Editor’s Note: This article is part of the Police1 Innovation Report, which examines how emerging technologies are reshaping law enforcement operations and leadership decision-making. This series focuses on school safety in an era of expanded digital awareness, exploring how technology, governance and operational alignment intersect before a crisis unfolds.
By Chuck Popik
Three students approach you separately over two days. Each describes the same peer: talking about not wanting to be here, giving away belongings, pulling away from friends. A teacher reports concerning journal writing. The school counselor confirms the student disclosed thoughts of self-harm during a check-in.
You do what you’re trained to do. You document. You coordinate with administration. The student is transported for a mental health evaluation.
Four hours later, the student is back in school.
If you’ve worked as a school resource officer (SRO) for any length of time, you recognize this scenario. The details shift — different students, different schools, different states — but the pattern stays the same: multiple credible disclosures, professional concern from trained adults, a brief evaluation, a rapid return. And nothing changes.
This isn’t about one student or one failure. It’s about a systemic breakdown that school resource officers witness over and over — and the consequences when the professionals closest to at-risk youth have no way to ensure follow-through.
The moment trust breaks
The most immediate damage isn’t to the student who was evaluated — it’s to the students who came forward.
Kids live in a world where loyalty matters and snitching has consequences. When a teenager walks into an SRO’s office or a counselor’s door to say they’re worried about a friend, they’re taking a real risk. They’re betting that the social fallout is worth it because adults will actually do something.
When that friend comes back hours later, unchanged and aware that people reported them, those students learn a lesson.
They learn that coming forward accomplished nothing except personal risk. They learn that adults — despite their titles and training — don’t have the power to actually intervene. They learn that the system doesn’t work.
The next time a student has information about a peer in crisis, they hesitate. The next time they notice warning signs, they stay quiet.
This is the hidden cost: not just the students we can’t help, but the reports we’ll never receive because we’ve taught young people that reporting is pointless.
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This isn’t rare — it’s routine
Officers new to school-based work sometimes assume these cases are unusual breakdowns. They’re not.
The pattern of identification, evaluation, release and return to baseline has become predictable.
Across districts and across states, SROs describe the same sequence. Teachers and counselors flag concerns. Students corroborate with specific disclosures. Officers facilitate evaluation. And the mental health system — operating within its own constraints — makes a determination based on a brief clinical snapshot that contradicts days or weeks of documented observation.
The problem isn’t that individual professionals are failing. The problem is structural. School-based professionals accumulate context over time. Crisis evaluators see a moment. When those two perspectives conflict, the moment usually wins.
Where the system breaks down
1. Mental health evaluations without context
Emergency psychiatric evaluations are designed to assess imminent danger. Clinicians often have limited time to make decisions with serious consequences.
A student who presents as calm and denies current suicidal ideation may not meet criteria for involuntary hold — even when multiple adults have documented concerning statements over preceding days.
The issue isn’t indifference. It’s that evaluation protocols don’t consistently pull in corroborated observations from school-based professionals. Current frameworks prioritize what the clinician sees directly. They aren’t built to weigh what five other trained adults observed independently.
2. Parental refusal as a dead end
When evaluations result in outpatient recommendations rather than hospitalization, follow-through depends almost entirely on parental cooperation.
For many families, that works. For others, it doesn’t.
Some parents deny there’s a problem. Some lack resources. Some face transportation or insurance barriers. And sometimes the family situation is part of what’s driving the student’s crisis in the first place.
When parents refuse recommended care, the options narrow fast. Schools and officers are left holding documented concern with no way to act on it.
3. Legal gaps for juveniles
Officers working with adults in crisis have clearer legal pathways — probate processes, civil commitments, coordination with adult mental health systems.
For juveniles, those pathways are often narrower and inconsistent across states. Thresholds for involuntary treatment can be high, and procedures that exist on paper may be hard to actually use.
Sometimes everyone agrees a kid needs more help than the family will provide — but there’s no clear legal mechanism to make it happen.
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4. Child Protective Services constraints
When mental health systems can’t compel treatment, schools sometimes turn to Child Protective Services (CPS). If refusal of care is neglect, maybe that’s the pathway.
In practice, CPS thresholds are high and caseloads are heavy. Referrals about mental health follow-through often don’t meet criteria for investigation.
That’s not a criticism of child welfare workers. It’s recognition that the backup plan many school professionals count on often isn’t there.
5. Access to care
Even when families want help, access barriers get in the way. Adolescent mental health providers are limited in many regions. Wait times stretch weeks or months. Insurance and transportation create more obstacles.
