The discontent over SRO programs has intensified in recent years, but challenges to these programs have been lodged since they started spreading in the 1960s. Like opponents today, the earliest dissenters hated the idea of shifting school responsibilities to police. But their main gripe was that police officers might be free to interrogate students in ways that exceeded procedural due process norms.
Called a “living symbol of law and order” by some at the time, the presence of police in schools represented a larger, national tide of clarion calls to solder steel fangs onto America’s criminal justice system. Politicians like Minneapolis Mayor Charles Stenvig ran for office on “law and order” platforms, with Stenvig even promising to “take the handcuffs off the police.
At the heart of the fight was the American Civil Liberties Union. Knowing that the federal grant to Minneapolis’ program was still pending, the director of the ACLU’s Washington office asked the U.S. Department of Justice to require that “under no circumstances would the policeman in the school be able to interrogate any juvenile without the presence of his parent.