Niceness as Whiteness in School Police Officers’ Perceptions of Student Arrest

Abstract

School Resource Officers (SROs), or sworn police officers in schools with arrest powers, are increasingly common in schools. Despite concerns surrounding SROs broadly and their use of arrest, in particular, little is known about how SROs understand their role in arrest. Drawing on a case study of SROs’ perceptions of arrest across two school districts and using a niceness as Whiteness framework, we found that SROs generally expressed trying to avoid arrest. Yet, when they recounted making arrests, they used mechanisms of niceness as Whiteness to justify arresting young people. We examine implications for school safety, care, and future research, policy, and practice.

Introduction

In the 2017–18 school year, 54,321 students were arrested at least once in the United States (CRDC, n.d.). Being arrested as a child has negative consequences, lowering likelihood of graduating high school (Hirschfield, 2009) and increasing likelihood of continued contact with the criminal legal system (Lopes et al., 2012; Wiley & Esbensen, 2016). One mechanism that has been linked to higher school arrest rates is the presence of school resource officers (SROs), or sworn police officers in schools with arrest powers that have become increasingly common in recent decades (United States Government Accountability Office, 2024). Approximately 23,400 SROs are stationed in schools nationwide (Davis, 2023). Although evaluation studies differ in their estimates of the extent that SROs impact school-based arrests (Fisher et al., 2023), some studies have found that their presence is associated with higher student arrest rates, especially among Black and Latine students (Homer & Fisher, 2020) and students with disabilities (Fisher & Fisher, 2023). SROs are involved in a large number of these school-based arrests of students; a nationally representative survey of SROs in the 2019–20 school year found that nearly 40% of the officers surveyed reported making an arrest on or near school grounds in the past 30 days alone (Davis, 2023).

While prior quantitative research sheds light on the extent to which the presence of SROs is related to school-based arrests (see e.g., Fisher et al., 2023; Homer & Fisher, 2020), less is known about how SROs perceive their use of arrest (Wolf, 2014 is an exception). This is important to understand because SROs’ perceptions of arrest likely shape their behavior, which has direct consequences for student wellbeing. Therefore, understanding how SROs understand their own roles in the process of arresting students is crucial to understanding how and why arrest in schools occurs.

To address this, we analyzed data from 73 SRO interviews from two school districts. Drawing on analysis of these data and using a niceness as Whiteness framework, we sought to answer the following research question: In what ways is Whiteness reflected in SROs’ self-perceptions of arrest? In answering this question, we illuminate components of school-based arrests that provide insight for policy and practice related to school safety, school policing, and school discipline. These insights supplement the growing body of research on school safety, especially regarding the potential role for police in schools.

Literature Review

SROs and Arrest

There are multiple ways in which schools use law enforcement officers, with SROs representing one way. In contrast to school-based law enforcement officers who are not SROs, SROs typically complete training about working in schools or with children and youth, but these trainings are not standardized and have been subject to limited evaluation for their effectiveness (Espelage et al., 2021; Soderstrom, 2025). SROs typically take on a range of roles. The National Association of School Resource Officers describes these roles as falling under a triad model in which SROs have three main roles: law enforcer, educator, and informal counselor (Canady et al., 2012). As law enforcers, they engage in a variety of activities to prevent and respond to perceived crime or violence in the school. Their role as educator may come in the form of formal classroom instruction, but they may also provide guest lectures or run seminars about drug or gang resistance, driving laws, or other law-related content. As informal counselors, SROs can provide advice for students and act as mentors. These multiple roles are consistent with a widely used approach in which SROs are given discretion in their roles and activities in schools with the goal of being responsive to the needs and climate of the school to which they are assigned (Canady et al., 2012). SROs typically identify most with their law enforcement role (McKenna et al., 2016), a perspective that influences their other roles as educators and informal counselors (Higgins et al., 2022). SROs are often the only sworn law enforcement officers in a school building, making their role unique among school staff.

One reason that SROs are controversial is that they can make arrests, a power which can be and often is levied against students. Critics suggest that the presence of SROs increases the likelihood that schools’ responses to student behaviors will escalate to arrest rather than being handled internally to the school (although a recent meta-analysis shows null effects; Fisher et al., 2023). As noted above, about 40% of SROs nationwide reported making an arrest at school in the past 30 days (Davis, 2023). These officers also reported having a high degree of discretion in the decision to make an arrest. 68% of the officers surveyed reported that school administration played no role in their decision about whether to make an arrest, with only one-in-six indicating that school administration collaborated in this process (Davis, 2023). This may be explained in part by the presence of memoranda of understanding that clarify when SROs should make arrests, but only 13% of the officers surveyed reported that such a document was in place (Davis, 2023). More research is needed to examine how and why school personnel play a role in involving an SRO in incidents that result in arrest.

Concerns about arrest are especially prevalent when considering Black boys, who have historically been the most likely demographic group in the United States to experience arrest (Brame et al., 2014). Moreover, among youth who experienced police contact (e.g., arrest) as youth, police are far more likely to subsequently arrest Black adults than their White peers, indicating that arrests are particularly harmful for Black youth (McGlynn-Wright et al., 2022). To our knowledge, similar analyses have not yet been conducted with other traditionally marginalized groups. Citing these and other concerns, organizers aligned with the Movement for Black Lives pushed schools and districts across the country to remove police from schools in 2020, although many schools and districts have since reversed course due to concerns about violence (Arango, 2023).

Still, SROs continue to arrest students, with little empirical evidence illuminating their motivations or how they understand their role in facilitating this experience that, on balance, is harmful for children. An important exception to this is a study that drew on an analysis of an online survey distributed to all SROs in the state of Delaware, finding that SROs reported using a great deal of discretion when deciding to make an arrest (Wolf, 2014). All respondents indicated that extralegal factors affected their decision to arrest, including evidence, seriousness, the wishes of the victim’s parents/guardians, and students’ attitudes (Wolf, 2014). We build on Wolf’s (2014) study, providing an analysis of in-depth interviews with SROs across two districts. Better understanding SROs’ perspectives on arresting students brings much needed focus to one of SROs’ most controversial functions, something that is critical as we collectively work to make schools more just places for all students.

