ANOTHER Florida School Resource Officer investigated for sexual offense

Guys, I can’t make this stuff up. Another Florida School Resource Officer (a police officer assigned to work in a school) is in trouble this week for a child sex crime.

Just days after a school resource officer in Jacksonville was arrested, another officer in Altamonte Springs’ home was searched as part of a child pornography investigation. I literally had to reference our earlier posts to make sure this wasn’t the same incident before posting this, but it is not.  Second SRO in one week!

According to the National Association of School Resource Officers, “The school resource officer (SRO) is a carefully selected, specifically trained, and properly equipped full-time law enforcement officer with sworn law enforcement authority, trained in school-based law enforcement and crisis response, assigned by the employing law enforcement agency to work in the school using community-oriented policing concepts.”

So not only are these individuals police officers, but they are police officers “carefully selected” and “specifically selected” to work in schools!!! Not like the “other” police officers arrested this week for child sex crimes in Lantana and Nassau County.

Before anyone starts calling for the crucible, let’s take a step back… NO, we should not prevent law enforcement officers from entering schools, NO, certainly not all (and in fact a very small percentage – just like registrants) of SROs are doing wrong, and NO, the point of this article is not to further shame the officers who are accused or police in general. The ONLY reason we are sharing this information is to illustrate that the registry does not identify the dangers to our children and proximity ordinances do not isolate children from “the bad guys”. Children can be abused by anyone, anywhere, including police officers and even in their own school. In fact, children are far more likely to be abused by someone they know and are taught to trust and are far more likely to be abused where they live or go to school.

Abolish the registry and reallocate the wasted resources to education!