Schiff: “You should have
armed
people in these buildings …”
MONTICELLO – It’s an issue that’s coming up everywhere and is a symptom of the times. Sullivan County lawmakers spent a good part of Thursday’s Public Safety and Law Enforcement Committee meeting thinking about it, and they didn’t even get into whether school resource officers, or even teachers, should be armed.
Sheriff Michael Schiff, referring to recent reports that the Middletown school district has an SRO in each of its seven buildings, acknowledged he may at some point come to the county legislature with the same proposal.
That creates a new issue – finding qualified candidates willing to accept that kind of work. Schiff said putting young law enforcement officers in schools won’t work.
“They want to be out there arresting bad guys, chasing bad guys; they took this job to be police officers.”
Schiff said a fix is possible, similar to what was done following 9/11. Action from the governor is needed.
“So that we can hire retired police officers without a lot of fanfare and put them in a school. That would allow us to hire people without doing the training.”
Legislature Chairman Luis Alvarez, a veteran of many years in the sheriff office, said it takes a special temperament to spend a full day with young people, as a law enforcement officer.
“It has to be somebody who can be very mellow,” Alvarez said. “Believe it or not, more work in there than it is to be on the road. By the end of the day, you are completely drained.”
Schiff said the other issue is a school building’s physical security. While improvements have been made, including restricted access, the sheriff said the system is not perfect at keeping unwanted people out.
“You should have armed people in these buildings as a failsafe to stop the aggressive actor and it could be done but it is complicated and I would not advocate an easy answer on that.”
Proponents of SROs maintain if airports have security, our most prized
possessions, our children, should also have protection in school.
