098: Do school shooter trainings help (or hurt) children?

Jen 01:21 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We have another serious topic to cover today and it's probably one that you don't want to listen to with children around. I received a question from listener Selena about 6 months ago saying that an incendiary device had been discovered on the grounds of the public school that my daughter would actually going to be attend if we weren't going to homeschool. And that some of the parents who were very worried and were demanding video surveillance and disaster preparedness drills and she wants to know whether there was any research available about the impacts of drills to prepare children for things like active shooters. And I wanted to know are these drills effective? And then when I started researching this issue, I went down a complete rabbit hole related to the effectiveness of other kinds of school security measures as well as bullying, as a potential cause of violence in schools. Jen 02:08 And the kind of relational aggression that girls particularly to practice as well. So expect episodes on those topics soon in the coming months. But here to kick us off today on this mini series is Dr. Ben Fisher. He's Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at University of Louisville. Dr. Fisher’s research focuses on the intersection of education and criminal justice, but particular focus on school safety, security and discipline. He approaches this research from an interdisciplinary perspective with a focus on inequality that is grounded in his Ph.D. in community research and action from Vanderbilt University, which prepared him to work on this view from a social justice orientation. Welcome Dr. Fisher. Dr. Fisher 02:46 Thank you. Glad to be here. Jen 02:47 And so before we get going with our conversation today, I do want to just take a minute and acknowledge that we're recording this in the week after a gunman killed 22 people in Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and then another gunman killed 9 people outside a bar in Dayton, Ohio. So, it feels very raw to me to be discussing this today. We're going to talk today about the likelihood that a child will be killed in a school shooting. And despite the impression that we might get from the endless news cycles that keep these kinds of incidents top of mind when they happen, our chances of dying from many other causes are far, far greater than dying during a mass murder. But despite this, I do believe there are too many guns in our society and not enough control over who has access to them and what they do once they have them. Jen 03:30 And I also think that these kinds of events are not the ultimate problems we need to deal with. Yes, we need to make it much more difficult to access guns. So, people who feel disaffected can't harm large numbers of people very easily and instituting tighter gun control in a country where so much of the political power is tied to the money provided by the gun lobby currently seems like a really insurmountable challenge. But in my mind, the far greater challenges, the one facing our families and schools where we need to address what is leading children and later adults to feel so disconnected from their families and communities, but the best tool they have to express their emotions is to kill people. So with that said, let's talk about some ways we might be able to do this. Okay. So let's start by putting this topic in context because I think many parents, myself included before I started this research, are probably under the impression that there's kind of an epidemic of violence and particularly violence perpetrated by people with guns in schools. Dr. Fisher, can you help us understand whether that is in fact the case? Dr. Fisher 04:26 Well, we certainly do have a problem with violence in our country as we've seen in very clear fashion this past week. However, the statistics also indicate that our countries become safer and safer over the past two decades in terms of crime and victimization rights. Schools in particular have not been as safe as they are in the past 20 years in terms of rates of all sorts of crime and violence in schools. So although violence certainly does continue to be a problem, particularly gun violence and many of its forms compared to where we were two decades ago, things are going fairly well. Jen 05:02 Yeah, I was really surprised by that. It seemed as though there was sort of a high watermark around 1992 and 1993 where the rate of homicide risk was much higher than it has been in the more recent years, I think with the exception of the year of the Sandy Hook shooting. And why do you think that is? Dr. Fisher 05:21 Well, it's been across the board with all types of crime and violence. It's not just gun violence, although it does include that. Part of that is most certainly regression to the mean where when stuffs gets really bad, it is going to get better on average. When stuffs going really well, it's going to get worse on average. So that's gotta be part of it in my mind. And I'm a little less familiar with sort of the broader sociological explanations around long-term reductions in crime, but we've seen parallel trends in community policing strategies where officers are more focused on building relationships with community members instead of going out and cracking skulls, only I say that and just mostly, but they're less concerned about, you know, just finding and responding to crime. There's a lot more of a proactive approach. So, there's that law enforcement perspective on it, but that's not too much of my area of expertise. So, I don't want to step away like too much here. Jen 06:19 No worries. A couple of the stats that stuck out to me as I was researching that was the deaths by different causes over that period. And bicycle accident was one of the highest ones at 2,400 and this is deaths of children by various causes, a fire accident of some kind 1900 and change, accidental fall around 1700, lightning strikes 251 and then school shootings 113 children. And then just to put that number in context, only about half a percent of the 24,000 children who were murdered in that period between 1999 and 2013 were killed at school. So I think there is still