Abstract This analysis will support the position that the school-to-prison pipeline is systematically and implicitly fueled by the law-supported practices of the School Resource Officers (SROs) from the Richland County Sheriff’s Department (RCSD). Middle-class whiteness (Twine & Warren, 2000) and the blueness of the RCSD School Resource Officers both share the following unwarranted benefits: disproportionate communal privilege, comfortable conflict avoidance, and hegemonic-driven authority. An exploration of Kenny’s ethnographic dilemma of hometown whiteness will be conducted, and its effect will be compared to a case study concerning the Richland County SRO’s abuse of the South Carolina Disturbing School Law (Twine & Warren, 2000). Within the analysis section, the following theoretical concepts, Attribution, Transformational Leadership, Hegemony, and Intersectionality, will further explain the use of both Kenny’s description of middle-class whiteness and the author of this analysis’s description of law enforcement blueness (Twine & Warren, 2000).

Law Enforcement Blueness is the Kissing Cousin of Middle-Class Whiteness:
Addressing the Hidden Contributions of the School to Prison Pipeline
Introduction/Case Study Background

This analysis will offer a correlated breakdown of how the practical application of both law enforcement blueness and middle-class whiteness currently contributes to the cultivation of the school-to-prison pipeline. Contemporary training initiatives that are favorable towards the Transformational Leadership model offer the law enforcement culture an opportunity to wean away from the strict parameters of problem-solving mediation (Anderson, T. D., et al. al, 2006). In addition, narrative driven strategies such as Conscious Discipline (Bailey, B., 2015), Trauma Informed Care (Withers, M., 2017) and Adverse Childhood Experience (Permanente, K., 1998) training, can be used as a vital tool so that both the SROs and the citizens within middle-class white America can better identify…confront…and remove the comfortable lens of their subconscious blueness/whiteness. Attributing certain behavior to a specific type of people, as mentioned within the Theory of Attribution, compartmentalizes the cognitive functional ability to reason beyond innate social comfort. This practice limits the use of emotional affinity and problem-solving creativity for both groups in question. One goal of this analysis is to impress the need for law enforcement and middle-class white citizens to consciously and subconsciously move past the dismissive, shameful discomfort of discussing the presence of their social privilege (Twine & Warren, 2000). To ensure personal and ultimately racial communal growth, law enforcement personnel and middle-class white citizens must stop avoiding the overdue conversation of race as well as take ownership of their contribution toward the spiraling conflict surrounding race relations. Both the mindset of blueness and whiteness come with attached benefits that are secretly discussed and abhorred by others whose ethnicity, lifestyle, and/or socio-economic status may prevent them from being included. Just like the middle-class white citizens who attribute bad behavior to a specific group of people, members within law enforcement incrementally develop an “us versus them” train of thought that ultimately leads to a psychological social compartmentalization of citizens. Behavioral grouping within the psyche of Richland County Sheriff’s Department School Resource Officers has caused the unfair practice of preferential treatment in favor of white students. Meanwhile, African American students are identified as repeat classroom offenders by both the school faculty and law enforcement and ultimately funneled through the school-to-prison pipeline by way of a School Resource Officer-related arrest (McCleod, S., 2012).

According to Lorraine Delia Kenny in Twine, middle-class whiteness is sustained within a “culture of avoidance” (Twine & Warren, 2000). Without officially giving hegemonic-fueled whiteness permission to infuse its ideals and practices into the psyche, white middle-class citizens take on the identity of separation, social distinction, and the automatic acceptance of social privilege from an early age. Despite the silent dysfunctionality of their own family status, middle-class whites who suffer from their whiteness tend to only see the need to meddle in racial social injustice to avoid the shame of appearing as a complete and absolute racist. With the help of the media, middle-class whites become experts at hiding the existence of their own social intra-cultural dysfunction. Within the whiteness of middle-class America, white citizens find it difficult to shift their perception of white privacy and avoidance to social inclusion and trauma awareness (Twine & Warren, 2000). The substandard thoughts of self for African Americans appear to be instinctive. They cannot explain why they feel lesser than; they just believe and conduct themselves as if they are socially 2nd class by way of birth-driven default.

