Breaking the School-to-Prison Pipeline: Implications of Removing Police from Schools for Racial and Ethnic Disparities in the Justice System, United States, 2003-2018

Momentum toward removing school-based law enforcement (SBLE) has increased since the summer of 2020. This change has occurred due to issues of equity with the hope that removing SBLE will reduce existing racial and ethnic disparities in the criminal justice system. SBLE refers to sworn law enforcement stationed in schools on either a part- or full-time basis. Some SBLE are known as school resource officers, who often receive special training in juvenile law and interacting with students in schools, although this varies from state to state. Other SBLE do not receive any special training in working with young people.

Although the move toward removing SBLE may have intuitive appeal to some school districts, no empirical evidence exists regarding what happens to students' frequency of contact with the criminal justice system after schools remove SBLE. Similarly, current research has not examined the impacts on the attendant racial and ethnic disparities.

All the data used in this study are secondary data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), including both the publicly available Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) and the restricted-use School Survey on Crime and Safety (SSOCS). All data cleaning, manipulation, and analysis will be done using syntax files in Stata. This study is a collection of these three Stata .do syntax files.

This study compared changes in three measures of criminal justice contact (i.e., arrests, referrals to law enforcement, and crimes reported to police) in schools that removed SBLE relative to the changes in schools that did not remove SBLE. The study examined within-school racial and ethnic differences in rates of arrest and referrals to law enforcement, and between-school differences in all three measures of criminal justice system contact by school racial composition.