“This will be an expensive undertaking,” said Wayne County
Sheriff Barry Virts, President of the New York State Sheriffs’ Association,
“but we owe it to our children, and their parents, to provide a safe place for
education to take place.”
“We spend many millions of dollars to protect a relatively
small number of judges across the state, as we should. Surely we can also find
the money to protect our most defenseless people – the children we send off to
school each day,” Sheriff Virts said.
There are about 4,750 public schools and nearly 2,000
private schools educating students in grades K through 12 in the state. The
Sheriffs’ Association estimates that the cost of this proposal would be roughly
equivalent to that of adding one teacher to each of these schools.
School resource officers (SROs) provide an armed police
presence while building relationships with the school community. “The
relationship of trust formed with the students often allows the SRO to gain
critical timely information and intervene before an issue becomes an incident,”
Sheriff Virts said.
The number of SROs has dropped in recent years due to the
lack of local funding. Some schools already have SROs that are funded by the
school district, the county government, or both. “The only way to assure that
every student has the protection of an armed officer in close proximity is for
the state to provide a reliable funding stream for SROs. Many school districts and local governments
are unable to do it due to tax caps and limited funding sources,” Sheriff Virts
added.
Allegany County Sheriff Rick Whitney who is a strong
advocate for SROs in his county stated “Unfortunately, many times when law
enforcement arrives at the scene of a school shooting, everything is over and
all our officers can do is assist the survivors. With an armed SRO in the
school, an attack may be discouraged, or at least ended quickly, hopefully
without loss of life.”
The Sheriffs’ Association acknowledges that there are many
ways to approach this issue. Each school district and law enforcement agency
would have to figure out what works best in that district. Some, including
Sheriff Whitney, have indicated a preference for stationing an armed security
officer at a single school entry point of each school. Others, including Washington County Sheriff
Jeffrey Murphy and Warren County Sheriff Bud York, support the use of retired
law enforcement officers as an economical way of getting well-trained armed
officers into schools.
“Any of these would be better than nothing,” said Sheriff
Virts. “Most Sheriffs feel the BEST solution is to assign active deputy
sheriffs or other active police officers to the schools as SROs who would have
the freedom to move about the campus, “network” with students and staff, and
either head off an incident before it happens or at least be there on scene to
immediately respond.”
The New York State Sheriffs' Association, Inc. is a
not-for-profit corporation, formed in 1934, for the purpose of assisting
sheriffs in the efficient and effective delivery of services to the public. It
comprises all of the elected and appointed sheriffs of New York State.
