Retired Santa Rosa Police Chief Sal Rosano on why police at school still is a good idea

Pulling specially assigned law enforcement officers out of secondary schools seems like a good idea if you believe cops are fundamentally racist and brutal and therefore pose great peril to kids, especially those of color.

Retired Santa Rosa police chief Sal Rosano doesn’t share that view.

Rosano was widely seen as a forward-thinking and innovative chief when he introduced school resource officers to Santa Rosa in the early 1990s. Anchoring the program is a central goal of community policing: to have officers on foot get to know people ― and allow people to get to know them ― through everyday, nonconfrontational encounters.

Rosano, Santa Rosa’s chief from 1974 to 1996, has long observed that many young people first meet a cop during a traffic stop or similar enforcement action. “That,” he says, “leaves a sour taste.”

How much better to assign officers to middle and high schools to assist teachers and administrators and to “establish a rapport with teenagers so that their first encounter (with a cop) is not a negative experience, but a positive one.”

DRUG USE AND GANGS were burgeoning concerns at Santa Rosa schools when police and schools officials agreed, as a more holistic approach to traditional enforcement alone, to assign resource officers to the secondary campuses.

Soon, students were talking to and confiding in uniformed police officers the same as they would a trusted teacher, counselor or coach.

You might have seen Saturday’s Letter to the Editor by Lisa Lauren. She wrote that through 15 years as a high school administrator she found campus resource officers to be “kind, caring and respected” people who curtailed bullying and stood ready to act against a shooter or other threat.

NOT ALL COPS, I trust we can to a person agree, are kind, caring and respected.

Sal Rosano, who became a police officer on his 21st birthday and was active in public safety into his 70s, is confident that the remedy to bad cops is not to treat all cops as such and to aggressively cut back and incapacitate law enforcement.

What he sees in ghastly videos out of Minneapolis, Atlanta and so many other places across the country are people who never should have been hired as police officers.

Rather than defund law enforcement agencies, he would push to assure that those with weak hiring practices do vastly better at testing and background-checking applicants, and weeding out those unqualified to wear the badge.

He recalled that during his tenure with the Santa Rosa Police Department, the selection process raised red flags and rejected nearly all of those who applied to become a peace officer.

“We were lucky to approve one or two candidates for every 100 who applied,” he said. He holds that many law enforcement agencies are making cops of people unfit for the work, yet it doesn’t have to be that way.

IT’S UNDERSTANDABLE that right now there are many who want to strike back at police everywhere, and to strike hard.

We might keep in mind that any number of times, outrage and disgust over crime brought broad-brush, get-tough responses that swelled the prisons and greatly stretched the sentences of some people who didn’t deserve to be treated so harshly. Let’s be smart about this.

You can reach Chris Smith at 707-521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.