Do police belong in schools? A suburb wrangles with how to keep kids safe.

Susan Burkinshaw remembers feeling relieved when she saw a police car parked outside the high school her three children attended. “There’s an officer in the building,” she would tell herself. “If anything happens, there’s boots on the ground.”

But when Tiffany Kelly sees a cruiser near her 10-year-old son’s elementary school, her heartbeat quickens. Last year, the child, who has learning disabilities, was questioned by police at his school for playing with counterfeit money.

“I constantly live with this fear,” Kelly said. “If there’s a cop, I immediately think: What’s happened to Sadiq?”

These disparate views, in the same liberal Maryland suburb, illustrate the core of a thorny debate that has erupted over a community policing bill. The legislation includes a request to “maintain and expand” Montgomery County’s $3 million School Resource Officer (SRO) program, which places police in the county’s 25 public high schools. While the goal of the legislation was to bridge — not widen — the distance between law enforcement and marginalized groups, the clause on SROs has had the opposite effect...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/md-politics/do-police-belong-in-schools-a-suburb-wrangles-with-how-to-keep-kids-safe/2020/02/21/f12abc72-4dee-11ea-b721-9f4cdc90bc1c_story.html