The California school resource officer had a 17-year-old high school student on the ground and was about to handcuff him when the boy produced a handgun from the waistband of his pants. SRO David Scott of the Stockton Police Department pinned the boy’s wrist to the ground with one hand, while using his other hand to bend the gun barrel in the opposite direction of the of the boy’s hand. Fortunately, the teen didn’t pull the gun’s trigger in the process.
“It was a five to seven-second battle,” Scott told NASRO about the August 2022 incident.
By then, nearly 200 students were surrounding the altercation, so Scott knew he had to secure the weapon, versus throwing it out of reach. He released the magazine, cleared a cartridge from the chamber and put the gun in a cargo pocket of his pants. Around the same time, he also radioed for a patrol officer response. Having lost control of the gun, the student then obeyed verbal commands, allowing the SRO to handcuff him.
The incident started a few minutes earlier, during a lunch period at Stockton’s Lincoln High School, a multi-building campus with a large, outdoor courtyard, where a group of four to five students became involved in a fight. School administrators and security personnel quickly intervened and began escorting participants to offices. Security video indicates that during that time, one of the participants slipped away to a parking lot, retrieved a 9mm, unserialized, Polymer80 semiautomatic handgun from a car and then returned to “sucker punch” a student who Scott had begun escorting. The attacker fell to the ground as Scott and others worked to separate him from his victim, and that’s when the student drew the gun.
The suspect subsequently invoked his Miranda rights, declining to speak to police about what happened or his intentions. The prosecutor charged the student with multiple crimes.
Scott had no prior interactions with the boy, which is not unusual in a high school with a student population of 3,330. The boy’s discipline record indicated, however, involvement in a large altercation about a year earlier.
Scott is thankful that he didn’t have to use his service weapon. But that option is one of many reasons he’s glad his school has an SRO, the only armed person on campus. Also, law enforcement officers receive training more often than do the district’s non-sworn security workers. While certainty is impossible, Scott said he believes that if the school didn’t have an SRO, “this could have been a homicide.”
Do you have a similar SRO success story? If so, contact NASRO PIO Jay Farlow, [email protected].