Protectors or instigators? Santa Rosa’s campus police officer debate reignites after student’s fatal stabbing

Santa Rosa Police Chief John Cregan looked out at the audience and articulated the case for assigning school resource officers to local campuses. A police presence would benefit K-12 students in several ways, he argued.

“Frankly, it does impact the police department’s response times to the schools,” Cregan said. “It impacts our familiarity with the campuses. It greatly impacts our relationships we’re building with the youth.”

This was Feb. 17. Cregan was participating in a public roundtable on the topic of law enforcement equity at the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts in Santa Rosa.

Twelve days later, across town, a 16-year-boy died from stab wounds inflicted in a Montgomery High School classroom, and Cregan’s words began to echo like a chorus.

On social media, at public meetings and in news reports, parents all over Santa Rosa have been calling for the reintroduction of campus officers, frequently called SROs ― a program the Santa Rosa City Schools Board of Education voted to discontinue in 2020 as the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis officers sparked a national examination of police practices.

Support for school policing extends to younger people, too.

On Thursday, The Press Democrat surveyed four students at the SRJC campus, picked randomly as they went about their business. All four supported the idea of SROs.

That included Kelly Hansen, 19, who had a campus officer for part of her time at Analy and West County high schools.

“His son went to the campus, so we all became basically his children,” Hansen said. “He was very protective. He was just the sweetest guy. Just knowing he was there was very comforting. Especially for my parents, who worked far away.”

Tyler Whittenberg also said he believes officers have the power to alter the dynamic on school campuses. Just not in the way Hansen describes.

“That incident that just happened? The one you’re describing? With an officer in the classroom, it could have led to two people dead,” said Whittenberg, deputy director of Opportunity to Learn, part of the equity-focused nonprofit Advancement Project.

“One student who died at the hospital, and another who was shot by an officer at school.”

In 2020, when protests against police brutality swelled the streets of big cities and small towns across America, including Santa Rosa, the pendulum clearly swung in the direction of civil liberties. Now, with the momentum of that movement ebbing in places, it’s swinging back to the side of traditional policing.

But the debate over school resource officers remains complicated, and the solutions elusive, as this community wrestles with a suddenly devastating question: How can we make sure our children are safe when they step onto school property?

To law enforcement officials, the answer is obvious: A man or woman in uniform.

“Quite bluntly, I think it was a mistake to remove school resource officers from the school program,” Cregan said. “That wasn’t a decision made by the Santa Rosa Police Department. It was a decision made by the Santa Rosa school board.”

His counterpart, Sonoma County Sheriff Eddie Engram, said the need for SROs only grew during the COVID-19 pandemic, as months of isolation altered the behavior of many students, making them more prone to fighting, arguing and online bullying.

A campus officer, these officials argue, can nip problems in the bud, before they become the sort of desperate situation that has Montgomery High families reeling.

There is also room for improvement, Engram acknowledged.

“I think there’s a way maybe to re-imagine and relook at how SROs are in schools, and what their true purpose is,” he said at the Luther Burbank Center event.

“Their purpose isn’t to take phones away from kids. That’s not what the SRO is for. It really is to provide safety, and to show that role model to the next generation of law enforcement.”

To Whittenberg, the Opportunity to Learn lawyer, that police presence means something very different, particularly to students of color, those with disabilities and LGBTQ kids.

“The institution of education is completely undercut and undermined when you place that law enforcement official there,” he said. “Especially when those law enforcement officers are sent to schools where their communities are also policed the way they are.

“When I’m targeted in my community, at school, after school, how am I supposed to learn in that environment?”

The Advancement Project has mapped incidents involving police-on-student violence at schools and has tallied more than 200 assaults since 2007. Most of them involved students of color. Three of those were in the East Bay. None were in Sonoma County.

“If the trends nationally, at the state level and locally, showed that police disproportionately arrested white students, you think there would be this call for police on campus?” Whittenberg asked.

“Police are how this society deals with people of color when they have failed to provide those communities with what they need to be successful.”

And what they need is not more policing, Whittenberg emphasized. It’s funding that translates to better educational resources, smaller class sizes, more diverse teaching staff and wraparound social services on campus.

As it stands, Whittenberg and others at the Advancement Project see campus police as a key part of what they call “the school-to-prison pipeline.” They worry that negative interaction with police can get kids labeled early and plunge them into a cycle of confrontation that leads to long-term incarceration.

“We’ve seen data that says for students of color in some areas, it’s more likely they’ll enter the justice system attending school rather than staying home,” Whittenberg said. “I’ve seen a lot of that in Northern California, where there’s this idea that Black and brown students are gang members, rather than ‘these young people are our community.’”

Whittenberg’s argument that SROs treat white and minority students differently isn’t speculation. There is a growing body of research to back it up.

F. Chris Curran, associate professor of educational leadership and policy at the University of Florida, has helped conduct a lot of it, and his views on the issue are clear.

“On balance, there are probably more negatives to their placement than positives,” Curran said.

“There is evidence SROs can make campuses a bit safer in some ways. But not evidence they can prevent school shootings. And there are negatives associated with them, particularly for students of color and marginalized groups.”

In one study published in 2020, Curran and seven other researchers interviewed 73 SROs from two different school districts. They characterized one of those districts as “suburban-white” and the other as “urban-diverse.”

The study found that SROs in the suburban-white district expressed more concerns about intruder-based threats, while those working in the urban-diverse district focused more on student-based threats.

