Fact-check: Do armed campus police prevent school shootings?
Ted Cruz: “We know from past experiences that the most effective tool for keeping kids safe is armed law enforcement on the campus.”
PolitiFact's ruling: False ...
Broader research provides not much support for Cruz’s claim that armed law enforcement officers on school grounds are the "most effective tool" for keeping kids safe from mass shootings.
A 2021 study conducted by researchers from University at Albany and RAND examined data from U.S. schools between 2014 to 2018 to evaluate the impact of school resource officers. It found that school resource officers "do effectively reduce some forms of violence in schools, but do not prevent school shootings or gun-related incidents."
In addition, that study found that school resource officers appear to protect students from "a non-trivial number of physical attacks and fights within schools," which could have long-term academic and psychological benefits for students. But schools with resource officers also report more suspensions, expulsions, police referrals and student arrests — and those harsher disciplinary punishments disproportionately fall on Black students, male students and students with disabilities.
Another 2021 JAMA Network study conducted by researchers at Hamline University and Metropolitan State University in Minnesota examined a total of 133 school shootings and attempted school shootings from 1980 to 2019.
It was limited by the availability of public data and the inability to measure deterred shootings, among other factors, but researchers found that, controlling for other factors such as location, school type and region, the data showed "armed guards were not associated with significant reduction in rates of injuries" during school mass shootings.
Further, when researchers controlled for location and school characteristic factors, "the rate of deaths was 2.83 times greater (emphasis added) in schools with an armed guard present."
Pete Blair, the executive director of the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University, said armed individuals can play a role in stopping school shootings in progress but cautioned against any claim that it’s "the most effective tool" or that it prevents school shootings.
In Illinois in 2018, for instance, officials credited an officer with avoiding a potential school shooting involving a student at the school. The shooter’s mother said she thought her son was trying to get the police to kill him. Only the shooter was injured.
Blair said the ALERRT Center is part of a group that works with the FBI to release annual active shooter data. The FBI defines an active shooter as "one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area."
That data shows that from 2000 until 2021, there have been 434 active shooter incidents, Blair said. This includes shooter incidents in schools and elsewhere.
"The most common resolution is for the attacker to flee," Blair said, which happened in about 25% of all cases.
In about the same number of cases, the shooting stopped when a responding on-duty police officer, armed security or off-duty officer shot the attacker, he said.
Blair said the data isn’t specific enough to break down whether police officers who used force to stop an attack were already stationed there at the time — as a school resource officer likely would be — or were called in specifically to respond to the incident.
Dewey Cornell, a professor of education at the University of Virginia who studies school safety, bullying and student threat assessment, said he has seen research that suggests school resource officers "can be valuable in building relationships with students and working with threat assessment teams, but not as armed guards protecting the campus from a shooter."
"I know of no scientific evidence that having armed law enforcement on campus by itself keeps kids safe at school," he said. "We have prevented school shootings by identifying threats and working with troubled students before they make an attack."
There's even more to read for those who wish to see Ted Cruz's disingenuous argument thoroughly debunked.