About a minute ago, a woman took the stage at the RNC and spoke about the issue of safety in schools, endorsing School Resource Officers (cops embedded in high schools) as an invaluable tool for keeping the people and dealing with dangerous students. Detractors claim that SROs can be unnerving to students, and that they're often too trigger happy when it comes to arresting minors. And this got me thinking:
I propose that local governments dramatically increase the frequency of plainclothes officers in schools, who infiltrate classrooms at the start of a given academic semester and have long-term assignments, say, for up to a couple of months, choosing the youngest looking officers who pose as students of the oldest plausible age (i.e. seniors). To avoid the likelihood of a real student recognizing them from, say, a traffic stop, different police departments ought to swap personnel for these assignments so that they're from relatively faraway places. This would accomplish the following:
(1). Their presence would not be overt, and to students it would feel like a school instead of a prison;
(2). Whereas students would try to hide their misbehavior in the known presence of police officers, these officers being around would not cause them to alter their behavior. They could get a feel of the territory, gather human intelligence, conduct stings, and bust crimes literal seconds after they start happening. For example, a prospective dealer would be more likely to sell to somebody who they've seen around for the last 3 weeks than to an absolute stranger.
(3). The knowledge that they "only have one shot", and that making an arrest will blow their cover, will cause them to pick their battles carefully, and go after what they believe to be high-priority crimes instead of being overly confrontational.
(4). This would deter outsiders to the school from dealing to students, as they wouldn't know who's a cop and who isn't.
(5). It would signal to mass shooters that the visible absence of police officers does not equal an easy target. This might also allow schools to cut funding for School Resource Officers.
