Metro Nashville Police officers will no longer serve as School Resource Officers at two Nashville schools because the students reportedly hurl a lot of verbal abuse their way.
These are reportedly alternative schools — Bass W.A. Alternative School and Johnson Alternative Learning Center.
This, according to news reports in both The Tennessean and the Nashville-based NewsChannel 5.
Metro Police have reassigned them to “mainstream schools,” The Tennessean went on to say.
“The officers don’t need to be subjected to that kind of abuse, they don’t need to be subjected to an environment where the students aren’t welcoming,” Metro Police spokesman Don Aaron reportedly told News Channel 5.
Aaron reportedly went on to tell the station that “working in the alternative schools, if you’re a police officer, is not an ideal place to be.”
MNPD spokesperson Kris Mumford told The Tennessean, meanwhile, that “officers did not feel they were able to do their jobs — including developing relationships with the students to mentor and educate them, as evidenced by the reported abuse.”
The verbal abuse has been going on for a long time, the paper quoted Mumford as saying.
“However, the exact length of that ongoing abuse, or the content of the comments, was not something she was able to confirm,” according to The Tennessean.
Sixty-two MNPD employees make up the SRO program, including seven sergeants and one lieutenant. One SRO serves at each middle school and two at each high school, the paper reported.
Officials task SROs with three responsibilities — education, mentoring and law enforcement. Several officers, however, found those responsibilities difficult. Acting as security guards is not their responsibility, the paper said.
“The department plans to continue to visit the schools, with patrol officers stopping by the schools on a likely daily basis,” according to The Tennessean.
“The decision to pull the three Metro Nashville Police officers has been in the works for nearly a month,” according to NewsChannel 5.
Many of the students at the two alternative schools “have lengthy criminal records and most have been kicked out of conventional high schools because of behavioral problems,” the station added.
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Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star. Follow Chris on Facebook. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Bass W.A. Alternative School” by MNPS Schools.
What is going unsaid here is that the officers are subjected to behavior for which the school will not allow affective extinguishing responses. This, because of a focus on “restorative justice”. I am all for restorative justice if it is implemented affectively and where appropriate, in many cases it is just a way to improve discipline statistics without really making a difference.