04-01-2023, 09:45 AM
(03-31-2023, 08:11 PM)BFritz21 Wrote: There are 130,930 schools in the United States.
Take the 76.8 billion dollars we sent to Ukraine so far for their war.
Divide that up and that leaves $586,000 to give to each school in this country and you can pay NINE officers $65,000 a year to protect it.
Or 10 officers $50,000 a year and that leaves $86,000 leftovers for a raise for teachers or for whatever else. Arming and training teachers, bulletproof glass, or anything.
Biden cares more about aiding the Ukraine than protecting our kids.
Solving this problem is very far from easy. To begin, the U.S. hasn't just sent Ukraine $76.8B - most of that is the value of what they have sent. Humanitarian aid and equipment accounts for the vast majority of that figure. We have provided financial support to the tune of $26B. Now, that is probably still enough to do this hypothetical scenario, but I don't think cash was the issue in the first place - it is personnel and redundancy. There are plenty of schools that already have police presence. Roughly 58% of schools as of 2018 reported having police presence at least one day out of the week. Hell, my tiny school in Oklahoma had police presence.
Regarding personnel, police departments are already struggling with staffing. Where are we going to find the officers to do this? Are we going to pull them off the street? That'd be a large chunk of officers pulled away from policing the entire city. For instance, in Tulsa, there are 679 police officers (facing a staffing shortage here as well). There are 69 schools in Tulsa. Using our figure of $26B from above, we could provide each school about $200k. The average starting salary of a police officer is $50k, so we could theoretically get four officers to each school. Even this isn't correct as that $50k isn't all that it costs to hire a police officer, but I am just using it for the simplicity of math. In total, that would be 276 officers in schools in the Tulsa area, or roughly 40% of the entire department. Again, we already have a police shortage and this would exacerbate it. There would need to be a massive influx of new recruits to police academies which is not likely to happen.
Finally, there is no empirical evidence that exists that police presence at schools actually deters gun violence. I would honestly rather make a large monetary investment into a policy that has evidence of efficacy to back it up.