Theoretical Framework: Niceness as Whiteness

Whiteness

We situate SROs’ reflections on student arrest within the growing body of literature on niceness as Whiteness (Castagno, 2014, 2019; DiAngelo, 2021). Whiteness is a “set of assumptions, privileges, and benefits” that support White racial dominance—the status quo—by justifying the privileges that flow to White people and the exclusion of those who fall outside of Whiteness (Harris, 1995, p. 1713). It operates as a “status property,” as the basis for the allocation of societal benefits (Harris, 1995). Whiteness provided the justification for the forced removal of Indigenous people and the seizure of their land (Harris, 1995). During chattel slavery, Whiteness was used to mark White people as “free” or “not slaves” while Black racial identity was used to mark Black people as property –a status that was recognized by law in the 1660s and codified in slave codes in the 1680s (Harris, 1995, p. 1718). Today, the social benefits of Whiteness are borne out across institutions such as housing, employment, healthcare, incarceration, and schooling. Whiteness thrives on the appearance of fairness, neutrality, and compassion—in other words, it thrives on obscuring White racial dominance (Castagno, 2014). As such, color evasiveness, or the refusal to recognize race (Annamma et al., 2017; Bonilla-Silva, 2021), reifies Whiteness by allowing people to avoid recognizing racial inequality (Castagno, 2014). As a pervasive structure and ideology in the United States, Whiteness operates in racially homogenous and heterogenous locales, and across rural, suburban, and metropolitan geographies (Diamond et al., 2021).

As arms of the state, police enforce Whiteness by protecting the legally sanctioned psychological, public, and private benefits conferred to White people (Harris, 1995). Thus, regardless of the positive intentions of some individual police officers, they uphold Whiteness by virtue of participating in a system of incarceration that systematically privileges White people and incarcerates Black people, including children. Black people are incarcerated at five times the rate of White people (NAACP, n.d.), and Black youth are 4.4 times as likely to be incarcerated as a result of arrest by police officers, including SROs (Rovner, 2023). Whiteness functions as property through the multiple “policies, practices, and informal knowledges” (Meiners, 2007, p. 4) that systematically repress and control the resistance and self-determination of marginalized children and their communities (Sojoyner, 2013; Vaught et al., 2022). In this sense, we understand Whiteness as a power structure and ideology that creates space for racial stratification and inequality in various domains of social life, including the systems of education and criminal justice.

Niceness

Niceness is an enduring component of Whiteness (Bissonnette, 2016; Castagno, 2019). Niceness focuses attention on the intentions of people who are essentially good, while minimizing their own damaging actions (Bramen, 2017, p. 8). “Niceness compels us to reframe potentially disruptive or uncomfortable things in ways that are more soothing, pleasant, and comfortable” (Castagno, 2019, p. x). Niceness allows predominantly White people to elide how their own actions contribute to inequality by maintaining a sense of their own benevolence, though some people of color also use niceness to uphold Whiteness (Castagno, 2019; Lewis & Diamond, 2015).

Within the field of education, niceness acts as a barrier to cultural responsiveness within teacher and education leadership preparation programs (Alemán, 2009; Bissonnette, 2016; Marshall & Theoharis, 2007). Niceness can delimit diversity initiatives in schools by emphasizing “inclusion, optimism, and assimilation” while obscuring inequity, making it difficult to address (Castagno, 2014, p. 4). Efforts to disrupt niceness can be foiled by White teacher resistance and their tepid advancement of equity and inclusion initiatives in ways that are comfortable to them (Miller, 2024). In the U.S. Midwest, a particular variant of niceness, “Midwest nice,” has been critiqued for contributing to racial inequality and violence (Vlach et al., 2022) and impedes social justice initiatives (Smolarek & Martinez Negrette, 2019). “Midwest niceness” can intersect with other phenomena that act as barriers to racial justice, including color-evasiveness, White fragility, and emotionalities of Whiteness (Drake & Rodriguez, 2022). In this study, we identify niceness as key to how predominately White SROs in our study made sense of their experiences arresting children, which obscured the ways that student arrest contributed to racial inequality.

Niceness and the Myth of Officer Friendly

Although critiques of SROs have been elevated to the national level only in the last few years, niceness is reflected in a long history of policing, both in and out of schools. For at least half a century, police departments have adopted a community-oriented policing model to build goodwill in local communities towards law enforcement. From the perspective of law enforcement, police will be better equipped to meet their goals (i.e., enforce the law) if members of the community are willing to assist and see police as their allies. This community-based policing model manifested in K-12 schools through “Officer Friendly” programs in the 1970s-1990s and Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) programs in the 1980s–90s (Felker-Kantor, 2024). By framing police officers as nice, friendly teachers and disciplinarians, both Officer Friendly and DARE programs sought to transform the image of police in service of community-oriented policing goals. This is not to suggest that the underlying goals of policing changed with the advancement of more community-oriented approaches; as others have argued, community-oriented policing can be viewed as a tactic that allows for the expansion of more aggressive, even militaristic forms of policing (Kraska & Kappeler, 1997). This may be the case with school policing, as well (Higgins et al., 2022).

Such efforts to promote positive views of law enforcement among children have never been able to successfully paint over the harm to Black and Latine communities by the system of incarceration (Derlega et al., 1979; Hahn & Jeffries, 2003; Jones-Brown, 2000). Law enforcement enacts violence disproportionately upon Black and Latine people, most infamously through extrajudicial killings, but more commonly through methods like stop-and-frisk and mass incarceration (Boyd, 2018; Wendel et al., 2022). Many have convincingly argued that racism is baked into police culture because of ways violence against Black bodies was written into the Constitution (Browne, 2010; Simmons, 2014) such that SROs’ activities reflect many elements of traditional police culture in schools, even when these values are incompatible with the goals of schooling (Fisher et al., 2020). For instance, a traditional element of police culture is situational uncertainty, which is characterized by tedious, often boring, surveillance activities that are punctuated by unpredictable situations that can be dangerous (Crank, 2014). While schools tend to be quite predictable (e.g., bell schedules), unpredictability in schools is often unrelated to criminality and SROs are not solely responsible for responding to unpredictability, with many other authority figures in the school there to respond (Fisher et al., 2020).