A family can want to help their kid and still not be able to get an appointment in time.
The student returns to school. The school keeps watching. The system waits.
The operational risk to officers and agencies
This isn’t just a school problem. It’s a law enforcement liability issue.
When a student with documented warning signs later harms themselves or others, the documentation trail becomes central. Every report, every email, every transport decision gets reviewed with hindsight.
“What did you know, and what did you do?” That’s the question that follows tragedy.
Officers are responsible for identifying risk but don’t have the authority to compel intervention. We can document. We can coordinate. We can transport. What we can’t do is force treatment when evaluators release and parents decline.
Command staff need to understand this dynamic. Identification without systemic follow-through creates exposure when things go bad.
It also creates moral injury for officers who got into this work to help kids and instead find themselves filing reports that go nowhere.
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What needs to change at the system level
None of these fixes are simple. But without structural change, the pattern continues.
- Context-integrated evaluations: Crisis assessments should have a standard way to incorporate documented observations from school-based professionals—not as hearsay to discount, but as corroborated data that matters.
- Legal pathways when parents refuse care: When minors need treatment and parents won’t authorize it, states need to look at whether alternative judicial or oversight mechanisms are necessary.
- Juvenile mental health hold reform: Commitment standards should be reviewed to make sure they balance autonomy with protection when multiple professionals identify serious risk.
- CPS protocol clarity: Child welfare systems may need clearer guidance for situations involving sustained mental health neglect.
- Improved access to care: More providers, fewer barriers. Identification doesn’t matter if treatment isn’t available.
What officers and agencies can do now
Until systems change, officers have to protect both students and themselves.
- Document disclosures with specificity: Record exact statements, dates, and sources. “Student reported peer made suicidal statements” doesn’t cut it. “On 10/14, Student A reported that Student B said ‘I don’t want to be here anymore’ during lunch and described Student B giving away a bracelet that was meaningful to her.” That’s what holds up.
- Name corroborating witnesses: When multiple people observed concerning behavior, document each one. Build the pattern on paper.
- Provide written supervisor notification: Verbal isn’t enough. Email summaries to your supervisor, school administration, and district personnel. Make sure it’s in systems that get preserved.
- Articulate disagreement professionally: If release conflicts with what you’ve observed, say so in writing. “Student was released following evaluation. Based on documented disclosures from multiple sources over the preceding 48 hours, this officer remains concerned about student safety and will continue monitoring.” You can’t control the outcome, but you can make sure the record reflects your concern.
- Know your escalation pathways: Understand what options exist in your jurisdiction before you need them. Juvenile probate? Court liaison? District protocol for extreme cases? Know the mechanisms.
- Coordinate with school mental health staff: Counselors and social workers often share your frustration. Present unified concern. Fragmented reports are easier to dismiss than consistent, multi-source documentation.
Until the system gives us better tools, documentation is our primary defense and our primary contribution to eventual accountability.
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The real cost of inaction
The cases that make the news are the ones where students act on what they disclosed. Those tragedies are real, and they’re the most visible cost.
But the bigger cost is quieter. Students stop reporting. Teachers stop documenting. Officers burn out.
Every failed intervention teaches everyone involved that the system doesn’t respond. The silence grows. The reports disappear.
We’re creating environments where students believe adults can’t help and professionals believe their observations don’t matter.
That’s what happens when you give people responsibility without giving them authority.
Responsibility without control
The hardest truth in school-based policing is that we can often see what’s coming and still can’t stop it.
We identify. We document. We coordinate. We transport. We push concerns up every channel we have.
And sometimes the student comes back four hours later, and nothing has changed, and we watch.
I’m not arguing for despair. I’m arguing for honesty about where the system breaks and who absorbs the consequences. Officers can’t fix mental health infrastructure or rewrite commitment laws or expand CPS capacity. But we can document what we see, push concerns through every available channel, and keep advocating for the tools that would let us actually do the job we’re responsible for.
Until then, we do what we can. We document. We coordinate. We show up for the students who still believe someone might help.
And we keep pushing for a system that lets us do more than watch.
About the author
Chuck Popik is a Master School Resource Officer and Program Coordinator for the Willoughby-Eastlake City School District in Ohio, where he coordinates school safety operations across 13 schools and six police departments. He holds Master SRO certification through OSROA, NASRO Practitioner credentials, and serves on the board of the Ohio Police & Juvenile Officers Association. He is the author of The SRO Handbook Volume 1: Foundations of School-Based Policing. Contact: TheSROHandbook.Author@gmail.com.
