The Numbers

Approximately 2,068 people were criminally charged by School Resource Officers between September 2011 and December 2021. ¹ ²

Over 20,963* students were labeled as "offenders" by the EPS (a high number considering we do not have any data from September 2018 to December 2021). “Offender” is defined as anyone who has committed a criminal offence or is found to be in contravention of provincial statutes or bylaws such as the education or traffic safety acts.**

In that time, 679 students were expelled and 5,228 students were suspended with SRO involvement.³ 

The application of criminal charges for occurrences (2068, or 47%) is almost equal to the usage of alternative measures to address occurrences (2306, or 53%).⁴

Footnotes

¹ We added the number of charges from each given year to arrive at this number.

² The data for 2016 stated 1606 criminal charges, which to us seems like an error, as it is four times higher than the highest number for any other. As such, we took an average of all years and substituted it as a proxy for year 2016 (number = 168). This means that the number of criminal charges overall is potentially higher than 2000.

³ Based on Sep 1, 2011 to March 31, 2020 (data unavailable for the rest of 2020 and 2021). In addition, these numbers are substantially less than total suspensions and expulsions reported by the school boards. Suggesting this data primarily concerns cases involving police officers.

⁴ Here, we added together the number of criminal charges to the number of alternative measures and took the percentage for each one of that total. Alternative measures included from the data are those under the categories/spreadsheet cells: "alternative measures/community service," "DIVERSION First Program," and "PAYOFF Program." Some occurrences included under the category "criminal" are: theft, possession of a controlled substance, fraud, assault, sexual offence, among others). The number of criminal occurrences is always much lower than non-criminal.

* We have revised the total number of “offenders” from 23,725 to 20,963. This is because we were informed by a twitter user (who appears to have a law enforcement background) that the N/S category on the excel sheet stands for “Non-Student.” This was helpful so we removed all the “N/S” numbers. This eliminated 2,762 ‘offenders’ from our list, leaving us with 20,963 student offenders. We value this additional information that gives us a clearer picture of the thousands of students labelled as ‘offenders.’ This example demonstrates the extreme difficulty in analyzing the poorly kept EPS records.

** The Edmonton Police Service put out a media statement clarifying the definition of the term ‘offender.’ This definition is taken from the following story. The EPS has not provided clarification on the other issues mentioned in their media response (i.e., no clarify was given regarding the high number of charges in 2016).

Methodology

Our analysis is based on the data we received and we reviewed the data with larger questions about police in schools in mind. The data was partial, categories often changed from year to year, and sometimes, their numbers didn’t add up (ex. 2016 charges).

This is why this is an ongoing project. Further analysis of other aspects of the data, as well as seeking out further data, are goals that we hope to accomplish. This will not be quick. It will be slow and deliberate research. Our current work barely scratches the surface but there was enough information to begin the public dissemination of our analysis.

Our Analysis

The numbers indicate that the presence of police in schools increases the likelihood of students entering the school-to-prison pipeline. The school-to-prison pipeline involves school disciplinary policies and practices, including suspensions and expulsions, that lead to a student being more likely to be pushed out and end up in the criminal justice system. Administrators and teachers apply these policies in ways that criminalize children and youth, disproportionately those who are Black, Indigenous, and/or students with disabilities. 

Placing police in schools increases the contact of children and youth with police. SRO programs extend the over-policing of racialized and disabled youth into a space that should be nurturing, caring, and healthy in ways that support learning, create strong connections with education, and foster positive relationships with teachers and administrators. As Abigail Tsionne Salole and Zakaria Abdulle state in their 2015 article "Quick to Punish: An examination of the school to prison pipeline for marginalized youth,"

Indeed, given that racialized youth are over-policed in their neighbourhood, disproportionately disciplined in school and disproportionately incarcerated; it is quite possible that racialized youth do not experience a rupture between their governance in their neighbourhood, school and prison. (p. 138)

In other words, racialized youths' experiences of surveillance, discipline, and arrest exist across various contexts in their lives with deeply negative repercussions for their futures. Discipline and surveillance in schools comes to resemble and feel like that of the prison or of living in an over-policed racialized community. 

Do policy-makers, school leaders, and teachers really want racialized youth to experience schooling as akin to being policed in communities and incarceration? 

The Missing Piece: Race Based Data

Unfortunately, we could not break down the EPS data by indicators like race because we were not provided that information. However, looking at another large, racially and class diverse school board in Canada -- the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), the rate of suspension/expulsion in relation to their percentage of the school population by demographic was: 

Black - 3.3x 

Indigenous - 5x 

Students with disabilities (special education needs) - 3.4 x 

Mixed - 1.5x 

Whites - 0.77x

EPSB is developing a strategy to collect race-based and other demographic data, which will help understand the different factors shaping educational experiences and outcomes in our city. At this time, we are not aware of any efforts in the ECSD in this regard.

Further Data

Outside of our FOIP, Edmonton Police Service revealed additional policing data in their Response to Information Request on the School Resource Officer Program made by the Edmonton Public School Board that pertains to criminal charges. 

For 2017, an analysis was conducted for all youth charged city-wide for minor criminal offenses (for example, theft, possess stolen property, mischief, common assault). Of these charges, 67.2 per cent were withdrawn, 31.1 per cent of went to extrajudicial sanctions, and 1.6 per cent went to a guilty plea (p. 12-13). 

The Information Report also notes that the creation of a criminal file for incidents does not necessarily lead to criminal charges, but does involve collecting information and can involve documentation in a file (p. 12). 

These details and explanations do not exonerate the police, as youth processed for charges must interact with the police and court system, often attending hearings and other meetings with authorities with their families. 

These constitute traumatic and stigmatizing experiences. Moreover, students are put into databases (actions like "investigations" or "files taken" all involve police information gathering on students). If anything, these numbers show how needless some of these charges are, given the number that end up in extrajudicial sanctions or dismissals.

Conclusion

Despite the data we’ve uncovered, a major missing piece and a focus of future work will be uncovering the following breakdown of additional information:

• By race and ethnicity (and other student demographics)

• Student status (ELL); 

• Disability;

• School location;

• and other relevant info to understanding effects of SRO Programs

While this analysis may seem dry, it is crucial to understanding the impact SROs have in our schools. The first step of solving a problem is by understanding it, and that is what we hope we have accomplished in this section.

The next section will discuss the history of the SRO program and place the data within a larger framework.