Prior scholarship on how police structure professional identity and understand the racial dynamics in their work suggests that community police tend to make claims rooted in “race-neutrality,” which is central to maintaining White racial dominance. Meanwhile, such color-evasiveness obscures their concrete contributions to racial inequality (Annamma et al., 2017; Bonilla-Silva, 2021). For example, in a study of traffic stops using interviews with 52 city police officers in San Diego, researchers found that despite clear racial disparities in traffic stop outcomes, officers excused, justified, or negated the role of race in their work (Welsh et al., 2020). Likewise, in a critical discourse analysis of discursive strategies used by police officers who had killed unarmed, primarily Black civilians, Pipkins (2017) found that police officers used discursive strategies to reinforce racially driven fear, avoid blame, and invoke empathy. A similar phenomenon was found in a study of discourse related to street checks in Hamilton, Ontario wherein the police department used strategic tactics (e.g., plausible deniability) to avoid being implicated in claims of structural racism in policing (Tobias & Joseph, 2020).

Although data limitations prevent our current study from examining racial inequality in the application of arrest (i.e., our data do not include the race/ethnicity of those arrested), we would be remiss to exclude a discussion of the disparate racial impacts of school policing, more broadly. Ample empirical evidence finds that SROs have disproportionate negative effects on Black students when placed in secondary schools, especially for exclusionary discipline (Sorensen et al., 2023; Weisburst, 2019). Although fewer studies have examined the impacts on other subgroups of students, some research points to similar trends among Latine and Native American students, as well as students with disabilities, especially those who are also from a traditionally marginalized racial/ethnic group (Fisher et al., 2021; Homer & Fisher, 2020). As exclusionary discipline and arrests have negative consequences for future youth outcomes, particularly for Black students, these negative effects of SROs likely have ripple effects for students even post-high school (Gerlinger et al., 2021; Mowen et al., 2018; Novak, 2019). Qualitative studies confirm that SROs see students as threats in more racially diverse communities versus students needing protection in predominantly White schools (Fisher et al., 2022). Thus, even when operating with the best of intentions, student arrest contributes to negative outcomes for all students, especially Black students.

Niceness overlaps with prior work in the field of sociology that seeks to explain how well-intentioned actors understand their own seemingly harmful responses to vulnerable individuals. For example, Stuart’s (2018) work on “therapeutic policing” suggests that with the rollback of social welfare, police officers are increasingly tasked with the day-to-day management of citizens falling through the cracks, whom they pathologize and seek to “cure” through their policing work. Similarly, prior work on school policing has highlighted the positive intentions of school police while implicating them in the “culture of control” or “youth control complex” (Kupchik, 2010; Nolan, 2011; Rios, 2011). For example, Kupchik (2010) found that school police espoused positive intentions of mentoring and counseling students, yet their presence too often escalated matters that could have been handled internally at school, facilitating their use of arrest. Of particular relevance to our study is Rios’s (2017) examination of the interactions between authority figures and gang-associated youth in a Southern California community. Rios (2017) found that well-intentioned authority figures, including school police, typically tried to engage in positive interactions with young people, but these interactions often ended with a punitive result, such as arrest, that was not in their best interests. Niceness is a conceptual tool that allows us to spotlight ways in which SROs reframed these experiences as minimally harmful or even positive for children whom they had arrested—while simultaneously maintaining racial inequality.

Context and Site Selection

This study drew on existing data from a pair of large-scale qualitative studies of SROs that occurred across two different geographic and demographically diverse settings. The research teams that collected these datasets both included co-authors of this current study. These extant datasets and the settings they represented were chosen specifically for their inclusion of in-depth data on SRO roles and activities, including that specific to school arrests, as well as the range of demographic and social contexts represented by each dataset. In this section, we provide an overview of the context of each site of data collection, our research design, and analysis.

Pleasant Valley

Our first source of data came from a prior study of SROs in a suburban county conducted in 2016–17 by several members of this research team. Located in the southeastern United States, Pleasant Valley (pseudonym) is a largely suburban county, though its locales include small cities and more rural areas. The county is among the most affluent counties in the country, and the schools are among the state’s highest performing academically. The county population itself is politically conservative and has a high degree of educational attainment.

The county is served by two school districts—a county district and a small city school district. Pleasant Valley schools are predominantly White. While the small city school district serves a higher proportion of students of color and students from lower-income families, the county schools, which enroll over 90% public school students in the county, consist of only 5% Black students and 5% Latine students. Only 10% of students in the county are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. These demographics reflect the broader county, of which approximately 85% of the population was White. We treat both school districts in Pleasant Valley as a single case, given the documented overlap in their policy decision-making as well as school attendance zone patterns that result in all students attending the county schools for at least part of their K-12 school trajectory.

Schools in Pleasant Valley have had at least one full-time SRO serving each school since 2013. At the time, schools expanded SROs from middle and high schools to all elementary schools in response to concerns following the Sandy Hook elementary shooting in Connecticut. SROs in the county are provided by the local Sheriff’s office and generally see their role as relating to the prevention of school shootings as well as building positive relationships with students.

Metro Public Schools

Our second source of data came from a prior study conducted by one of the co-authors in 2017–18 of Metro Public Schools (pseudonym), a large metropolitan school district in the Midwest. Located in a relatively large city (city population over half a million and metropolitan area over one million), Metro Public Schools serves a racially and economically diverse student population. The student body was approximately 50% White, 40% Black, and 10% Latine, with around two in three students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. The student population did not match the broader demographics of the city, which had a much larger proportion of White residents; many White families opted to send their children to private schools in lieu of Metro Public Schools. The county had one of the highest arrest rates in the state at the time of data collection.

Metro Public Schools had SROs in about 30 of 150 schools in the district. The schools with SROs served a higher-than-average proportion of students of color, although there was variability in the demographics of the schools in which SROs were placed. Four different law enforcement agencies provided officers to staff Metro Public Schools. The presence of SROs was not as clearly linked to concerns of mass school violence as it was in Pleasant Valley, and the use of SROs was more controversial among the community served.