Poverty and criminal behavior are socially inseparable. The characteristics of a school serve as a representation of the neighborhood in which it is seated. High crime, poverty, and the presence of toxic trauma within the community can render a student cognitively and eventually academically handicapped, thus creating an increased chance of having an encounter with a School Resource Officer. Prior to August of 2016, the Richland County Sheriff’s Department failed to provide its School Resource Officers with adequate disability identification and trauma-informed care training. In the case study involving RCSD, the absence of advanced SRO training ultimately led to the criminalization of health and trauma-related behavior.

On May 15, 2015, an unknown community stakeholder from within the County of Richland filed a two-part complaint against the School Resource Officers of the Richland County Sheriff’s Department with the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) division of the United States Department of Justice (DOJ). The anonymous complainant accused RCSD School Resource Officers of arresting African American students at a disproportionate rate. The second chief complaint alleged that the SROs were officially engaging students with disabilities during conflict-related situations, while on school campus, absent the necessary training to do so. Both complaints insinuated a potential violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as well as a possible infraction of Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. On May 22, 2015, the OCR initiated a Compliance Review of the RCSD SRO program. The results of the initial inquiry yielded enough evidence to cause legitimate concern for the upper command staff of the Richland County Sheriff’s Department. Despite internal and external ridicule and prior to the completion of the Office of Civil Rights Compliance Review, the Chief Commander of RCSD, Sheriff Leon Lott, saw fit to use an integrative conflict style to work alongside the OCR. Both the DOJ and RCSD mutually entered into a Voluntary Resolution Agreement on August 9th, 2016, that would span over an agreed period of three years. The Resolution Agreement required that RCSD address the following major objectives; professional development, transparent data collection, development of the nation’s first law enforcement disability policy, modification of the SRO/school district memorandum of understanding, development of a community work group that would serve as a citizen advisory board, an internal review report that would be made available to the general public and finally the creation of a School Resource Officer training manual that would need to be approved by the DOJ Office of Civil Rights.

The author of this analysis was selected by Sheriff Lott to serve as the Liaison. My primary job function is to ensure that RCSD remains compliant in accordance with the United States Department of Justice Resolution Agreement. During the first year of joint observation, the qualitative data of the incident reports generated by RCSD School Resource Officers during the 2016/2017 school year offered both parties enough evidence to corroborate the original complaint that alleged the presence of disproportionate arrests. The phenotype breakdown for the general population of Richland County in 2015, according to the OJP’s (Office of Justice Programs) diagnostic analysis, is listed as follows: 64% White, 44% African American, 2% Hispanic. Per the OJP report, during the 2016/2017 school year, African Americans made up 71% of the arrests made by the School Resource Officers of the Richland County Sheriff’s Department (OJP Report, 2017). Both law enforcement blueness and middle-class whiteness are fueled by an underlying presence of self-righteousness. Unfortunately, many SROs strongly believe that their arrests were legitimate because they were legally justified. The critical application of the below-mentioned theories will assist in providing a clearer understanding of this social phenomenon.

Discussion

As it is within the possession of middle-class whiteness, law enforcement blueness prevents the School Resource Officer from shifting his train of thought from behavior \= bad child to behavior \= toxic trauma. Anderson, T., D., et al. suggest that leadership within law enforcement generationally suffers from leadership illiteracy. The model of Transformational Leadership requires a coordinated balance of competencies. One of the competencies mentioned by Anderson, T., D., et.al, is organizational intelligence. The use of Dr, Becky Bailey’s Theory of Conscious Discipline allows the individual to become “Brain Smart”(Bailey, B., 2015), by first allowing the SRO to identify the emotional state of their own brain prior to making a decision to arrest or whether or not to use the option of deferring a student toward a diversionary program. The practice of Conscious Discipline allows the SRO, while exercising officer discretion, to explore a diversionary strategy rather than introducing the student to the criminal justice system due to a lack of cultural affinity. The consideration of trauma-induced behavior when exercising the discretion to arrest or refer to a diversionary program forces the School Resource Officer to think beyond the comfort zone of familiarity and actively requires the use of the officer’s prefrontal lobe (Bailey, B., 2015).

