One Reason SROs are Important

The other day I listened to a school safety webinar. A lot of familiar information was covered, but one tidbit of information stood out, which I’m sharing here.

If you don’t follow my blog or School/Kids focused Facebook page, then let me state that SRO stands for School Resource Officers (SROs). While the webinar was ultimately trying to sell software to help with school safety, my takeaway was further confirmation that the use of SROs within schools is important. While there are many reasons for this (look at some of my old articles), the webinar pointed out one big reason which is summarized in the following picture:

If there is an incident at a school, such as a school shooting, then how fast can a police officer get to the school? When you weigh this against the data point that with a standard weapon, one shot can be fired every 4 to 15 seconds, you quickly realize that minutes matter – a single minute matters.

It was stated that it can take 4 to 9 minutes to make a call for help. In that time, you could have over 15 casualties. If an officer can respond in 3 minutes, then that could be an additional 12 casualties. If the officer that shows up is a marathon runner, then they might be able to get from their car and into the building in a single minute. That minute could be another 4. That puts the total at over 30 with the assumption of a shot every 15 seconds rather than 4 seconds.

In the webinar, it was indicated that the response time of police to aggravated assault ranges are generally five minutes or more. Only 21 percent of responses by police happen within 5 minutes. 33 percent are within 6 to 10 minutes and 36 percent are from 11 to 60 minutes. Roughly 10 percent are of an unknown length of time. At a five minute response time, that’s between 20 and 75 shots with standard weapons.

Having SROs in place would eliminate the response time from the equation as well as the need to do an initial all, which are the longest delays in the equation. That means lives potentially saved. That seems like one big reason to have them.

Of course, this value is only seen when there is security breach at a school. The impact on SROs goes way beyond just being available for emergencies, but that’s a different article!

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