Wendell Hissrich

Christine Spolar, Tribune News Service

A false alarm that a gunman was roaming one Catholic high school and then another in March 2023 touched off frightening evacuations and a robust police response in the city. It also prompted the diocese to rethink what constitutes a model learning environment. Months after hundreds of students were met by SWAT teams, the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh began forming its own armed police force.

Wendell Hissrich, a former safety director for the city and career FBI unit chief, was hired that year to form a department to safeguard 39 Catholic schools as well as dozens of churches in the region. Hissrich has since added 15 officers and four supervisors, including many formerly retired officers and state troopers, who now oversee school campuses fitted with Stop the Bleed kits, cameras, and defibrillators. When religious leaders first asked for advice after what are known as “swatting” incidents, the veteran lawman said he didn’t hesitate to deliver blunt advice: “You need to put armed officers in the schools.”

But he added that the officers had to view schools as a special assignment: “I want them to be role models. I want them to be good fits within the school. I’m looking for someone to know how to deal with kids and with parents — and, most importantly, knows how to de-escalate a situation.” Gun violence is a leading cause of death for young people in America, and the possibility of shootings has influenced costly decision-making in school systems as administrators juggle fear, duty, and dizzying statistics in efforts to keep schools safe from gun harm. In the first week of September, the risks were made tragically clear again, this time in Georgia, as a teenager stands accused of shooting his way through his high school and killing two students and two teachers.

Still, scant research supports the creation of school police forces to deter gun violence — and what data exists can raise as many questions as answers. Data shows over half of US firearm deaths are, in fact, suicides — a sobering statistic from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that reflects a range of ills. Gun violence grew during the COVID-19 pandemic and studies found that Black children were 100 times as likely as white children to experience firearm assaults. Research on racial bias in policing overall in the US as well as studies on biased school discipline have prompted calls for caution. And an oft-cited US Secret Service review of 67 thwarted plots at schools supports reasons to examine parental responsibility as well as police intervention as effective ways to stop firearm harm.

The Secret Service threat assessment, published in 2021, analyzed plots from 2006 to 2018 and found students who planned school violence had guns readily at home. It also found that school districts that contracted sworn law officers, who work as full- or part-time school resource officers, had some advantage. The officers proved pivotal in about a third of the 67 foiled plots by current or former students. “Most schools are not going to face a mass shooting. Even though there are more of them — and that’s horrible — it is still a small number,” said Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers. “But administrators can’t really allow themselves to think that way.

“They have to think, ‘It could happen here, and how do I prevent it?’” About a 20-minute drive north of Pittsburgh, a top public school system in the region decided the risk was too great. North Allegheny Superintendent Brendan Hyland last year recommended retooling what had been a two-person school resource officer team — staffed since 2018 by local police — into a 13-person internal department with officers stationed at each of the district’s 12 buildings. Several school district board members voiced unease about armed officers in the hallways. “I wish we were not in the position in our country where we have to even consider an armed police department,” board member Leslie Britton Dozier, a lawyer and a mother, said during a public planning meeting.

Within weeks, all voted for Hyland’s request, estimated to cost $1 million a year. Hyland said the aim is to help 1,200 staff members and 8,500 students “with the right people who are the right fit to go into those buildings.” He oversaw the launch of a police unit in a smaller school district, just east of Pittsburgh, in 2018. Hyland said North Allegheny had not focused on any single news report or threat in its decision, but he and others had thought through how to set a standard of vigilance. North Allegheny does not have or want metal detectors, devices that some districts have seen as necessary. But a trained police unit willing to learn every entrance, stairway, and cafeteria and who could develop trust among students and staffers seemed reasonable, he said.

“I’m not Edison. I’m not inventing something,” Hyland said. “We don’t want to be the district that has to be reactive. I don’t want to be that guy who is asked: ‘Why did you allow this to happen?’” Since 2020, the role of police in educational settings has been hotly debated. The video-recorded death of George Floyd, a Black man in Minneapolis who was murdered by a white police officer during an arrest, prompted national outrage and demonstrations against police brutality and racial bias.