According to data from the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), each district in our study had over 200 arrests take place on school grounds in the 2017–18 school year. ¹ In both districts, the arrest rate of Black students exceeded the arrest rate of White students. In Pleasant Valley, the arrest rate for Black students was three times the rate for White students; in Metro Public Schools, the arrest rate for Black students was four times the rate for White students. Similarly, while only 5% of Pleasant Valley students identified as African American, 12% of arrests were of African American students. In Metro Public Schools, African American students constituted 40% of the student enrollment, but 70% of the total arrests.

Data and Methods

Research Design

We approached our analysis using a qualitative case study of SROs’ perceptions of arrest (Maxwell, 2013) using data from two prior studies conducted by members of the research team. Given the purpose of understanding SROs’ perceptions of school arrests and their role in them, the qualitative data from the two prior studies, which included in-depth interviews with SROs, provided a rich opportunity to understand SROs’ views and perspectives on their roles in school arrests across school districts. Our research design blended elements of deductive analyses with inductive elements in a hybrid approach. Specifically, while we began deductively with a research question specific to arrests by SROs and a coding scheme focused on arrest, we allowed broader themes to emerge inductively and ultimately identified a theoretical framework, niceness as Whiteness, that was not anticipated at the outset of the study.

We initially anticipated this study as a variance-oriented comparative case study that would examine what we hypothesized might be divergent perspectives of SROs on arrests in each of the two geographic locations represented in the prior studies (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2016). However, through our inductive analysis, we found a marked similarity in the way SROs across the two districts understood arrest. As we “followed the inquiry” (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2016, p. 1), we identified a similar phenomenon—how SROs justified arrest—across two school districts.

Data Collection

We leveraged existing data from two prior qualitative studies, each which included co-authors of this study. Data in both settings were collected using semi-structured interview protocols. While the protocols varied, each asked a series of questions related to SROs’ involvement in school arrests. For example, the protocol from the study of Pleasant Valley schools asked SROs questions such as, “Have you ever had to arrest students? If so, why?”. In Metro Public Schools, the survey protocols included questions such as, “To what extent do SROs have discretion whether to make an arrest or a referral when a situation involves a student who commits a law violation?.” Neither question asked specifically about the race of students arrested. These questions were embedded in broader semi-structured interview protocols that included questions about school policing, safety, and discipline in each setting.

Our data consisted of 47 interviews with SROs from Pleasant Valley and 26 interviews from SROs in Metro Public Schools. SRO interviews in both school districts occurred in-person in the 2016–17 and 2017–18 school years. The SRO participants in Pleasant Valley represented a near census of all SROs in the county (> 95%). Pleasant Valley was chosen purposefully due to its recent expansion of SROs to all elementary schools. Similarly, SRO participants in Metro Public Schools represented slightly less than 90% of schools that had an SRO. Metro Public Schools was chosen by the original researchers due to its racially and ethnically diverse setting. The interviews were conducted in-person at the SROs’ school sites, typically in the SROs’ office, a conference room, or other private space and typically lasted around 45 minutes. We apply pseudonyms in this study to SRO participants to protect their anonymity.

Consistent with our goal of examining this issue in a range of settings, the demographics of SROs in Pleasant Valley and Metro Public Schools varied. 78% of the officers in Pleasant Valley were men and 90% were White. All Pleasant Valley SROs were staffed by the County Sheriff’s department. In Metro Public Schools, 81% of the officers were men and 65% were White. 20 of the Metro Public Schools SROs were provided by three local police departments and six by the county’s sheriff’s office. Across both school districts, most officers were mid-career officers who had also worked other jobs in the criminal justice system, but the samples also included officers at the very beginning and very end of their careers.

Data Analysis

In this study, we approached analysis using an iterative process that built on existing coding from the prior analyses of the data as well as additional coding specific to SROs’ use of arrests. Each of the datasets included existing codes created by the original study teams. For Pleasant Valley, there was an existing code, “Arrest,” that included descriptions of SROs’ use of arrest in schools. The Metro Public Schools data lacked a specific arrest code but did include codes for “SRO Discretion,” “Discipline v. Law Enforcement,” “Crime Prevention,” and “Roles in Context.” We reviewed these existing codes and then supplemented them with a search of Metro Public Schools’ interview transcripts for the word “arrest.” Multiple researchers read these excerpts in depth to identify additional text related directly to SROs’ use of arrests and created an arrest code in the Metro Public Schools data that paralleled that which already existed in the Pleasant Valley data. The result was a set of transcript excerpts across both of the data sources that aligned with the code of “arrest.” This process of coding was consistent with open coding paradigms in which codes represent labels for segments of text (Merriam & Grenier, 2019; Strauss & Corbin, 1990).

In addition to coding, the research team kept analytic memos throughout data analysis describing emergent observations, themes, connections to prior literature/theory, and examples of representative and divergent cases (Rogers, 2018; Saldaña, 2016). While our codes focused on identification and labeling of text, our memoing consisted of researcher reflection on emergent themes and identification of representative cases and divergent cases (Birks et al., 2008).

After our initial coding and building on analysis from our memos, we created a series of new codes across the two datasets—benevolence, discretion, and relationships. Benevolence included cases of SROs viewing or describing their actions in a positive light in the context of a school arrest, such as maintaining a positive relationship with the child during the arrest or framing their role as still one of mentor or friend. Discretion included excerpts in which SROs attempted to de-escalate or divert away from arrest, often including instances in which they chose not to arrest for more subjective or less serious incidents. Finally, relationships included quotes that related to interpersonal connections made between SROs and students, a contributor to discretion in some cases as well as a framing that allowed SROs to maintain a sense of benevolence even when making arrests. We developed a set of matrices comparing exemplar quotes for these codes across the two districts.

Reflecting on our re-reading of transcripts, initial coding, memoing, matrices, and discussion as a research team, we noticed our participants’ descriptions of arrest echoed prior literature on niceness as Whiteness and therefore employed this lens to further analyze the ways participants justified their use of arrest in schools. The “discretion” code corresponded to the “SROs tried to avoid arrest” finding. The “benevolence” code corresponded to the “highlighting their own goodness” and “shedding responsibility” justifications. The “relationships” code corresponded to the “highlighting positive relationships” justification. In all cases, we re-read the excerpts under each original code to develop the justifications described in our findings. Consistent with the comparative case study approach (Bartlett & Vavrus 2016), we then compared findings across each of the two geographic cases. As we discuss more in the results, however, and contrary to our initial hypothesis, we observed more commonality between SROs’ perspectives across each setting than expected. As a result, we discuss our results largely through a discussion of patterned justifications employed across both districts, pointing to differences where they exist but more often demonstrating the perhaps surprising largely similar views of SROs in each of the districts.