a lot of violence in our society and there are definitely children who are meeting an end way before their time is due, but only a tiny fraction of those are actually happening in school. I was I guess maybe I just hadn't thought about it, but those isolated incidents tend not to get the same coverage that the large scale incidents at school have. I think maybe part of it. Dr. Fisher 07:20 Yeah, that's right. Statistically speaking, schools are among the safest place for children and youth to be compared to other homes, neighborhoods, or almost anywhere else. Unfortunately, a lot of the media coverage around gun violence that occurs in schools, that's sort of gripped the public imagination and some degree, rightfully so because it's a sort of an absolute affront to the conscience to see the sort of gun violence happen in schools regardless of how common or uncommon it is. But in another sense there's been this sort of undue fear that has been stoked to where there's this idea that schools are dangerous places that need to be locked down and targets that need to be hardened in certain ways so that strangers or students with guns and ill-intentions can't do violence there. Jen 08:12 Yeah, I think parental fears are really key issue and some research that I saw in that said that somewhere between 25% and 30% of parents sort of have this sort of like a background level of fear about the researchers quiz them on their oldest child’s safety while in school in most years. And right after Columbine that spiked up to about 55% and then I guess there was another incident in Santee, which I think is in Florida, that was led to a spike in 45% and then only up to 33% right after Sandy Hook. So I wonder if people were sort of becoming a little bit immune to it. You know, the spikes were not quite so high each time above that baseline level, but still that's a very, I mean a third of parents almost are between a quarter and a third of parents have some kind of fear about their child's safety in school. Dr. Fisher 08:57 What I think was interesting is that a parallel research that has been conducted with students finds almost no effect of these shootings. So, I've conducted research where we measured students' levels of fear and feelings of safety at school and Sandy Hook happened to occur right in the middle of our data collection. So, we could compare those students right before or right after and there are similar research done by Lynn Addington around the Columbine shooting in 1999. And both studies found statistically significant effects, but ones that were so small as to actually be practically zero. So, essentially no changes in students' perceptions of safety or fear. So, this fear seems to be taking hold mostly in our adults and less so in our students. Jen 09:47 Do you have any sense as to why that is? Is it because the adults are watching these news cycles and that they're trying to protect the children from it and so the children aren't exposed to as much information or what's your sense on that? Dr. Fisher 09:59 I don't know. I don't have a strong sense of that. I can tell you that when I'm confronting potential danger, I'm usually more worried about the people I'm with than I am about my own safety. So it may be that sort of a factor, you know, parents love very few people in the world more than their own children and then maybe they just maybe sensitized to that. Jen 10:19 Yeah. Okay. And so as we heard about at the beginning of the episode is often parents who will then call for more security at schools, particularly after an incident at another school as sort of prompted their fears. And so I want to spend some time talking about what kinds of security are now in place in schools. So maybe we could walk through some of these and just talk about what they are and what kind of effects they have. So, the first one is the Gun-Free Schools Act that was enacted in 1994 and I think it calls for States to enact laws requiring that a student who brings a firearm or who possesses a firearm at school to be expelled for a period of not less than one year. How effective has that been? What do you know about that particular act? Dr. Fisher 11:01 Yeah, that act is credited largely with bringing in sort of this era of zero tolerance discipline into schools. And so it began with, as you mentioned, guns in schools and it quickly expanded to drugs as well. And then schools have followed that approach to extend it to other things such as fighting, even repeated offenses of more minor actions. So, when folks talk about zero tolerance, they sometimes talk about specific policies, like if you bring a gun to school, you're out. But a lot of researchers are also talking about this culture of zero tolerance where disciplinary strategies are bound up in the use of school security measures that are used to monitor and surveil students. And just sort of this sense that schools, yes are places of education, but also places of control. So critical scholars who look back to the Gun-Free Schools Act of 1994 largely point to that as legislation that has ushered in that era. Jen 12:04 Yeah, and I think on the face of it, it seems like a really valid thing to do. You know, yeah, no kid should have a gun in school. No child should have a knife in a school. Yes, they should be sort of things that are non-negotiable. But I think, 75% of schools now have these policies, but I read in an American Psychological Association report that found there is little evidence that this act is a deterrent firstly for people who are planning to do these kinds of things, they're going to bring it to school anyway. They don't increase school safety. They're disproportionately applied to students of non-dominant cultures. And you hear all the time in the news about, you know, some person who there was a kid who picked up her mom's lunchbox and her mom had a paring knife in her lunchbox so that she could cut an apple up at her work. And so the child finds it immediately, hands it in and gets kicked out of school. So once you look below the surface, how effective do you think this zero tolerance policies are? Are there instead of intended goal of reducing violence? Dr. Fisher 12:58 Well, they're not effective and I think some of us would even argue that