Law enforcement blueness and middle-class whiteness can also be further explained by what Crenshaw described as Intersectionality. The Theory of Intersectionality is understood as a framework designed to investigate the underlying and oftentimes hidden forces between co-existing identities such as gender, race, and class. Each of these identities has its own connection to systems of oppression. Crenshaw states that “Intersectionality is a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects” (Crenshaw, 2017). For the purposes of this analysis, the author is suggesting that Law enforcement blueness and middle-class whiteness both serve as tools of oppression when implicitly administered by way of professional decision-making within a school setting. Both the members of law enforcement and white middle-class commonly attribute the display of negative behavior on behalf of African American students in the same manner suggested by McCleod, when he defines internal attribution as “the process of assigning the cause of behavior to some internal characteristic, rather than to outside forces. When we explain the behavior of others we look for enduring internal attributions, such as personality traits. For example, we attribute the behavior of a person to their personality, motives or beliefs” (McCleod, S., 2012).

During the initial phase of the Office of Civil Rights Review, many School Resource Officers in an emotional knee-jerk manner rejected the notion that the culture of law enforcement was directly responsible for fueling the school-to-prison pipeline. In fact, over half of SROs externally attributed their African American student arrests stats to the S.C. Legislative branch since they were the original creators of the S.C. Disturbing School Law. Currently, the majority of SROs expressly believe that African American students within Richland County are getting arrested at a disproportionate rate because they are innately disobedient. Sadly, this impression is also maintained by the RCSD School Resource Officers even when referring to those students with an unseen disability. Fortunately, for RCSD, it is led by forward-thinking Sheriff Leon Lott, who understands and exhibits the necessary characteristics of a transformational leader (Anderson, T., D., et al. al, 2006). The fact that Sheriff Lott is socio-economically a middle-class white man shows a promise of hope for the culture to minimize the presence of law enforcement blueness. The practice of blueness and whiteness is the manifestation of a hegemonic presence. Antonio Gramsci’s Hegemony theory tells us that people involuntarily agree to a set of rules and cultural dominance (Palmer, N., 2012). Kenny suggests that by way of birth, middle-class whiteness is automatically attached. In the same vein, upon taking a sworn oath, School Resource Officers unknowingly agree to the possession and use of law-enforcement blue-ness (Twine & Warren, 2000).

Critical Analysis

Transformational Leadership, Conscious Discipline, Adverse Childhood Experience, and Trauma-Informed Care training will equip both the SRO and the middle-class white American with the ability to apply critical thinking when racially necessary. The use of these tools will enable both groups to identify the presence of systemic structural violence in the form of a lawful state statute. The S.C. Disturbing Schools Law was originally created to prevent an adult intruder from entering school property and causing school-related activity to halt. Until the signing of the Resolution Agreement, many of the SROs were unaware of their right to use officer discretion as a tool not to arrest a student for a first offense. Previously, once probable cause was established, the SRO generally felt obligated to make an arrest, especially if they had to use force to gain initial physical control of the student. Those law enforcement officers who possess the attributes of blueness are operationally robotic and system-driven.
It becomes apparent that they have given up their ability to think for themselves and have in some respect relinquished their right to operate from a level of “raised consciousness, creative, emotional, interpersonal, team, and organizational intelligence” (Anderson, T., D., et.al, 2006). The danger of such a mindset is that it limits the administration of officer discretion to the strict parameters of state statutes. No given law should be viewed as a panacea that can be applied to every given situation, especially when that situation contains only a fraction of similar facts. The law of the land is fluid and should never be exempt from question because of the nature of novel experiences and potential for human error. There is no one-size-fits-all statute; thus, the need for SRO and middle-class white citizens’ discretion, critical thinking, and the reframing of the behavioral narrative when it comes to the African American adolescent (Monk & Winslade, 2000). Chart 1.0 below depicts three examples of law enforcement blueness and middle-class whiteness in action.

