind the ball.”
He looks at other school shootings in places like St. Mary’s County, Maryland; Dixon, Illinois; and San Diego County, California; as examples of shootings that began when an SRO was at a school, heard gunfire, and immediately responded to the threat.
Covenant School: Responding to Stimulus
In the case of the Covenant School in Nashville, patrol officers and detectives responded to the report of an active shooter in the private school. Once inside, they started clearing room by room until they heard the sound of gunfire. At that point, they immediately responded to the stimulus, later explaining that was how they were trained.
They were not SROs and they were not at the school when the shooter arrived, but once they arrived they immediately acted without hesitation when they heard gunfire.
The opposite was Uvalde, where a high-ranking leader told officers to hold and not go in and get the shooter. Canady says that type of leader is not the one who should be in charge in times like that.
“We have to trust the first responders, those law enforcement officers who are first on scene, in dealing with this and realizing the history of what goes on in schools with these assailants. They're killing people, they're killing children,” adds Canady. “And we’ve got to stop it.
Canady says it is disturbing that the Uvalde report noted that officers did not have keys available to access the classroom and confront the gunman.
“That mindset is bizarre to me. Here we sit 25 years after the Columbine Massacre. How do you not have keys? Forget SROs for a minute, first responders we’ve got to have that kind of relationship with the school that we’ve got a way to get into classrooms,” says Canady. “We can't have a suspect going in and locking us out.”
Read More: Breaching: Ramming Your Way In
He says there should never be an excuse for not having keys to get into a classroom. Officers can’t be stopped by a locked door for a long time, as in the case of Uvalde.
Arming SROs the Same as Patrol Officers
Canady says he is often asked if SROs should have rifles, should SROs have pepper spray, should SROs have Taser-type devices. His answer is simple.
“SROs should be equipped with the exact same things as patrol officers in their departments. Whatever the other officers carry, the SRO should carry,” says Canady, noting that they should be well-trained with each item and be aware of sensitivities that can occur in a school environment.
As far as rifles for SROs, he says there have been healthy discussions on the topic in many meetings and training sessions. Canady says he is increasingly seeing more situations where SROs are being equipped with gun safes in their offices at their schools. Some are stand-alone, while others are built into a wall. That is often where the rifle will be kept, but some SROs may also keep them inside a patrol car parked at the school.
“The majority of the time the SRO is not going to be near that rifle. If they're fortunate enough that they happen to just step into their office to answer a couple of emails when the assault begins and can grab the rifle, good, then they're better equipped,” he says.
Even though that rifle may be an option during an active shooter event, Canady stresses that SROs need to be trained and highly proficient with their sidearm. Most likely if they respond directly to the sound of gunfire, that is the weapon they will have immediately at hand.
Providing Patrol Rifles for SROs
After Uvalde, the Madison County (North Carolina) sheriff put AR-15 variant rifles in reach of his SRO deputies. The rifles were locked into gun safes in the SRO officers, giving the deputies quicker access to them if needed.
The department has 61 employees, and the county has six schools, Mars Hill University, and a satellite office of Asheville-Buncombe Technical College.
“It was very simple. All I did was we took those firearms from the back of that officer's car. Probably every officer in the state or in the United States has an AR-15 tucked away somewhere in the back of a patrol car,” said Sheriff Buddy Harwood. “All I’ve done is put safes in my SROs’ offices mounted into the floor and took those AR-15s from the back of that trunk to place them in those safes to save valuable seconds.”
The AR-15s that went into the school were new rifles that were provided by the community. The sheriff said the department already had rifles, but the community provided FN AR-15s specifically for the SROs.
The sheriff talked with the local paper, and the story spread nationally. Some around the country approved, while others did not. The sheriff says he even received death threats from people opposed to the concept.
“But the community loved it. Probably 99% of the people across the United States that have called me loved the idea and I’ve had several agencies call asking how we were able to get that by and get them in the schools,” Harwood explains.
Read More: Giving SROs More Firepower and Tools for School Shooter Response
He says it was simple. He met with the local school superintendent and the two decided to move forward with what they thought was the best thing to do for the county and the schools.
Harwood, however, says the extensive media attention mostly focused on the patrol rifles, overlooking some other steps he took. In addition to the rifle, there is space in the safes for breaching tools.
Taking a page out of a fire department playbook, the sheriff provided each SRO with a Halligan tool, a Go Devil, and what he says are the basic tools that an SRT team would use for door breaching. It is all locked in the safe of the SRO’s office.
“I put breaching tools in there that way you don't have to wait on the fire department to come with the breaching tools,” Harwood says. “We've got all the stuff there that we need to take care of the situation.”
But past all the needed hardware, the sheriff’s office is also hosting coordinated training. The sheriff said last year the state bureau of investigation came to train on a rapid deployment at a school, and this year federal officers will do the same.
“We train, train, train and I just want my people to be prepared If anything at all happens. You can't train enough,” he says. “You can have all the training in the world, but at the end of the day, you've got to have someone with a backbone that will engage a threat.”
At the end of the day, the SROs place the rifles into hard cases the sheriff’s office purchased and the weapons are taken out of the school. Then, the next morning they arrive early and return them to the safes.
What About Deploying Ballistic Shields?
In the weeks following the Uvalde shooting it was common on social media to see communities and businesses buying and donating ballistic shields to departments for their SROs. So where does Canady stand on shields and body bunkers.
Learn More: 5 Things to Know When Buying Ballistic Shields
At his former police department, he was on the tactical team for 11 years and said the team regularly trained with shields. But he acknowledges there can be tactical disadvantages.
“It’s not the perfect solution it might sound like,” he says. “It can certainly slow you down and cause you to not think about the other tactics you need to be thinking about, but it can also be helpful,” he says. “I'm one of those from a tactical standpoint that leans toward very few circumstances in an active shooter incident where I would want to body bunker.”
“Body bunkers can be effective in barricaded suspects situations if we're making a slow and deliberate type entry. But an active shooter situation is not a slow and deliberate type of entry,” Canady explains.
Canady said he appreciates the well-meaning donations of shields, but really would rather see the money spent elsewhere such as making sure the school has keycard access, plus making sure officers have access cards.
Securing the perimeter, such as keeping doors locked, goes a long way in preventing shootings in schools. However, just locking doors is not a guarantee.
“I can go to just about any school in America, knock on the door, smile enough, and convince a student to open the door for me and let me in. We got to think about where the weak points really are,” he says.
Learn More: Training to Prevent the Next Uvalde
