POLICE INTEGRITY LOST

School resource officers (SRO)s have become a permanent presence in many K-12 schools throughout the United States. As a result, an emerging body of research has focused on SROs, particularly on how SROs are viewed by students, teachers, and the general public. In this episode of the Police Integrity Lost podcast, Bowling Green State University professors Phil Stinson and Adam Watkins discuss their research recent research study on crime by SROs. This exploratory and descriptive research employs a different focus by examining the nature of crimes for which SROs were arrested in recent years with information gathered from online news sources. The current findings, which are discussed in this podcast episode, are encouraging insofar as they reveal that SROs are rarely arrested for criminal misconduct. When SROs are arrested, however, they are most often arrested for a sex-related offense involving a female adolescent. These sex-related incidents generally occurred away from school property or during nonschool hours at school and rarely involved the use of physical force. The implications of these findings for SRO programs are also discussed in the podcast. The Police Integrity Lost podcast is available on iTunes.