A blue wooden sign with golden engraved letters reads "City of Syracuse, Dept. of Police" on a green lawn outside of the police station downtown. A blue sky shines down on the scene.
Syracuse Police headquarters on South State Street in downtown Syracuse. Credit: Julie McMahon | Central Current

The Syracuse Police Department again plans to put retired officers in city schools, according to Deputy Chief Richard Shoff. 

Over the previous two years, the department failed to recruit any retired officers for the job, Shoff said. 

Up to 20 retired police officers could be placed in Syracuse city schools this year, he said. 

The department has been unable to recruit retirees because Syracuse does not pay as much as other districts, Shoff said. The department and the school district increased the hourly rate to more than $40. 

“To attract the retired officers, they had to raise the rates,” Shoff said. 

The cadre of retirees is meant to supplement the Syracuse police officers already working in the schools. Up to 10 officers work in the district alongside a supervising sergeant. 

Syracuse’s Common Council approved the potential cost of hiring 20 retirees in the schools earlier this month. At the time, Shoff said the department had recruited nine retirees, though they had not been hired yet. Employing the retirees in the schools as school peace officers would cost the city and the district up to $1.23 million. Under the agreement, the Syracuse City School District will reimburse the city for the costs of hiring the retirees. 

Former Police Chief Frank Fowler has tried recruiting officers to work as school police officers, Shoff said. The officers must have retired within the past four years or undergo new training, Shoff said.

Councilor Chol Majok, who sponsored legislation to have SROs and SPOs in schools, said that employing retired officers lessens the strain on the SPD to staff the SCSD with officers. Majok believes the presence of experienced, armed officers in SCSD schools makes students safer.

“Policing right now is hard to recruit, if we can tap into our retirees to do this for our kids, we’re gonna take it,” Majok said.

Lori Nilsson, the chairperson of the city’s Citizen Review Board, said the CRB had not been consulted on the agreement to staff SCSD schools with Syracuse police officers and retirees. The CRB is a police oversight agency aimed at promoting transparency in the department’s actions and internal affairs. Nilsson said in a statement that the CRB would “love to provide input” on the agreement to both the department and district.

“We promote relationship building between SRO’s and SPO’s in order to foster the desire of students in the profession of law enforcement as we look to have SPD be representative of the community they serve,” Nilsson said in the statement.

Some advocates are wary of employing police officers in schools. The presence of SROs can be tied to more children entering the juvenile justice system, said Lauren Bonds, a civil rights attorney and the executive director of the National Police Accountability Project.

Bonds also expressed concern over the training that school officers receive. 

The department would like to send school resource officers to a weeklong training but that the responsibility ultimately falls with the school district to send the officer, Shoff said. It’s unclear whether officers currently assigned to the schools have had specific training. The department declined to name the officers who work in the schools. 

Bonds said SPD and SCSD’s agreement to place retired officers in schools is atypical. If the retired officers were trained to handle violent crime, they may not be equipped to work with children and young adults, Bonds said.

“Children are different, and their brains are still developing, and there are different ways to talk to them and de-escalate situations,” Bonds said.

Shoff said he believes the district intends to send each officer hired to a weeklong SRO training, but said it is up to the district to facilitate that. 

In the last decade, SROs in city schools have made headlines. 

In 2015, officers confronted a mother and daughter who barged into Nottingham High School with a knife intending to attack another student. Later that year, SROs arrested a student after he brought a stolen and loaded handgun into the school.

In 2017, Syracuse police officer Vallon Smith tackled a student to the ground. The student suffered an injury to his arm. The city’s review board found Smith used excessive force while Onondaga County District Attorney William Fitzpatrick cleared Smith of wrongdoing. Smith went on to work as an investigator at the DA’s office.  

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Patrick McCarthy is a staff reporter at Central Current covering government and politics. A graduate of Syracuse University’s Maxwell and Newhouse Schools, McCarthy was born and raised in Syracuse and...