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  • Resource officers’ ‘position of trust’ with students sometimes exploited

    Resource officers’ ‘position of trust’ with students sometimes exploited


    Students walk to class during passing periods at Pacifica High School, which is part of the Oxnard Union High School District.

    Credit: J. Marie / EdSource

    Last year, a Washington Post investigation identified more than 200 school police officers across the country “who were charged with crimes involving child sexual abuse from 2005 through 2022.”

    There are at least two ongoing court cases involving allegations of sexual misconduct against former school resource officers in California. 

    James Louis, who worked as a resource officer at Rodriguez High School in Solano County, was arrested on March 8, 2024, after parents told police that he had texted sexual images and messages to two students. 

    Solano County prosecutors charged Louis with “sending, distributing, or exhibiting harmful or obscene material to a minor,” court records show. Louis is free on bail. His attorney declined to comment. The Fairfield Police Department, which had employed Louis and assigned him to the high school, would not say whether he resigned or was fired after his arrest.

    In Orange County, former deputy sheriff and resource officer Justin Raymond Ramirez pleaded guilty in 2023 to misdemeanor charges that he showed students at Trabuco Hills High School a video of a couple having sex that ended with a woman’s violent death. One of the students and her family are now suing Ramirez, the county, and the county sheriff for extreme emotional distress.  

    The state Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission stripped Ramirez’s policing certification last year, a move that permanently bans him from working as a law enforcement officer in California.

    After Ramirez’s arrest, Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer issued a statement saying, “School resource officers are in our children’s schools to ensure a safe learning environment and help build trust between law enforcement and our community. Ramirez had no business being in a position of trust around children, and he abused that position of trust in a truly disgusting way.”

    The county and Sheriff Dan Barnes are also defendants in the lawsuit. Neither responded to requests for comment, and attempts to reach Ramirez were unsuccessful. Court records show he does not have an attorney for the civil case.

    In December, after the Washington Post published its investigation, the U.S. Justice Department revised its recommendations for school resource officer programs and called for schools and law enforcement agencies to “develop clear policies and procedures about interpersonal contacts” between resource officers and students, including about touching, social media contacts, emails, cards and after-school interactions. 

    The Justice Department also recommends that “officers should take extra precautions to avoid any appearance of impropriety.”

    A spokesperson for the National Association of School Resource Officers, which provides training for law enforcement, said that it is updating its recommendations to reflect the Justice Department’s recommendations.





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  • How we obtained and examined contracts for school resource officers

    How we obtained and examined contracts for school resource officers


    We began by sending requests for contracts and memoranda of understanding with law enforcement agencies under the California Public Records Act to nearly 20%  – 178 – school districts across the state, in urban, suburban, and rural communities.

    We sent requests to 103 unified school districts, 37 high school districts, and 38 elementary school districts.

    We received responses from 157 districts; we are continuing to pursue responses from the remaining 21. We asked for contracts entered into between 2018 and June 2024 and analyzed the most recent contract provided by each district, some of which extend as far as 2027.

    Of the districts that responded to our requests, 68 said they had no applicable documents. Sixty-five districts had no assigned school resource officers; three had officers on campus but no contracts with cities and counties for policing services. The 89 districts with responsive documents provided contracts, including supplemental material such as memoranda of understanding, as PDFs and other document file types. 

    We analyzed the 118 responsive documents – many districts had agreements with multiple law enforcement agencies – and extracted a collection of data points including contract length, costs to the district, reporting requirements, and resource officers’ duties, among other topics.

    Additionally, to verify and clarify notable points, we reviewed videos of school board meetings, interviewed experts on policing and government transparency, as well as school board members, school superintendents, law enforcement officers, parents and students.

    The resulting data was combined with demographic and accountability information from the California Department of Education and analyzed to identify the commonalities, trends, and outliers explained in our stories.

    Teacher pay data was collected from Form J-90s that school districts submit to the state with teacher pay scales. To determine the salary for a  mid-career teacher, we used data from the “BA+60” field on those forms.

    If you have questions, please email data journalist Daniel Willis at dwillis@edsource.org.

    digging into the documents

    Our collection of district contracts that informed this story can be browsed and downloaded below.





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  • How one rural county pays for its resource officers

    How one rural county pays for its resource officers


    A Trinity High School student in Weaverville conducts a science experiment with the assistance of school resource officer Taylor Halsey, while fellow resource officer Greg Lindly observes.

    Credit: Timbre Beck / EdSource

    While some districts commit millions of dollars to resource officers, others struggle to find funding.

    Trinity County, population 16,500, has cobbled together a school policing program using a state grant funded by taxes on marijuana sales.

    The grant helps pay for two resource officers who cover nine widely spaced districts across the county’s 3,208 square miles, most of it national forest. Checking on one school requires a five-hour drive round trip on mountain roads, County Superintendent of Schools Fabio Robles said.

    The officers, a deputy sheriff and a juvenile probation officer, balance their work at schools with other law enforcement duties.

    They can only get to some schools a few times a year. “It’s a challenge,” Robles said in an interview in Weaverville, the county seat. The sheriff’s office and the probation department did not allow the officers to be interviewed for this story.

    Only one district has a contract with the county. Trinity Alps Unified agreed to an open-ended agreement with the county in 2020. That agreement doesn’t address school discipline.

    Robles said he wants to revisit the issue of contracts, but his priority is to keep the resource officer program running.

    “We’ve taken a step back lately,” Robles said of formal agreements between the districts and the counties. Contracts “are something we should re-look at,” he said.





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