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SFPD gives overview of School Resource Officer work, arrest and attendance interventions
Summary
SFPD youth services presented an annual overview: 29 school resource officers serve San Francisco schools with expanded attendance, home-visit and youth-development work; the unit reported 194 school-site arrests last year, 115 home visits and proposed monthly reports and alternatives to suspension.
Colleen Fatou, who coordinates the San Francisco Police Department’s Youth Services Unit, presented an end-of-year overview of School Resource Officer (SRO) activities at the Sept. 12 Board of Education meeting.
Fatou said 29 officers currently serve schools across the city and that SROs carry out a range of duties including school safety and crime-prevention activities, law-related education, student-support work, community liaison functions and youth-development programs. Officers conducted roughly 115 home visits and participated in 1,547 student conferences, 558 parent conferences and 63 student success team meetings in the last year. The unit reported 194 arrests on school sites for school-related offenses and 25 arrests on school sites for non–school-related offenses during the past year; Fatou said some arrests involved outsiders and that staff are working to disaggregate data by school, offense and student demographics.
Commissioners asked for more detailed, disaggregated data (by school, ethnicity, age and offense), and Fatou committed to returning monthly with a statistical report, including a PowerPoint breakdown. The SRO office described work on alternatives to suspension and arrest — citing a “Saturday school” model used in San Jose that pairs a police officer and district staff to facilitate a six‑hour program emphasizing life skills and parent participation — as a possible alternative to reduce suspensions and arrests.
Board members emphasized the need for transparency and asked for a written report in October with data for September, and to consider moving future, ongoing data discussions to a committee if the full board cannot accommodate them monthly.
Fatou said the unit will provide a monthly oral or written report and will work with district staff and other city agencies to improve data-sharing and to target interventions for at-risk students.