Findings

In what follows, we present our findings. First, we demonstrate that SROs expressed that they avoid arrest when possible. Nevertheless, because of their roles as police officers in schools, there were instances when SROs described choosing to or being required to arrest children. When they recounted making arrests, we show how SROs used niceness as Whiteness to: (1) shed responsibility for making the arrest, (2) minimize the negative impact of arrest by highlighting their own goodness, and (3) point to positive relationships with children whom they had arrested.

SROs Tried to Avoid Arrest

Some SROs suggested that arresting students is harmful and expressed an impulse to protect students from arrest given this. For example, a White man Metro SRO explained that new principals and assistant principals sometimes ask him to “just lock them [students] up,” detailing:

They let their own personal beliefs get in the way of what we’ve agreed to with Metro Public Schools and they forget. Everybody becomes jaded sometimes, and they just don’t want to deal with these kids any longer. They get frustrated, and they just want them out of their classroom, no matter how it happens, and the SRO is an easy way to make that happen. That’s the way we had operated at some point. We would work with them more than what we could do and go above and beyond to make it a good place for the teachers and we still do, but we have to live within the MOA and the law.

In cases in which SROs viewed arrest as inappropriate and/or in violation of the law, they described themselves as protecting students from arrest, even when encouraged to arrest by school staff. As this officer described it, the Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) the school district had with the police department encouraged officers to shield students from unlawful arrest, whereas prior to the MOA, they operated outside of the law in response to teacher concerns. Motivated by the MOA, officers did not want to make unlawful arrests, because they could lose their school-based policing jobs and be “put back on the beat” in community policing roles.

Whether or not participants explicitly discussed the harms of arrest, the majority of SROs discursively rejected arrest, expressing that they did not enjoy making arrests and describing tactics they used to avoid it. Matthew, a White man SRO working in Metro Public Schools, explained this approach to arrest as a key difference between regular police officers and SROs in a May 2017 interview:

The difference with the SRO is we don’t want citations. We don’t want arrest. I think we’re doing our job really well the less we have, and the school is operating pretty good. . .We’re just called in different directions sometimes and called away from our probably ideal goal to where we mentor and have good relationships probably.

Matthew emphasized the ideal role of an SRO as a “mentor” who builds relationships with students, rather than someone who wants to issue citations or make arrests. While forming relationships with students suggests a desire to provide for the social and emotional needs of children, there is a potential harm of SROs forming such relationships, given that some SROs leverage these relationships to pursue law enforcement goals (Higgins et al., 2022), even to the point of arresting students’ parents (Higgins et al., 2020; Kupchik, 2010). Like Matthew, many SROs in this study expressed that they do not want to arrest children but sometimes are required to make arrests due to their roles as sworn law enforcement. Similar to Matthew, Frank, a White man working in a Pleasant Valley high school, emphasized that he does not like arresting children. When asked whether he had arrested a child in his role as an SRO, Frank related:

Yes, I have. I mean, you do arrest them, and I tell them, “Look dude, I’m not here to arrest you. That’s not what I’m here for. I’m here to make sure you behave. . .and get you on the right path.” I don’t like arresting kids. That’s not what I like to do.

Frank’s emphasis on ensuring that students “behave” and are “on the right path” parallels Matthew’s description of the ideal role of an SRO as that of a mentor. Both Frank and Matthew called attention to relational elements of SRO work (e.g., mentoring, getting students on the “right path”) while acknowledging the role that arrest unfortunately plays in their work. Even when recounting making an arrest, Frank expressed distaste for arrest, relating that he did not “like” arresting kids. However, regardless of his intentions, assuring a student that he “does not like” arresting him does little to protect the student from what are likely to be negative consequences of arrest if the arrest is still carried out. Across both districts, arrest contributed to patterned outcomes of racial inequality that maintained Whiteness.

Beyond expressing an aversion to arrest, SROs described a range of strategies they used to avoid making arrests. For example, Isaac, a Black man in his third year as an SRO in Metro Public Schools, explained:

Something goes on, like you can charge a kid with a disorderly conduct all day long, but I’d rather just go in there, deescalate the situation, talk to them, let them get their discipline from the school, and be done with it. We don’t have to do that, but I’d rather do it. I stay busy, get some trust from the kids. They know they’re in trouble. They’ve cut or smoked weed or something, I’ll just get them to come in there and they’ll talk to me. Then I’ll get them to calm down. Then they say, “Well, I’m going to get in trouble, aren’t I?” “Probably, but not with me.”. . .Just try not to be the bad guy all the time. Sometimes you can’t help it.

Isaac related a general desire to avoid arrest for disorderly conduct, truancy, and drug use, explaining how he uses de-escalation techniques like talking to students instead. Preventing an arrest, which has documented negative consequences, is laudable and prevents harm to students. Nevertheless, SROs like Isaac are quite constrained in their capacity to prevent arrest in their roles as enforcers of the law. Indeed, as Isaac’s comment that he “can’t help” being the “bad guy” sometimes suggests, SROs state that they have no choice but to arrest students in some instances. There may be instances (e.g., possession of a weapon with perceived intent to harm) when SROs have no other legal option but to respond with arrest in their structural positions as police officers. Therefore, while SROs, like Isaac, can sometimes use discretion to avoid arrest, they are structurally constrained in their capacity to do so.

While most participants, like Isaac, described generally trying not to arrest, for other participants, their avoidance of arrest depended on their assessment of students’ reputations and labels. Zach, a White man working in a Metro Public Schools high school, explained how he used discretion to avoid arrest in the case of a student whom he felt confident he could “bring down,” or de-escalate:

Daryl acted out in class a lot. At that time, we were arresting for disorderly conduct. I didn’t arrest him for disorderly conduct. There might have been times he probably should have, because I knew that I could pull him down. Half an hour later, I could put him back in class, and he’d be successful. You know what I’m saying? . . . If Jimmy over here is known to be out of control, and he stays out of control, Jimmy would go, because I can’t bring him back down.

