Greg Smith greets students in Frederick Douglass High School’s hallways not so differently from when he was a standout wide receiver on its gridiron: a fist bump here, a handshake there, and usually a smile.
But these days Smith, who graduated in 2005, is an Atlanta police officer whose beat is the hallways, cafeteria and grounds of his alma mater. Now, he’s on the lookout for trouble. Before, he said, “I was probably willfully blind to it.”
Being a school cop is different from patrolling a regular beat on the streets of Atlanta, where Smith’s focus was making arrests and he was evaluated in part by how many people he cuffed.
At Douglass High, he spends time talking to kids and listening to them. The goal is to make their educations safer — in part, so that the streets will be safer later. For cops in Atlanta Public Schools, making an arrest is now one of the least favored outcomes. Instead, Sheriff Andy Taylor’s friendly policing of television’s Mayberry is the model.
“Sometimes, kids just need somebody to listen to them,” Smith said. “It is all about building relationships.”
Smith is one of 26 full-time school resource officers patrolling city high schools and middle schools, along with about 20 part-time officers. The number eventually will rise to 73. Unlike Clayton, DeKalb, Gwinnett and Cobb counties, which have their own school police forces, APS decided to contract with the Atlanta Police Department to provide school security as of this school year.
Before that, APS principals hired off-duty officers, a practice that led to uneven enforcement — heavy-handed in one school; gentler in another. The system lacked a long view on how the interaction with police was affecting kids, said APD Maj. Keith Meadows, who oversees the division.
“A lot of SROs would charge kids criminally and send them to jail if juvenile court would accept them,” Meadows said. “I think if you get in the habit of criminalizing children every time they make a bad choice, you are opening yourself up for trouble. We don’t want to create a police state within the schools.”
This year, officers are steering students involved in fights and petty thievery to counseling, administrative punishments and conflict-resolution classes, Meadows said, although there is still a zero-tolerance policy toward weapons and illicit drugs. Smith already has criminally charged at least two Douglass students with possession of marijuana.
Still, he said, even then “we don’t try to embarrass the kids when we make an arrest.”
There is a good practical crime-fighting reason for that. Experts say a teen who is made to feel like a hoodlum — or who others view as a hoodlum — has a better chance of actually becoming one.
Not everyone buys into the more restrained approach, noted Jeff Butts, a policing expert at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. He said officers trained to arrest rather than to mediate often balk at treating infractions differently just because they occur on school grounds.
“We have criminalized a lot of teen behavior,” Butts said. “One kid shoves a kid and the other kid swings at him and both are charged with assault. One falls and cuts his arm and now it is aggravated assault.”
Some APS observers aren’t happy with the new arrangement with the police. Michelle Newcome, PTA president at Maynard Jackson High School, said she thinks security was better last year when the high school had more off-duty police officers working security and hall monitors on duty.
Now, she said, the school principal “is the one who is monitoring lunch or breaking up fights.”
Marquenta Sands, director of security for APS, said research doesn’t show that more officers make schools safer, and that security is a responsibility of all employees.
David Payne, a parent who is involved in his children’s schools, said he hopes having a full-time officer on campus will result in a more evenhanded approach to students. In the past, he said, some schools and their off-duty officers too quickly moved to arrest students for such incidents as fighting. Sometimes, parents of children involved would push for an arrest, which could have long-term consequences for the offending teen.
“The police’s job is to stop crime, and if they view normal adolescent behavior as a crime, they have to arrest them,” said Payne, president of Southwest and Northwest Atlanta Parents and Partners for Schools. “Kids fight. I don’t want to arrest them. … We need to teach children proper coping mechanisms and how to deal with the problem.”
Police in schools can be trained to avoid arresting students, said Clayton County Chief Juvenile Court Judge Steve Teske, a nationally known expert on school policing and reducing juvenile crime.
Teske said his court started working closely with Clayton schools a decade ago to avoid students being arrested for crimes such as assault that occur on school property during school hours. In the 1990s, he said, police were creating a school-to-prison pipeline with a “get tough” crackdown. Research showed that channeling many of those kids toward the court system actually increased delinquent behavior, he said.
“Most of the kids who are getting arrested are not seriously delinquent — the kind of kid who is breaking into homes or stealing cars. They’re not criminals,” Teske said. “But students arrested on campus are twice as likely to drop out of school, and if they appear in court, they are four times as likely. It is the trauma.”
He said school districts and police need to have a firm policy to determine when an incident warrants an arrest as opposed to being handled administratively or through counseling.
Sands said the contract between the school system and APD doesn’t spell out when an officer can make an arrest. That needs to be left to the officer’s discretion, she said.
But she said she thinks the improved oversight of an APD chain of command will result in a more standardized approach to how officers at different schools handle trouble on campus.
“This model is very different from what we have done in the past,” she said. “We’re going to have to try this one and evaluate how it works.”
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