Three minutes.
That is the amount of time that it took police officers to respond to an active shooter call at Boulder High in February of 2023.
Thankfully, the call was only a swatting incident, and nobody was harmed. However, this event showed us the very real way that police officers and administrators at BVSD would respond to a real active shooter situation. In light of the three whole minutes it took for police officers to get to the school while a shooter was reportedly mowing down students with an assault rifle, many are left wondering whether this response time was fast enough.
Many students remember the time that BVSD had police officers working in schools to promote student safety and reduce the number of crimes in school. These officers would work to reduce crimes in the school by collaborating with students and educators while also being a security piece in the school, deterring violent crime and being there in case of the terrifying possibility of a school shooting. These police officers were not just typical beat cops; School Resource Officers were specially selected and trained to work in a school setting, acting as a legal asset for students and teachers while promoting crime prevention in the school.
In 2020, BVSD’s board of education voted 6-1 in favor of ending their partnership with the Boulder Police Department and removing SROs from schools. This decision, clearly politically motivated, came in a year when the BLM and ACAB (All Cops Are Bad) movements were in full swing, and outrage over George Floyd’s death caused a national backlash against law enforcement officers. As this national phenomenon brought attention to police in all aspects of life, concerns over discrimination against students of color surfaced in Boulder.
According to Randy Barber, Chief Communication Officer for BVSD, the decision was made amid “a conversation in regards to concerns around a school-to-prison pipeline”. The “School to Prison Pipeline” that he refers to is a theory that students at schools with SROs are more likely to be criminally punished and transferred to the hands of the juvenile justice system. This theory, pushed by BLM groups and the ACLU, is based on the data that schools with SROs have more student arrests than schools without them. However, such data ignores the fact that schools in impoverished areas with more crime are more likely to have SRO programs. When controlling for school poverty, studies have found that having SROs in schools is not associated with an increase in the overall arrest rate.
Fear of discrimination against students of color also played a part in the crusade against SROs. According to BVSD statistics from 2017-2020, Hispanic students made up 33% of arrests and 28% of tickets despite being 19% of the district population, while black students made up 4% of arrests and 5% of tickets, whereas they made up 1% of the district.
Though these statistics do show racial discrepancies at BVSD, they do not necessarily prove that SROs are the root cause of these problems. In BVSD’s new system without SROs, students are being punished at even greater racial disparities than before. Current district statistics show that Latino students make up 52.1% of suspensions at BVSD, showcasing a much larger discipline gap than arrests under SROs. This data suggests that BVSD’s own administrators disproportionately punish students of color at a higher rate than School Resource Officers, which makes their reasoning for removing SROs questionable at best.
What is also concerning is the current security and safety flaws in BVSD schools. Back when BVSD had the SRO system, at most times, there would be at least one armed police officer at the school. The SROs were specially trained to respond to active shooter situations and were armed at all times, which provided an immediate defense to schools against an active shooter. To prepare SROs for situations like this, they were required to complete active shooter drills in school buildings, including Boulder High School.
According to Marcus Askins, a past SRO at BHS, “In that kind of emergency, we would be helpful due to training.” He also remarked, “It helped because we would actually do a lot of scenario-based active shooter, active Harmer-type training. Sometimes using live characters.” These types of realistic school shooter drills would prepare the officers to be able to respond to an emergency in the school immediately while waiting for backup to arrive. With the added advantage of working in the school and having superior knowledge of the building layout, SROs have an edge over other police officers when it comes to clearing the premises and taking out a shooter.
It is abundantly clear that when it comes to safety, the BVSD Board of Directors made the wrong decision for our school district. Although the three-minute response time of the Boulder Police is far above average and touted as a success by the school district, any reasonable person knows that a shooter could kill masses of students at that time. A zero-minute response time is far better than a three-minute response time, where one or more specially trained and armed SROs can neutralize a shooter immediately after an attack begins. In our current system, we are left with fatal security flaws where any person with a weapon can walk in and mass murder dozens of people with zero armed resistance until the police arrive.
BVSD administrators appear to be blissfully ignorant of this massive safety issue that they have implemented themselves. Their policies have eliminated our best line of defense against the school shootings that are all too common in America and replaced them with extra cameras and student IDs. They argued for this decision by calling the SROs racist, even though many of them were people of color themselves, and most were respected and well-liked individuals of the community. Our current system without SROs is a remnant of the 2020 BLM outrage, a time when cops were hated just for being cops, and Boulderites seethed at the idea of a uniformed officer keeping us safe. Many places that made such shortsighted decisions at the time have since reversed their decision, with The Denver School Board recently making the decision to reinstate SROs since their ruling that banned them in 2020. With the clear safety benefits of SROs and the current flaws in school security, BVSD should take the same path before it’s too late.