Zach drew upon his perceived knowledge of Daryl and his personality, explaining that he could use discretion to protect Daryl from arrest, because he knew he could deescalate the situation. In contrast, for another student, Jimmy, Zach considered discretion a non-option. Central here was Daryl’s reputation and label as “out of control.” Jimmy’s reputation and label could potentially have deleterious consequences for his life trajectory if he is not given the same benefit of the doubt accorded to his peers. Zach described leveraging his relationships with students to categorize them for future discipline and to engage in subjective calls regarding which students deserve arrest and which deserve more leniency.

Although the majority of SROs expressed a desire to avoid making arrests, a small number of SROs suggested they wished they could make more arrests. Unlike the majority of participants, some of these SROs lamented that pressure to decrease student arrests had prevented them from making arrests they would have liked to make. Others viewed arrest as the logical outcome of poor student choices or as a means of “teaching” or “conditioning” students to make the right choices. Sam, a White man SRO in his 20th year in law enforcement, was in his third or fourth position as an SRO at a Pleasant Valley high school. Reflecting on his use of arrest, Sam explained:

If you’re refusing to do what I tell you to do, and you’re not going to go where you’re supposed to go, I’m going to pull all the kids out of the classroom. I’m going to have an AP [Assistant Principal] come up, along with the principal, and I’m probably going to take him into custody for unruly juvenile, and we’ll settle it that way. . . But these kids know that. And frankly, you know, you arrest enough kids around here, I’m not saying you should have to arrest kids to get your point across. But unfortunately, in the nine weeks I’ve been here, I’ve arrested 20. So, the kids know that if you don’t do what you’re supposed to do, they know what’s coming. . . And, you know, it is what it is. They’re the ones making the choices to get that far.

Rather than emphasizing the steps he took to prevent arrest, Sam explained that he arrested children for making poor choices and used arrest as a strategy for communicating the need for compliance. Sam’s perspective overlaps with prior work in the sociology of policing finding that police officers justify arrest by blaming vulnerable individuals for their circumstances and by framing the arrest as teaching a lesson (Stuart, 2018). This framing places blame for the arrest on individual children’s perceived misbehavior, ignoring the structural nature of oppression and how arrest contributes to it. Sam’s quote also suggests a relationship in which school administrators report to the SRO without raising concerns about arrest, suggesting their potential complicity in the arrest. Though Sam’s perspective represents a minority of SROs working in either school district, SROs with this mindset are likely to perform more arrests (e.g., Sam recounted arresting 20 students within a nine-week period), which is associated with negative consequences for all students and was disproportionately levied against Black students.

SROs Used Mechanisms of Niceness as Whiteness to Justify Arrest

In cases in which SROs described making arrests, they used niceness as Whiteness to: (1) shed responsibility for making the arrest, (2) highlight their own goodness, and (3) emphasize their positive relationships with children whom they had arrested.

Shedding Responsibility

In Pleasant Valley and Metro Public Schools, SROs shed responsibility by minimizing their own roles in making arrests. Participants used language that either placed responsibility for the arrest on someone else (e.g., parent, school staff member) or reduced their own role in the arrest to “transporting” students. These good intentions (niceness) distracted from the patterned outcomes of racial inequality in both districts (Whiteness). For example, Jonathon, a White man SRO working in a Pleasant Valley middle school, explained an incident in which a student’s mother wanted him arrested, and Jonathon made the arrest after receiving a phone call from her:

It was the mom who initiated, she brought her . . . Her son has got some issues, and she wanted him to stay home to go see his psychiatrist and he refused. He said, “No, I have tests today. You’re not disrupting my learning. I need to be here. I need to take my tests.” And so, they’re kind of, really kind of arguing in the lobby and he’s a seventh grader and I mean, just itty bitty. . .And she said, “Officer, I would like him to be arrested. I’m going to take out unruly petitions on him.” So, I just, I said, “Alright.” Had to do that. I mean, I felt so bad. My handcuffs barely even fit on him. . .The assistant principal said, “Unfortunately, that’s what we have to do.”

Rather than taking responsibility for his role in arresting a child, Jonathon placed responsibility for the arrest on the boy’s mother and the assistant principal, describing himself as having little agency in the situation. When the interviewer followed up to ask whether Jonathon had discretion in the arrest, he explained, “I suppose I probably could have said, ‘Well ma’am, what do you think if maybe we try it this way?’ but she was at her rope’s end.” In this instance, the SRO described how his evaluation of the mother’s perceived lack of willingness to accept an outcome besides arrest led him to arrest the child rather than suggesting an alternative. In using niceness to shift responsibility to the boy’s mother, Jonathan minimized his own role in maintaining Whiteness in a school district where Black students were arrested at three times the rate of White students.

Pleasant Valley SRO, Frank (quoted in the previous section), similarly shed responsibility for his role in arrest. When asked whether he had arrested students, he explained that he arrests a “handful sometimes throughout the whole school year.” He went on to note:

A lot of times me personally I [inaudible] their petition. It’s the schools taking them out, I’m just doing transport. . . Now, sometimes they know if I see it and they’re really bad, just being disorderly, then I have to do it.

While Frank had earlier expressed an aversion to arrest, he was limited in his capacity to avoid arrest in cases in which students were acting “really bad” or the school filed a petition for their arrest. Niceness allowed Frank to continue participating in his job as a school police officer by minimizing his own role in arrest to transporting students while continuing to perform them. Frank shed responsibility by displacing blame for the arrest onto the school, thereby relieving himself of accountability for harm. To be sure, Frank may have felt his job security was on the line as he was legally required to arrest and transport students per the petition. This points to the structural constraints under which well-meaning SROs, like Frank, work and suggests niceness as a strategy for managing their participation in Whiteness. This pattern of shifting responsibility reflects an investment in Whiteness by focusing on officers’ intentions rather than the concrete outcomes of arrest. While race was markedly absent from SRO interviews, Whiteness was central to discursive moves which displaced responsibility, and thus accountability, for racially inequitable student arrests.

