Louis Mercer is a school law enforcement researcher based at the University of Illinois Chicago.
But in 2007, he was a teacher in a public school in Arizona when one of his eighth graders was arrested during class.
School police officers were conducting a random search for weapons when they discovered that one student had marijuana in his pocket. Mercer still remembers the arrest.
“It was jarring and it was disruptive to the learning process," he remembers. "It certainly didn’t make me, as a teacher, feel safer and it definitely didn’t make the students feel safer.”
That was nearly 20 years ago.
Since then, Mercer has thought a lot about that arrest as he studies how armed police started working in schools in Chicago and Milwaukee.
"The implementation of police in schools happened in big cities like Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s," he says.
At the time, organizations like teachers' unions advocated for law enforcement in schools in both Chicago and Milwaukee. Mercer explains that union leaders held up examples of violence against the mostly white teaching force as evidence that police needed to control the mostly non-white student population.
But police appeared to have the opposite effect.
"Actually violence in schools increased after that," Mercer says.
In Milwaukee, school resource officers are tasked with keeping campuses secure and investigating criminal activity on school grounds.
But staff and students say they’ve seen and heard of incidents where school resource officers, or SROs, escalate situations unnecessarily.
Anneliese Schultz is a junior at Hamilton High School. She says she wishes adults making decisions about SROs could see what it's like to have them in close proximity to students.
“I’ve seen and heard of multiple instances when an SRO put their hands on a student or tased a student or physically assaulted students just for doing things like skipping class or yelling at an administrator," she said at a January school board meeting.
Do police on campus make schools safer?
Milwaukee Public Schools has had an on-again-off-again relationship with SROs.
In 2007, the district began an SRO program that assigned pairs of officers to some schools. In 2013, the district also introduced mobile teams of officers who would travel between schools.
But following the start of a federal investigation into discipline in MPS, the school district began removing officers who were directly assigned to schools in 2016.
In 2020, it officially ended a related program that provided training for officers who were the go-to responders when police were called to school grounds.
Then, in 2024, the district was required by the state to create a school-based policing program. At the time, proponents said school resource officers were the best way to protect students from violence at school.
It took until 2025 for Milwaukee to make the changes, and MPS was the only district singled out by the state Legislature to put cops in its schools.
That’s really unusual, according to Ben Fisher, a researcher and associate professor of civil society at UW-Madison.
"There are a few states that have mandated that there need to be police in schools or some sort of equivalent. But I’ve never heard anywhere…of a state government targeting one particular school district and saying, ‘As your state legislature you all need to be putting police in your schools.’"
In 2023, Fisher reviewed 32 studies from the U.S., U.K. and Canada to figure out whether school police made campuses safer.
“We don’t see that schools are less violent when there are police there. We don’t see that there are fewer crimes when there are police there. It’s about the same," Fisher says. "We do see though that there is a statistically significant increase in the amount of suspension that is happening in schools.”
The studies reviewed by Fisher showed that more students were disciplined while school police were stationed on campus.
What's next for school resource officers in Milwaukee?
Advocates for school resource officers say that measuring safety is difficult – because it’s hard to quantify the number of threats that don’t pan out.
Mo Canady is the executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers. He worked as an SRO in Alabama before becoming leader of the association.
“One of the things that SROs do not get enough credit for is the issue of averted school violence," he says. "Everyone looks at the active shooter incidents and maybe whether the SRO stopped it or not … but the bottom line is there’s a lot of activity around averted school violence.”
Last month, the MPS board approved accountability measures for SROs. Those measures include barring officers from taking part in school discipline, and they require regular reports on arrests to the school board.
Superintendent Dr. Brenda Cassellius now needs to make a plan to implement those changes.
Students and families will be watching closely.
Katherine Kokal is the education reporter at 89.7 WUWM - Milwaukee's NPR. Have a question about schools or an education story idea? You can reach her at kokal@uwm.edu