“When SROs perceive students as the primary threats, they are more likely to police the students themselves,” the authors wrote.

Curran said he believes most of these resource officers are well-intentioned. But they are steeped in the rigid culture of policing.

“Part of it is the view held by many people that students of color, and Black students in particular, are more threatening,” he said.

“Studies show that a lot of people tend to judge Black children as older or more culpable for their actions. It plays out in simulation scenarios, too, like on firing ranges, where reaction is different based on an individual’s color.

“Considering all of that, it’s not surprising that it plays out when you have officers in schools.”

During the 2015-2016 school year, Black students accounted for 15% of total enrollment, but 31% of students referred to law enforcement or arrested, according to data provided by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.

It is equally clear that stationing a resource officer on a school campus cannot, by itself, prevent tragedies.

There was an SRO at Columbine High School in Colorado on April 20, 1999. He was coming back with lunch from a Subway sandwich shop when the first call for help came over his radio. Thirteen people died that day.

There was an SRO at Marjory Stoneham Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on Feb. 14, 2018. The police officer now awaits trial on 11 charges, accused of hiding while a teen gunman killed 17 students.

There was an SRO assigned to Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24, 2022. He was off-site when a shooter showed up, and after speeding to the scene, drove right past the suspect and confronted a teacher. He did not enter the school as 21 people were murdered, including 19 young children.

If there is an embodied rebuttal to the image of a biased, hostile campus officer, it may be Armando Jauregui.

He is currently a Santa Rosa patrol officer, but he has had many roles in his nearly 24 years with the department, including detective, hostage negotiator — and SRO.

Jauregui never expected to be in the latter role.

But in 2014, a supervisor approached him and encouraged him to apply for the job. Jauregui had experience in the domestic violence and child sexual assault unit. He was bilingual, of Mexican descent. And the supervisor felt he had the right mindset for working with children.

Jauregui applied and was selected the next year. He wound up working at Elsie Allen High School and Lawrence Cook Middle School for almost five years.

Over time, he formed close bonds.

“It was different. It was like a softer touch to law enforcement,” Jauregui said.

“I enjoyed the interaction with the students there. Some kids would get in trouble at the time, but they’d come back after they left and thank you. It was a rewarding assignment.”

Jauregui said he worked with assistant principals, parents and the students themselves to determine the appropriate response to violations. His goal, the officer said, was always to land on the lowest level of punishment that was appropriate.

“I’d look at it and say, is this is a school issue or a criminal issue?” Jauregui said. “And if it’s criminal, is it serious, or something I can refer back to the school?”

He offered an example: A student comes into class smelling of marijuana. The teacher searches the kid’s backpack and finds a bag of weed. Jauregui would “triage” it. If the student had never been in trouble, he might recommend counseling under the school’s restorative justice program.

“Instead of five days, maybe it’s a two-day suspension,” Jauregui said. “I might not cite the student. Just confiscate the marijuana and refer it to the school. So it wouldn’t generate a call for service.”

On average, he said, he would arrest no more than two or three students a year on suspicion of crimes. Jauregui worked four days a week on campus. If something happened on his off day, he said, the outcome would likely be harsher.

“Something may have happened where the school needs to contact dispatch,” he said. “OK, so they arrest a juvenile. They’re handling it appropriately. But if it was me, I probably would have handled it differently.”

Jauregui was about to finish his fifth year as an SRO when Santa Rosa City Schools trustees voted 7-0 in June 2020 to suspend the relationship with the police department.

He was part of a 32-person ad hoc committee appointed by the district that year to analyze the pros and cons of resource officers. Their final consensus: Keep officers on middle and high school campuses, but with changes.

Only four of the committee members suggested the program be fully dismantled.

Some residents saw it as a slap in the face when the trustees in November 2020 seemingly overrode the committee’s recommendation and opted not to renew the program with Santa Rosa police.

But another committee member, Omar Lopez — who was a high school student at the time — emphasized that the other 28 members voted to extend the discussion and explore modifications to the program.

No one, he said, wanted it to remain untouched.

“Safety is complicated, there’s different forms of it and different ways of achieving it,” Lopez wrote in an email to The Press Democrat.

“Because of that, it is my belief that the appropriate and necessary next step is for another committee to be convened, either as an ad hoc or, preferably, as a standing committee to further discuss student safety, not just SROs.

Amie Carter, the Sonoma County superintendent of schools, acknowledged much of the existing data about SROs look bad. But she said she believes there are reasonable solutions.

“In the Novato community, we had a similar conversation where there was some dispute over the benefits of the school resource officer, and groups that felt they were beneficial and groups that felt that they brought harm collectively.”

They came together and devised new protocols. Campuses began sharing discipline numbers with the school board.

The SROs, at the request of students, began to dress more casually. And the district made it clear that they were there to build trust, not to “enforce rules like chewing gum or running in the hallways.”

Curran, the University of Florida professor, also sees potential for a middle ground in the midst of a seemingly implacable tension — despite all the evidence he has uncovered painting SROs as counterproductive.

He said if policies are clearly outlined by districts, and if resource officers are better trained to interact with students and understand the educational environment, the model can improve.

And maybe that’s where we’re headed.

“What’s the alternative, right?” Curran said. “We want kids to be safe in school. Part of the attraction of SROs is that they’re so clearly linked in the public eye to safety. I don’t think we’ve come up with the answer of what else we might be doing.”

Staff Writer Jeremy Hay contributed to this story. You can reach Staff Writer Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @Skinny_Post.