SROs varied in the degree to which they described school staff as being involved in their decision to make an arrest. Officers primarily described school staff (e.g., administrators, school security) as referring students to the SRO, and at that point, SROs described themselves as making the decision to arrest independent of school staff. At other times, SROs described administrators as signing a petition for a student arrest, at which point the SRO would make the arrest. A handful of SROs in both districts described instances in which school staff asked them to get involved with an incident in which the law had not been broken, such as when a student was violating the dress code by wearing a hat. In some cases, SROs explained that school staff had requested that SROs arrest children. While we cannot judge the extent to which these assertions are true, several SROs explicitly used this language, which allowed them—intentionally or not—to shed responsibility for making an arrest.

Highlighting Their Own Goodness

In addition to shedding responsibility for making arrests, SROs highlighted their own goodness when making arrests. This discursive strategy may have alleviated participants’ own discomfort with having made arrests but did little to shield students from a penal system that upholds White racial dominance. For example, Metro Public Schools high school SRO, Jared, a White man, explained:

Even when I’ve had to arrest people, I’m super nice. I’m like, “You want to listen to the radio? You want the window down? Is there a station you want to listen to?” It goes a long way.

Jared simultaneously avoided talking about the harm of the arrest while reframing to focus on his own goodness, emphasizing that he lets students roll the window down or listen to the radio. Here, Jared used niceness to frame himself as well-intentioned and essentially good. While he may not have intentionally done so, this framing obscured any discussion of the harm of arrest or its contributions to inequality in a district where Black students were arrested at four times the rate of White students. People operating with the best of intentions can still perpetrate harm absent deeper consideration of how their actions contribute to or challenge broader structures and ideologies of Whiteness (Castagno, 2019; Lewis & Diamond, 2015).

SROs in Pleasant Valley similarly highlighted their own goodness when describing making student arrests. Frank reflected on the most recent student arrest he had made:

The last was just a petition that basically a kid had a petition filed on him for unruly juvenile. And it violated his probation. . .So, juvenile wanted him brought in, so they faxed over a copy of the petition, and we went ahead and brought him in. . .But it’s a kid I play basketball with sometimes. . . So, that being said, you go back to, hey, you know, you build this relationship with them, and I told him, “Man, I hate doing this to you.” He says, “I know you do.” “There’s no part of me that likes putting these handcuffs on you right now. So, what are we going to do to fix it?” And, “You’re right.” . . .Everything went perfectly fine and smooth. And hopefully it won’t happen again. It might, but we hope that it doesn’t.

As above, Frank emphasized to the child that he did not like arresting him, even as he was performing the arrest. Frank contrasted his own goodness with the violence of arresting a child, highlighting his own feelings when he recounted telling the child, “I hate doing this to you” and “there’s no part of me that likes putting these handcuffs on you right now.” Frank described the arrest as initiated by a petition that was outside of his control, while emphasizing his own goodness. Indeed, Frank may have had limited capacity to legally circumvent the arrest in this instance. Whiteness obliges us to support Frank’s attempts to mitigate the harm of arrest by assuring the child he took no pleasure in it. His nice approach to arrest makes it more difficult to address and challenge the racially inequitable impact of arrest.

Highlighting Positive Relationships

A third way in which SROs used niceness as Whiteness in their recounts of arrest was by highlighting the positive relationships they had with students they arrested. Take the example of Jared from Metro Public Schools (also quoted above):

Like I said, my kids are great. They get along good. 97% of my kids love me. You got 3% that maybe one time or another I’ve had to arrest for whatever reason. Even some of them I’ve arrested still come back and they thank me because I’ve helped change their persona and made them see the right way. Like I said, I’ve got a good situation. I think coaching actually helps out tremendously.

Here, Jared articulated that in the very few instances in which he had made an arrest, multiple students thanked him for doing so, highlighting their close interpersonal relationship. As with highlighting their own goodness, highlighting these positive relationships reframes violence (i.e., arrest) that contributes to racial inequality as a positive, since students still like the SROs. This strategy emphasizes the officer’s ability to retain his niceness—by virtue of the maintained interpersonal relationship—despite having arrested the student.

Similar sentiments were expressed by officers in Pleasant Valley. One officer stationed in a middle school recounted the story of arresting a student for setting fires, emphasizing the close interpersonal relationship that was in place following the arrest.

It was kind of weird, the next day he came in and walked in and came up to me and gave me a really big hug and he was like, thank you for listening and making me laugh and everything.

As the officer recounted the story, he specifically noted that the child thanked him for listening and making him laugh, even as the officer was carrying out an arrest. That the officer highlighted this in response to a question about arrest suggests that the officer values the maintenance of his niceness—as demonstrated by the relationship with the student. While the positive relationship between the student and the officer may or may not be beneficial for the student, it is beneficial for the officer to maintain a sense of dignity following his arrest of a 12- or 13-year-old child. Focusing on how the child hugged him after an arrest (niceness) diverts attention away from patterned inequality that resulted from SRO arrests in Pleasant Valley (Whiteness).

Sam expressed similar sentiments, focusing on high school students viewing him as a “good guy” even after he arrested them. He explained:

If I could claim one success here in nine weeks, it’s that even the kids that I’ve had to arrest at the end of it, all was, could still look back at it and go, “You know what? He’s a good guy.” And they’re not mad at me because I’m having to arrest them. They understand I’ve got a job to do. But at the same time, you know, the law’s the law, and if you break it, you know the consequences are going to be. But then again, if you need something, they can still come to me for it.”

By emphasizing that arresting students did not rupture their relationship—that they were “not mad” at him—this officer maintained a sense of his success even while arresting a child. It is also noteworthy that this officer engaged niceness by shedding responsibility when he stated that he was “having to arrest them” rather than choosing to arrest them. By accepting that “the law’s the law” and suggesting that students receive logical consequences when they break it, Sam invoked concepts of fairness and neutrality that are central to Whiteness and make it more difficult to address patterns of racial inequality in student arrest.