Chart 1.0

A fight in the lunchroom, an outburst in the classroom, sexual activity under the stairwell or the taking of another student’s lunch should each be considered a manifestation of trauma. It is the evidence of anger towards a parent leaving the home, physical abuse, the absence of food, the fear of being homeless and/or the daily experience of sexual abuse. It is equally essential for middle-class whites to move beyond their whiteness, primarily because they are the people who are working and making life-changing decisions while teaching trauma-driven children in the classroom. Middle-class white women are constructing the atmosphere of their classrooms to implicitly and psychologically benefit their students within the following phenotypical order: white girls, black girls, white boys, and then black boys naturally bringing up the rear. As suggested by Strauss, there is a serious interpersonal disconnection between middle-class white female teachers and the traumatically driven African American male adolescent. The reasons for the dissociation can be attributed to, but not limited to, gender, race, culture, and the inability for white female teachers to change the lens of their whiteness (Strauss, V., 2016). Middle-class whiteness and law enforcement blueness force their participants to pull from their dominant discourse and render them narrow-minded and unable to see the underlying trauma within the reframed conflict narrative (Monk & Winslade, 2000).

In fact, the social benefits of both law enforcement blueness and middle-class whiteness can be identified within the following two examples: an officer is rarely in fear of getting a speeding ticket while driving in his personal car, and middle-class whites normally do not possess a fear of being stalked by department store security. The use of a paramilitary structure within local law enforcement offers the benefit of internal organizational excellence; however, it does not automatically guarantee professional excellence in the community, where lives are saved through the building and reconciliation of relationships. The relationship-building ability of a community-oriented police officer is held captive by the strict internal and external enforcement of a paramilitary atmosphere that marinates within a hegemonic comatose. In law enforcement, taking the sworn oath to protect and serve is not met with the same sense of communal commitment as it was during the late seventies. Beat cops used to be police officers who patrolled an intentionally assigned neighborhood on foot. It is a strategy that is no longer used, and no one is vehemently asking why. The current disconnect between the community and law enforcement is due to the application of new-age policing. However, for the past (20) years, Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott has spent the majority of his effort in the area of community-oriented policing. It is because of the communal track record of the Richland County Sheriff’s Department that many of the citizens did not hesitate to offer Sheriff Lott an opportunity to remedy the problem. Per Sheriff Lott, systemic change by way of the Department of Justice Resolution Agreement is “a journey that will allow each of us to become better at what we do”.

Summary
The mindset of blue-ness within law enforcement culture is the leading cause of the misuse of South Carolina’s Disturbing School Law. With the looming national climate of conflict between law enforcement and the community spiraling out of control, it is essential that law enforcement and middle-class white America mentally migrate from a place of attribution-driven ridicule, sincere explicit ignorance, conscientious stupidity, unidentified implicit biases and emotionally led frustration (blueness and whiteness), to a position rooted in critical thinking and the ultimate establishment of a well-informed understanding of toxic trauma and the psychological effect that it has on the African American youth. The immoderate arrest of Law-related structural violence, multi-disciplinary denial, heavily hidden presence of behavioral attribution, implicit biases, and the use of avoidance as a conflict style, are the tools used by the Richland County Sheriff’s Department School Resource Officer and the middle-class white American citizen to perpetuate the early introduction of thousands of African American children to the judicial culture far sooner than their white peers. To ensure the future public and economic safety of African American students, law enforcement and members of middle-class white America will need to reframe the conflict narrative by treating the presence of unacceptable behavior exhibited by young African Americans within our schools as a manifestation of a deeper injury.

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