Safety Law News for 7/7/14

  •  A U.S. District Court in Texas upholds a school policy on cyberbullying which prohibits students from, “Send[ing], post[ing] or possess[ing] electronic messages that are abusive, obscene, sexually oriented, threatening, harassing, damaging to another’s reputation or illegal, including cyberbulling and ‘sexting’ either on or off school property, if the conduct causes a substantial disruption to the educational environment.”
  •  New data shows the Great Falls, Montana school resource officers program is having a positive effect in lowering the crime rate on campuses.  The 2013-2014 data shows the calls and complaints investigated decreased and the number of responses police made dropped dramatically.

Safety Law News for 7/2/14

  • The San Mateo City Council approved an agreement between the city, the San Mateo-Foster City Elementary School District and the San Mateo Union High School District Monday night. Each entity will now share the cost to assign three police officers to cover the city’s three middle and high schools.

Safety Law News for 6/27/14

  • In an opinion by the U.S. Supreme Court, the justices unanimously ruled that law enforcement officials cannot harvest the contents of a cell phone under the “search incident to arrest” exception to the warrant requirement of the Fourth Amendment.
  • Statistics on the effectiveness of school resource officers in Charleston County, South Carolina schools elementary schools show a decline in incidents and a sharp decline in referrals to the juvenile justice system. Most students involved in incidents were neither arrested nor charged.
  • The Arlington, Texas school board unanimously voted to approve the Police Lunch Pilot Program.  Under the program, the school district will provide free lunch on all district campuses for uniformed police officers. The objective is to create engagement between students and officers and provide an extra level of security.

Safety Law News for 6/24/14

  •  The Beaverton, Oregon School District Superintendent sent a note of reassurance to the local school community Tuesday afternoon in light of the campus shooting in nearby Troutdale, Oregon. The Beaverton Police Department has assigned six school resource officers at the high schools.

Safety Law News for 6/13/14

  • Middletown, Connecticut officials from the school district and the police department have signed a “Right Response” agreement that looks to allow for better discretion from administrators and school resource officers on how to handle behavioral problems.
  • Five sheriff’s deputies will continue to serve as school resource officers in Livingston Parish public schools following the Louisiana school board’s unanimous vote to renew a contract with the Sheriff’s Office.
  • For the second year in a row, Indiana policymakers have expressed strong support for grant funding to create new school resource officer positions or continue existing ones. The State has renewed or approved 141 grant applications totaling more than $4 million to employ school resource officers in schools.

Safety Law News for 6/2/14

  • School resource officers, in Gainesville, Georgia have access to all of the security cameras inside Gainesville City Schools.  The cameras are networked so that the SRO can not only see the cameras inside their school but other schools as well.”