Discussion

SROs across Pleasant Valley and Metro Public Schools generally expressed not wanting to arrest children and used several tactics to avoid it. This finding suggests that even SROs who are legally required to arrest children in some cases do not view arrest as a helpful response to harm, with some acknowledging directly that they view arrest as a source of harm for students. As they made sense of their own roles in arresting children, SROs tapped into an element of Whiteness—niceness—to: (1) shed responsibility, (2) highlight their own goodness, and (3) emphasize their positive relationships with students whom they had arrested.

Niceness as Whiteness may have allowed the officers to forestall reckoning with the harm in which they participated while arresting the young people in their schools, but it does not negate oppression. Officers’ investments in Whiteness came at the expense of students, especially students of color, who were disproportionately arrested in both school districts. Student arrest has real and long-lasting consequences for all children. On the whole, when the police arrest children and youth, it does not act as a corrective but is instead a harmful experience that shifts their trajectories toward a series of more negative outcomes along a variety of domains. For example, being arrested as a youth leads to higher rates of crime conviction (Bersani et al., 2022; Johnson et al., 2004; Wiley et al., 2013; Wiley & Esbensen, 2016;), poorer financial wellbeing as adults (Siennick & Widdowson, 2022), increased school dropout and lower enrollment in four-year colleges (Kirk & Sampson, 2013), and even greater mortality (Tolliver et al., 2023). Even though individual SROs may be unaware of these trends, they nevertheless use niceness as a strategy to minimize their participation in an institution that harms all children and upholds Whiteness through the racially disparate application of arrest. Niceness perpetuates such racial inequality by obscuring harm, making it more difficult to address.

Similar to prior work on niceness as Whiteness, we suggest its limitations for addressing children’s social and emotional needs (Pascoe, 2023). Nice SROs did not want to arrest children. Nice police officers thought of themselves as well-meaning. Yet, they expressed being required to arrest children because of real or imagined mandates. They used niceness as a strategy for upholding a system of Whiteness that systematically privileges White people and excludes those who fall outside of Whiteness. Niceness hinders possibilities for the types of political, communal relationships central to authentic care. Black feminist (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 1999; Irvine, 2002) and other critical feminist work on care (Fraser, 2016; Rivera-McCutchen, 2021) has teased out key features of caring teacher practice, highlighting the importance of political clarity, meaning that relationships are leveraged as a means of providing for students’ social and emotional development and as a force against Whiteness and other systems of oppression (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 1999; McKinney de Royston et al., 2017). These bonds transcend blood relation and are rooted in a sense of mutual responsibility (Beauboeuf-Lafontant 1999; Collins 2009).

Structurally, SROs played a role that was in tension with care. Here, we do not intend to demonize individual SROs, but to suggest that the structures of policing in which SROs operated prevented them from providing authentic care as theorized in prior scholarship. That SROs of color also did not describe caring relationships with students suggests that this is not a phenomenon unique to individual, White SROs. Many of the SROs in our study expressed a desire to develop relationships with students, mentor them, make connections between their school and community, and deescalate conflicts. These skills, paired with the political clarity and collective sense of responsibility of authentic care (Valenzuela, 1999), would be an asset to U.S. public schools, and we can envision that many of the SROs in our study could provide authentic care in other roles that did not position them to enact coercive power over students.

Implications for Research

This study contributes to the literature on SROs and arrest. While prior research demonstrates the prevalence and distribution of arrests, this study explains in part how SROs understand their own roles in the arrest. We find that SROs coped with their participation in Whiteness using niceness. Meanwhile, SROs’ niceness obscured their contributions to Whiteness, making it more difficult to confront. Future studies might compare perceptions of arrest across various stakeholders, such as students (both who have and have not been arrested), educators, SROs, and family and community members. Future studies might also analyze both interview and observational data to compare perceptions of arrest to the practice of arrest. Finally, future studies might draw from data with more information on the demographics of those arrested to examine whether SROs differentially applied niceness based on race or gender.

This study also makes theoretical contributions to literature on niceness as Whiteness. Prior research has demonstrated how primarily White women educators use niceness to uphold Whiteness in their work with children (Bissonnette 2016; Drake & Rodriguez 2022; Gardiner et al., 2023; Vlach et al., 2022; Wiborg, 2022). We found niceness was also present in the work of SROs, suggesting the potential for broader application of niceness to well-intentioned actors working in structurally violent systems. In addition to framing niceness as a means of excusing behavior that upholds Whiteness, we equally center the structural binds that delimit SROs’ capacity for providing care. In doing so, we identify niceness as a coping mechanism for arresting children. For SROs in Pleasant Valley and Metro Public Schools, despite what in some cases appeared to be good faith attempts to care for children, they were limited in their capacity to challenge Whiteness in their roles as police officers. Here, we do not mean to excuse the behavior of SROs who, for example, shed responsibility for arresting children. As we have shown, our participants’ descriptions of their daily work suggests that they exercised discretion in who they targeted for arrest and may have, in some cases, had the power to protect students from arrest. Rather, in examining niceness as a means of excusing arrest, we aim to expand upon niceness scholarship to highlight the structural positions in which SROs work and the limits of their individual agency therein.

Implications for Policy and Practice

Our findings suggest policymakers and school-based leaders reframe how they consider the role of SROs in schools and potential unintended consequences of SROs in schools. Though individual, well-intentioned police officers are often spotlighted by proponents of SRO programs (see e.g., Turner & Beneke, 2020), our analysis shows that participants relied on niceness as Whiteness to excuse the arrest of children, which reinforces a harmful relationship between schools and prisons. As school districts that ended their contracts with police departments begin to reinstate SRO programs (Arango, 2023), defenses of “nice” SROs are leveraged in support of SRO programs (Jenkins, 2023). But, niceness is not a sufficient policy solution. While proposals to train SROs in child development and restorative justice suggest that finding or training the “right” SROs can improve SRO programs and make them more equitable, there is no evidence these kinds of training could counter the racially inequitable nature of policing. As suggested by a recent review of literature on SROs, we encourage policymakers to resist the assumption that schools need SROs and to, instead, consider alternative responses for the problems SROs are in place to address (Zabala-Eisshofer et al., 2024). The findings of this study suggest that harms of SRO presence, including harms associated with arrest, are likely to persist even in the face of individual, nice police officers.