George County School District Forms Campus Police Department

By Royce Armstrong
Beginning with the 2007-2008 school year, George County will join a growing number of school districts with on campus police departments.
“The paradigm has changed,” Robert Laird, the Director of School Safety for the Mississippi Department of Education, said. “Years ago, if you saw a police officer on a school campus, you thought something was terribly wrong. Now, if you do not see one on the campus, there is growing concern.”
Laird, a native Mississippian, spent a career in law enforcement working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He retired as a special agent in New York and took a job heading up the newly formed Division of School Safety for the Mississippi Department of Education in 1998. Since that time his division has become recognized as one of the top school police officer training programs in the nation. The department is one of 16 chosen as advisors to the U.S. Department of Education, and he has helped train school resource officers (SRO) that included Canadian Royal Mounted Police and Mexican Federal police.
When the division was created in 1998, there were three schools and 14 police officers in the program. Today, there are 82 schools with 380 school resource officers and another 300 school safety officers, representing more than half of Mississippi’s 152 school districts.
George County School District Security Officer Ben Brown has already received basic school resource officer training through Laird’s program. Newly hired resource officers Al Hillman and Jason Smith will soon be going through the training.
“School resource officers are the best trained police officers in Mississippi,” Laird said. “The minimum qualifications for an SRO are a minimum of three years as a certified police officer and completion of the basic SRO program. Additionally, SRO must complete 40 hours of continuing training each year compared to a minimum of 12 hours for other police officers.”
Laird said the SRO training is not easy and that approximately 20 percent of each class quits before the training is completed.
The school board recently voted to create the on campus department rather than to share officers employed by either the sheriff’s department or city police. The campus police will have jurisdiction on any school campus in the state, according to Laird. If an extreme emergency arose on another school campus, these officers could be deployed to that area and visa versa. An example, Laird said, would be hurricane evacuation, which falls under the responsibility of the Department of Education because of its school buses.
George County has already been designated as a staging area for evacuees from the coastal counties.
Laird said the George County SRO will have a four-pronged mission. This includes law enforcement, school security, training and support and mentoring.
“About 20 years ago the U.S. Department of Justice recognized that there was a tremendous upsurge in juvenile crime,” Laird said. “Each school campus is a community of juveniles for 180 days each year. In George County, this is approximately 4,000 students, equivalent to the size of a small Mississippi town. Juvenile crime carries over into the school community.”
Laird said the crimes are both violent and non-violent. They include fighting, bullying, extortion and drug and alcohol abuse. During his tenure, he has broken up a prostitution ring in a school and had a situation where kindergarten students were having sex in a restroom.
“There had never been a school shooting before 20 years ago,” Laird said.
School districts forming on campus police departments, rather than sharing officers with local law enforcement agencies is becoming increasingly common, Laird said, although George County is the first in Southeast Mississippi.
Campus police will be equipped similarly to other police departments. School resource officers will wear uniforms and carry handguns on campus. The school board has already approved purchasing campus police cars. Tasers will not be used on students, Laird said.
Creating a campus police department is a long term commitment, Laird said. Now, that the school has done so, it will be very difficult for the school board to disband it because of civil liability issues.
“The issue is constructive notice,” Laird said. “If the school district decided to eliminate the campus police and a serious incident occurred, the courts would look at three tests. These are: What did you know? When did you know it? What action did you take to respond to it? Once it is determined that campus police are necessary, disbanding that police department would put the district out there all alone on a very narrow limb.”
Reporter Royce Armstrong may be reached at rarmstrong@hughes.net or by telephone
at (601) 766-9624.