their intention wasn't as much to prevent violence as it was to exert control. So, from a violence prevention perspective, they have been ineffective. From a control perspective, they've been highly effective. As you mentioned, there's a high degree of disproportionality in who is being excluded from our schools, this largely students of color, students with disabilities. In that sense, this sort of zero tolerance culture has reinforced ideas of what is considered normal. What is the status quo has maintained a lot of those cultural paradigms. Jen 13:39 Yeah. Okay. So let's talk about some of those more control and surveillance types of activities. I think 64% of public schools used cameras and this data is kind of out of date in the 2011-2012 school year. Is that increasing and what trends are you seeing around the use of cameras in schools? Dr. Fisher 13:56 Yeah, that's been to my knowledge, one of the largest increases over the past decade or so to where the vast majority of schools now use security cameras. I assume this is largely driven by sort of the advent of new technology that seems to be happening on a weekly, monthly basis. And cameras are becoming cheaper and cheaper. I just completed a study earlier this year with two of my graduate students where we examined a set of 850 schools that implemented cameras between time one and time two and what time one and time two varied a little bit, but it was all within the 2000. So, within that 850 schools, some implemented cameras, some didn't. Then we compared, you know, was there a reduction in crime when you implement cameras? Did it make a difference for violent crime, for property crime, for more routine things like a bullying or gang activities in the school? And across outcome after outcome we saw zero effect, zero effect, zero effect. Jen 15:01 Wow. Dr. Fisher 15:02 Even though cameras are becoming more and more prevalent, statistically we're not seeing any improvement in crime outcomes, at least in the data that we used. Jen: 15:11 Okay. So I want to sort of tease that out a little bit. I'm wondering, okay, so maybe there's this baseline level of crime and then cameras are implemented in the school. Is it possible that some children are deterred from committing crimes while other children are still committing them, but they're more likely to get caught? And so this sort of, you know, decrease in number but increase in number of people getting caught, are they canceling each other out and having that zero effect or do you think there’s something else going on? Dr. Fisher 15:38 Oh, that's certainly possible. I can't rule that out. I also wonder and speculate if young people today are so desensitized to being on camera with having one or two cameras on each of our cell phones that we use having so many in public spaces. I wonder if there's just not the deterrent effect that there may have been in earlier decades. Jen: 15:59 Oh, interesting. Yeah. It'd be interesting to compare that with an English dataset because you're on camera everywhere, everywhere you go in England. But that would be really interesting. Dr. Fisher 16:09 Fascinating. Jen 16:10 Yeah. So, I know that a lot of your researches focused on school security personnel and so there's a variety of forms these can take. There can be security guards, there can be actual police, there can be what's called school resource officers, which I think are police who are kind of deputized to the school. Can you talk a little bit about what your researchers found on those? Dr. Fisher 16:30 Sure. Yeah, so I think to begin there are maybe some useful working definitions that we'll give. And I will say that the definitions that I use differ slightly from the ones that other researchers use, which differ slightly from ones that practitioners and people in schools use, which differ slightly from ones that the public uses. So, I'll sort of define the terms as I'm speaking about them and folks can chime in and tell me I'm wrong afterwards. So, yeah, I see a sort of three types of security personnel. One being security guards who are not part of a police force, they are not sworn officers, they don't have arrest powers, but they're there to sort of address behavior issues in school to keep a general sense of order. There's police officers who are not SROs, who are not School Resource Officers where they do have arrest powers. Dr. Fisher 17:23 Typically, will carry a firearm. They’re assigned to a school maybe on a full time, maybe on a part time basis, but they don't have any sort of special training around working in schools or working with children and youth. Then finally School Resource Officers are a subset of police officers. So it's another form of school-based law enforcement. But when people talk about SROs, they typically talk about them in a context of folks who have had some sort of training around say, child and adolescent development or understanding the school system or things like that. On the ground, it’s not always the case that they have those sorts of trainings, but when people talk about them as a general idea. So most of the research that I have been involved in over the past two or three years has been with school resource officers. Dr. Fisher 18:10 I've been partnering with two different school districts, one in a very urban area, one in a rural and suburban area. And I've done interviews with around 75 officers. And I've looked at some administrative data in the suburban district, talked with a variety of other stakeholders, teachers, students, parents. One of the major themes that we've found has been that context really matters in schools. So the context, both in terms of the school context, but also the neighborhood and community really shapes what SROs do, how they understand their jobs and what effects they have. How other folks perceive them. Jen 18:49 Okay. And so I know that the incidents of having SROs in schools really increased dramatically after Columbine because the Federal Government made $475 million in grant money available to hire and train SROs despite any lack of empirical evidence of their effectiveness. So, I wonder if we can talk through what your research and the research of others has found about things like links between the use of SROs and other...